Ashani Ved
Photo courtesy of Saint Peter's University Hospital
Saint Peter's University Hospital, a non-profit, 478-bed acute care teaching hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, had existing programs to support food accessibility and transportation, but not a means to efficiently identify which patients needed them.
In July, the hospital pegged Dallas-based Lightbeam Health Solutions and its population health management platform to help address the problem.
The company's Lightbeam AI social determinants of health (SDOH) offering aims to predict which patients are at risk of avoidable emergency department utilization within 90 days based on social vulnerability to allow for early interventions and care coordination.
Ishani Ved, director of transformational population health and outcomes at Saint Peter's Healthcare System, parent company of Saint Peter's University Hospital, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss how the care provider uses Lightbeam's SDOH AI tool.
MobiHealthNews: What problem did Lightbeam Health Solutions' AI platform help you solve?
Ishani Ved: Saint Peter’s realized the need to address social drivers of health more than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lightbeam AI was one of the first interventions when I assumed the role of director of transformational population health and outcomes in 2021.
The problem we were trying to solve is that we knew we had a large number of patients with social drivers of health that needed to be addressed. We hired two SDOH coordinators to screen patients face-to-face during their appointment between intake and provider involvement.
This tool helped us risk stratify patients in our adult clinic so we knew who is most at risk, so we could optimize our time and effort.
Lightbeam AI gave us insight on who may be food insecure, so we reached out to them for screening if we never met them before. People who have a transportation barrier may be more likely to miss an appointment, so we can try to better educate them about local micro-transit options.
The market at Saint Peter’s had a ribbon cutting in April 2024, after a year of ramp-up, significant capital investment and research of best practices. We have used information we collected through screening to advocate for better low-cost transportation options in the county.
MHN: Can you talk about the implementation process and the technology? How does Lightbeam work?
Ved: Lightbeam uses big data, both healthcare utilization data and non-healthcare social drivers of health data, that is publicly available to create a risk score for each person in the adult clinic where screening is focused.
Patients are put into rising-risk and high-risk categories, which is a flag to our team to try to see that patient that day. Implementation meant connecting the solution to our inpatient and outpatient medical records and was pretty straightforward.
MHN: What impact has implementation had on your initiative regarding vulnerable populations?
Ved: Implementing Lightbeam AI helped us quantify the impact of our work by looking at downstream utilization.
While this statistic is a snapshot in time, the effect of social drivers of health screening is more than just an absolute reduction in unnecessary ED visits. Saint Peter’s has a rich history of helping the underserved populations in our service area, and this is just one example.
Helping patients feel cared for in our multi-specialty clinic and coupling any outreach with a deep appreciation and understanding of their life situations is truly how we quantify a successful program.
