Responding to a rise in outpatient care

Just as providers listen to patients to help chart a path forward, we listen to the healthcare community to design technologies that can help change lives for the better. As the sector changes, so do we.

One example?

In response to a fast-growing shift from inpatient to outpatient settings, Solventum’s Health Information Systems team modified existing software to track complications following outpatient surgeries. The software helps healthcare providers and payers track overall costs and make improvements to offer better, smarter, safer healthcare to patients. It even sparked a collaboration with U.S. News & World Report. 

Here's why reimagining the technology for outpatient care was so essential.

The rise in outpatient care 

Same-day surgeries and procedures have increasingly become the preferred care setting. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated a shift to ambulatory surgery centers, which focus on same-day surgical care. When hospitals reached maximum capacity during the pandemic, many elective surgeries shifted to outpatient settings.  

McKinsey predicts the shift to ambulatory care will grow due to larger market trends, like technologies that help people heal from home and consumers who want the more personalized care they can receive in ambulatory surgery centers or hospital outpatient centers.  

Using data science to choose care 

Providers can identify potentially preventable complications that could occur following elective outpatient procedures with our 3M™ Ambulatory Potentially Preventable Complications (3M AM-PPCs) Grouping Software. U.S. News & World Report will incorporate the software in the analysis of its 2023-2024 Best Hospitals Specialty rankings. 

“It’s such a credit to Solventum,” asserts Dr. Sandeep Wadhwa, global chief medical officer of Health Information Systems. “Especially because U.S. News & World Report could have chosen other routes, like government measures. Instead, they chose Solventum science and rigor.” 

How does this software move healthcare forward?

Our advanced data software helps individuals across the healthcare spectrum make more informed decisions regarding outpatient care. 

“People have an elective procedure and leave the same day, so we then follow what happens in the data—if they end up in an emergency room or get hospitalized in a window of 30 days—we link it back to that earlier same-day procedure,” Sandeep explains.  

Providers can use the data to modify their protocols for better outcomes. Payers can use the data to better understand the cost of preventable complications. Health systems can see their safety performance compared to peers and make improvements. And when this information becomes accessible to consumers through rankings from U.S. News & World Report, patients can make more informed decisions about where to have procedures. 

“We’ve developed the clinical logic that can pinpoint complications related to a procedure,” Sandeep says. “We have benchmarks to parse out whether a hospital has better or worse complication events.”

Providing the best care possible

“I’m excited that our software and solutions will shine a light on organizations who excel at providing the best possible care,” Sandeep says. “That means others can learn from and emulate their best practices. In the end, that’s what all of us who work in this industry aspire to support: better, smarter and safer care.”  

To hear more about this collaboration straight from Sandeep, listen to his conversation with Scott Becker on Becker’s Hospital Review.