October 2019 - Clinical decision support (CDS) tools should provide insight into patients’ medical problems and empower providers to follow the best course of action to address their needs. AgileMD and QuantHC, two companies with roots at the University of Chicago, have come together to provide this two-pronged guidance, powered by artificial intelligence.
The merged company will retain the AgileMD name, with co-founder Borna Safabakhsh, MBA, MS, at the helm as CEO. Co-founder Dana Edelson, MD, MS, will serve as the President.
“The marriage of these companies brings the best of predictive analytics and prescriptive workflows together under one EHR-integrated roof. This gives us the ability to precisely flag patients for intervention and to standardize clinical care to improve patient outcomes and provider experience,” said Safabakhsh.
AgileMD was founded in 2011 to enable healthcare workers to access and follow the most up-to-date clinical guidance. AgileMD transforms static guidelines into actionable workflows inside of Epic Systems and Cerner EHRs to make best practices easier to provide to patients and to deliver care more consistently. Clinical leaders are able to easily customize workflows, then seamlessly disseminate protocols to frontline providers in interactive decision trees with embedded links to clinical orders. The company now has more than 300 pathways live across emergency medicine, hospital medicine, surgery, oncology and primary care.
A Y-Combinator and Rock Health company, AgileMD earned top prize in the University of Chicago Booth School of Business New Venture Challenge and Chicago Biotech Consortium Competition, also becoming a grantee of the University of Chicago Innovation Fund.
QuantHC, a MATTER company, was founded in 2013 to operationalize real-time machine learning analytics for patient care. Quant’s flagship analytic, eCART, was developed by Edelson and Dr. Matthew Churpek, in their research lab at the University of Chicago, to predict acute deterioration in hospitalized patients. This capability allows hospital clinicians to prioritize high and moderate risk patients and best allocate nursing and equipment resources.
To date, eCART has been used to monitor hundreds of thousands of patients and has been shown to decrease cost, cardiac arrest, and mortality.
Under the banner of AgileMD, the now-integrated clinical pathway and risk prediction tools provide the right information at the right time to clinicians, enabling them to attend to patients faster, more accurately understand their risk, and deliver higher quality care.