Kemah Palms Recovery® Ties EHR Data to Addiction Relapses

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Kemah Palms is prominently featured in article of Healthcare IT News  about Addiction Relapses written by Bill Siwicki.

Texas treatment center ties EHR to data-tracking tech to slash addiction relapses

Substance use disorder treatment centers are notoriously behind in technology, but Kemah Palms Recovery® has implemented the tracking tech and an EHR to improve outcomes and report value

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said earlier this month that it will match up to 90 percent of funds facilities not eligible for meaningful use spend on interoperable technology. Kemah Palms Recovery®, one such facility, has already started using data-tracking tools to better understand outcomes and ultimately reduce relapses.

Kemah Palms Recovery®, one such facility, has already started using data-tracking tools to better understand outcomes and ultimately reduce relapses.

The nascent CMS initiative intends to help bridge an information-sharing gap in Medicaid to connect a broader variety of providers, namely long-term care, behavioral health and substance use disorder treatment centers, to a health information exchange.

That additional funding, in turn, will help sustain health information exchanges and lead to increased connectivity among Medicaid providers, CMS said.

To that end, Kemah Palms, a substance use disorder treatment center in Texas, implemented software from MAP Health Management, a vendor that specializes in technology and services for substance use disorder treatment centers as well as telehealth technology.

Kemah Palms sought the software with the aims of improving treatment outcomes and thus decreasing patient relapses, reducing healthcare costs, and proving to insurance companies the value of its care in a healthcare environment increasingly driven by value-based care contracts.

… Today, Kemah Palms Recovery® caregivers use the clinical data in their EHR and tracked and analyzed by the MAP Health system every day to enhance care and work toward improved outcomes and evidence-based care.

Kemah Palms Recovery® Dr. James Flowers is quoted in the article:

“The data the MAP Health technology offers us is timely and important to the future treatment of patients. In the past we used our own Excel spreadsheets to study relapse rates and reasons for relapses. But the MAP program does all of that for us. We enter information and it, in turn, helps us improve our treatment outcomes because we can track everything in real time,” said James Flowers, founder and CEO of Kemah Palms Recovery®, where he also is a caregiver. “And that will help us achieve a lower recidivism rate in the future because we will be able to improve the course of treatment on future patients based on past experiences.”

“How many days did they stay? What substance do they use? Are they polysubstance or alcohol use?” Flowers asked. “We can track all of this and more visually, look at it, and see where we need to do something different for folks.”

“Every morning from 8-9 a.m., we use outcomes data when discussing current cases,” Flowers said. “We study people who are at risk of relapse, talk about people who need to come back into treatment or need to be referred out to other centers for treatment. It has helped us to see that data on a daily basis in our clinical rounds.”

Learn More About Kemah Palms Recovery®

Located in Galveston County, Kemah Palms Recovery® offers a variety of Houston substance abuse treatment programs to helping struggling individuals regain control of their lives. Our services include:

To learn more about Kemah Palms Recovery®, call 855-568-0218.