Middleware Consulting International

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — IBM Watson Health today announced its 2022 Fortune/IBM Watson Health 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals list, naming the top-performing U.S. hospitals for inpatient cardiovascular services. This year’s study included 951 U.S. hospitals with cardiovascular service lines. Based on comparisons between the study winners and a peer group of similar hospitals in the study, the winners delivered better outcomes while operating more efficiently and at a lower cost. The list of the top cardiovascular hospitals was published by Fortune today.

Based on the methodology used by Watson Health, the study concludes that if all United States hospitals’ cardiovascular service lines performed at the level of these study winners, some 6,400 additional lives and roughly $1.4 billion could be saved, and 5,000 additional bypass and angioplasty patients could be complication-free.

Compared to similar cardiovascular hospitals, this year’s 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals winners had better results on indicators intended to measure clinical outcomes, operational efficiency, financial performance, and patient experience. The measures evaluate inpatient and 30-day mortality, patient complications, 30-day readmission, average length of stay, 30-day episode-of-care payment, and adjusted cost per case, for acute myocardial infarction (AMI), coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and heart failure (HF) patients.

The study data also showed that there was an overall 13.5 percent decline in the volume of patients treated for these cardiovascular conditions from 2019 to 2020. This decline was most likely related to the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in many patients delaying or avoiding care and hospitals focusing on treating only patients with urgent needs. For the heart patients who were treated, the outcomes were similar to previous years, indicating that quality of care was stable in the observed hospitals despite the pandemic.

New to the study this year is the inclusion of a patient experience measure based on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey as reported in the CMS Hospital Compare data set. Patient perception of care – or the patient “experience” – is crucial to the balanced scorecard concept and has a direct effect on a hospital’s ability to remain competitive in the market. As with other measures, winning hospitals outperformed their peers in the HCAHPS measure in all comparison groups.

Fortune/IBM Watson Health 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals List (by category)
* Hospitals are listed in alphabetical order. The order of hospitals reflected below is not to be construed as any indication of performance or recommendation.

Teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs*
Ascension Borgess Hospital (Kalamazoo, MI)
Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center (Charlotte, NC)
Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – Temple (Temple, TX)
Baylor Scott & White The Heart Hospital – Plano (Plano, TX)
Baylor University Medical Center (Dallas, TX)
Froedert Hospital (Milwaukee, WI)
Intermountain Medical Center (Murray, UT)
Kettering Medical Center (Kettering, OH)
Mayo Clinic Florida (Jacksonville, FL)
Mayo Clinic Rochester (Rochester, MN)
Mercy Medical Center (Cedar Rapids, IA)
Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital (Winfield, IL)
Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Chicago, IL)
Penn Presbyterian Medical Center (Philadelphia, PA)
Piedmont Atlanta Hospital (Atlanta, GA)
Riverside Methodist Hospital (Columbus, OH)
St. Luke’s University Hospital – Bethlehem (Bethlehem, PA)
Summa Health System – Akron Campus (Akron, OH)
UNC REX Hospital (Raleigh, NC)
University Hospital (Madison, WI)

Teaching hospitals without cardiovascular residency programs*
Ascension Sacred Heart Hospital Pensacola (Pensacola, FL)
Aspirus Wausau Hospital (Wausau, WI)
Atrium Health Pineville (Charlotte, NC)
Baton Rouge General – Bluebonnet (Baton Rouge, LA)
Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – Hillcrest (Waco, TX)
Beaumont Hospital, Troy (Troy, MI)
Bronson Methodist Hospital (Kalamazoo, MI)
Chester County Hospital (West Chester, PA)
Chippenham Hospital (Richmond, VA)
Eisenhower Medical Center (Rancho Mirage, CA)
Missouri Baptist Medical Center (Saint Louis, MO)
Overland Park Regional Medical Center (Overland Park, KS)
Providence St. Patrick Hospital (Missoula, MT)
Redmond Regional Medical Center (Rome, GA)
Sarasota Memorial Hospital (Sarasota, FL)
St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor Hospital (Ypsilanti, MI)
St. Joseph’s Hospital (Tampa, FL)
The Medical Center of Aurora (Aurora, CO)
The Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital (Greensboro, NC)
TriStar Centennial Medical Center (Nashville, TN)

Community hospitals*
Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center (Medford, OR)
Ascension St. Vincent Heart Center (Indianapolis, IN)
Bellin Hospital (Green Bay, WI)
Harlingen Medical Center (Harlingen, TX)
McLaren Northern Michigan (Petoskey, MI)
Oklahoma Heart Hospital North (Oklahoma City, OK)
Oklahoma Heart Hospital South (Oklahoma City, OK)
Parkwest Medical Center (Knoxville, TN)
Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center (Reno, NV)
UnityPoint Health – Allen Hospital (Waterloo, IA)

The Watson Health 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals study is based on quantitative research that uses a balanced scorecard approach, based on publicly available data, to identify the top cardiovascular hospitals in the U.S. To determine the cardiovascular hospitals included on the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals list, IBM Watson Health researchers evaluated 951 short-term, acute care, non-federal U.S. hospitals that treat a broad spectrum of cardiology patients. It includes patients requiring medical management, as well as those who receive invasive or surgical procedures. Because multiple measures are used, a hospital must provide all forms of cardiovascular care, including open heart surgery, to be included in the study.

All research was based on the following public data sets: Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) data, and Hospital Compare data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare website. Hospitals do not apply for awards, and winners do not pay to market this honor.

For more information, visit https://www.ibm.com/products/50-top-cardiovascular-hospitals.

About the IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals® Program
The IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals Program’s annual studies result in the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals list, Fortune/IBM Watson Health 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals list and IBM Watson Health 15 Top Health Systems list. Organizations do not apply or pay for this honor or pay to promote their award. Award-winning hospitals and health systems serve as a model of excellence for the industry. Visit https://www.ibm.com/products/100-top-hospitals for more information.

About IBM Watson Health
IBM Watson Health is a data, analytics, and technology partner for the health industry. Supported by the innovation of IBM and intelligence of Watson, we are committed to helping build smarter health ecosystems. Through the combination of our deep industry expertise in health, data and analytics, actionable insights, and reputation for security and trust, Watson Health is working together with its clients and partners to help them achieve simpler processes, better care insights, faster breakthroughs, and improved experiences for people around the world. Learn more at https://www.ibm.com/watson-health.

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new natural language processing (NLP) enhancements planned for IBM Watson Discovery. These planned updates are designed to help business users in industries such as financial services, insurance and legal services enhance customer care and accelerate business processes by uncovering insights and synthesizing information from complex documents.

Businesses are increasingly turning to NLP and machine learning to help them comb through rising volumes of documents and data sets in a wide range of formats¹. By applying AI to get document insights, business users can reduce research time and help their employees make more fact-driven decisions during complex, time sensitive tasks such as processing insurance claims, conducting financial analyses and reviewing legal agreements or contracts.

The new planned features that IBM announced today are designed to make it easier for Watson Discovery users to quickly customize the underlying NLP models on the unique language of their business. Stemming from NLP advancements developed by IBM Research, business users can train Watson Discovery to help read, understand and surface more precise insights from large sets of complex, industry-specific documents even if they don’t have significant data science skills.

• Pre-trained document structure understanding: Watson Discovery’s Smart Document Understanding feature, available now in the Plus, Enterprise and Premium plans, includes a new pre-trained model that is designed to automatically understand the visual structure and layout of a document without additional training from a developer or data scientist. This helps users quickly find answers that were previously hidden or difficult to find like text in complex table structures or images.
• Automatic text pattern detection: IBM has released a new advanced pattern creation feature in beta in the Plus, Premium and Enterprise plans that is designed to help users quickly identify business-specific text patterns within their documents. This is key for tasks like analyzing massive amounts of contracts or financial reports, which may report the same type of information, such as an increase or decrease in revenue, in different formats or using different phrases. Developed by IBM Research, it helps provide efficient ways of labeling data and training models. It is designed to start learning the underlying text patterns from as few as two examples and then refines the pattern based on user feedback. This helps users more rapidly train a model without manual and time-intensive tasks like defining rules and expressions.
• Advanced NLP customization capabilities: Training NLP models to identify highly customized, business-specific words and phrases – for example insurance claim forms may include specific claim reasons or affected products – is a time-consuming task that requires significant data prep, labeling, and orchestration. Models trained on generic data sets often fail to retrieve the right information. With a new custom entity extractor feature, now available in beta for Watson Discovery Premium users, IBM is simplifying this process by reducing the effort for data prep, simplifying labeling with active learning and bulk annotation capabilities, and enabling simple model deployment that can accelerate training time.

The planned updates announced today are part of a pipeline of developments stemming from IBM Research. For example, answer finding was recently made generally available in Watson Discovery and Watson Assistant’s Search Skill. It is designed to help busy professionals and customers identify the precise insights they need.

“The stream of innovation coming to IBM Watson from IBM Research is why global businesses in the fields of financial services, insurance and legal services turn to IBM to help detect emerging business trends, gain operational efficiency and empower their workers to uncover new insights,” said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager of Data and AI, IBM. “The pipeline of natural language processing innovations we’re adding to Watson Discovery can continue to provide businesses with the capabilities to more easily extract the signal from the noise and better serve their customers and employees.”

In addition to the new features announced today, IBM is highlighting how organizations in the legal services, financial services and insurance sectors use Watson Discovery’s existing features to help automate and transform business processes.

Contract management can be a slow, manual and complex process. IBM business partner ContractPodAi, an award-winning provider of the AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) led solution ‘One Legal Platform’, extended its end-to-end solution with several AI technologies including IBM Watson Discovery, among other providers. The solution helps simplify the complexities of contract management, automate mundane tasks and transform complicated workflows. Building on the strength of ContractPodAi’s CLM solution, the no-code platform is designed to help in-house legal teams manage many legal scenarios, processes, or documents using the platform’s pre-built and configurable applications, such as claims, RFP review, and IP portfolio management.

To learn more about Watson Discovery, please visit: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-discovery.

About IBM Watson
Watson is IBM’s AI technology for business, helping organizations to better predict and shape future outcomes, automate complex processes, and optimize employees’ time. Watson has evolved from an IBM Research project, to experimentation, to a scaled, open set of products that run anywhere. With more than 40,000 client engagements, Watson is being applied by leading global brands across a variety of industries to transform how people work. To learn more, visit: https://www.ibm.com/watson.