Amplifire Crosses 2 Billion Learner Interaction In Its Adaptive Learning Platform

BOULDER, Colo., May 13, 2019 — Amplifire, today announced it has reached more than 2 billion learner interactions in its patented adaptive learning platform. That’s a 9% increase in user interactions from the previous year. The company has also added more than 827,797 unique learners to its platform during this time period.

Amplifire engages learners and creates memorable learning experiences by adapting to each learner in real time. The platform detects and corrects knowledge gaps and misinformation that can lead to poor performance and cause errors.

The system includes a robust reporting suite that identifies misinformation, gaps, and struggle at the individual, team, location, and systemic level. Organizations can use this to improve performance. With 2 billion learner interactions, the system is able to deliver insights on learner behavior, predict who is at risk, and intervene where necessary to keep learners on the path towards mastery.

“Reaching 2 Billion learners is a a significant milestone, ” said Nick Hjort , SVP of Product and Development. “Over the past three years, Amplifire has seen learner interactions grow exponentially which reflects that Amplifire continues to be a leader In a crowded education tehnology market.”

“It has been an exciting year for us,” said Bob Burgin, Amplifire CEO and Founder of the Healthcare Alliance. “We continue to see growth in the Higher Education market while expanding our reach in the Healthcare and Call Center space. More importantly, we are making a difference by helping individuals focus on areas where they have knowledge gaps or are struggling so they can perform at their highest potential. We remain committed to improving learning efficiency.”

Learn how Amplifire improves performance, saving organizations money and time at https://amplifire.com/case-studies/

In Partnership with Amplifire Healthcare Alliance, Partners Health’s Knowledge Transformation Lab Announces New Approach to Clinician Competency

BOULDER, Colo., March. 13, 2019  — The Partners Healthcare Knowledge Transformation Laboratory has been working for the past several years to establish a Clinical Knowledge Engineering capability for Partners Health that brings continuing professional education to the front line of clinical operations.

As healthcare systems shift to a value-based model, there’s a need to quantify the impact of learning interventions. “Knowledge engineering” refers to all the technical, scientific, and social aspects involved in building, maintaining and using knowledge-based systems. Knowledge engineering incorporates principles of cognitive psychology and neuroscience (i.e. how the brain learns) in order to assure the retention and utilization of accurate information. Furthermore, enterprise clinical data repositories, derived from electronic health record (EHR) systems, accrue vast amounts of vital patient outcomes data that can be related to learning interventions to measure their actual impact.

According to Robert Birnbaum, MD, PhD, Vice President of Continuing Professional Development, “Continuing professional education in healthcare has traditionally been relegated to a licensure compliance model without a direct clinical mission. Many of the standard methods of ensuring provider competency are either antiquated, expensive or too labor intensive to be deployed with any regularity.”

Partners has worked with the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance for the past several years to develop clinical knowledge engineering courseware deployed through their adaptive learning platform that provides effective learning and rich analytics. The platform was developed in partnership with the top US cognitive science labs for human learning and has shown strong performance improvement results in clinical settings.

Brent James, MD, Adjunct Clinical Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and a member of Amplifire’s Healthcare Alliance, commented, “It is exciting to begin work with Dr. Birnbaum’s lab to bring new tools to the market. What I saw with Amplifire and the Partners’ courseware was a set of tools that much more accurately, completely, and rapidly loaded critical knowledge to providers. It gave us the ability not to just transmit it, it gave us the ability to measure how well we have done and identify specific areas where things were falling short. I personally believe that this combination of smart, confident professionals tightly trained around specific issues in conjunction with effective systems, has the potential to clearly carry health systems across the country far beyond what any of us would believe possible. We have not yet begun to understand how good healthcare can be.”

Bob Burgin, CEO of the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance, noted that, “Partners Healthcare is a true leader in advancing clinical knowledge engineering as an alternative to compliance-based training based on licensure compliance rather than clinical focus. Perfunctory compliance-based training is quickly losing relevance as healthcare systems seek to move forward under new reimbursement models. For clinical areas where there is both a risk of patient harm and financial liability for unreimbursed care, hospitals can no longer afford to deploy obsolete learning methods that do not actually help providers perform at their highest potential.”

As a founding member of the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance, Partners is making their clinical knowledge engineering courseware in critical areas such as Safe Prescribing of Opioids, C-Difficile, Surgical Site Infections and others available to other member health systems including Intermountain Health, UC Health, Children’s Colorado, the VA VISN 19, Banner Health, Centura Health and others. As a critical step in this effort, Partners is migrating Amplifire learning modules into a new learning management system provided by EthosCE, the leading LMS for healthcare systems. This move also enables Partners to leverage proven clincal knowledge engineering courseware developed by other member systems.

Dr. Birnbaum commented: “It is exciting to collaborate with health systems across the country to bring these advancements forward. New models of delivery, rapid information technology advances and the ever-expanding velocity of clinical data have made it imperative that providers adopt innovative approaches to life-long training. It’s no secret that our industry has a history of wasteful investments that have encouraged training approaches without a demonstrable improvement in quality of care. Now is the time to apply evidence-based protocols and learning interventions that will assure the adoption of those protocols at the point of care. We’re confident that knowledge engineering is an advancement that will create a dynamic learning healthcare system responsive to the needs of both providers and patients alike.”

About Partners Healthcare Knowledge Transformation Laboratory
Partners Healthcare Knowledge Transformation Laboratory serves as an R&D accelerator that architects, builds, and tests cutting-edge learning innovations. The lab works closely with Partners Health internal capabilities, coupling them with technology startups, innovation collaborators, and service healthcare stakeholders to deliver specific goals, for example, improving diagnostic accuracy, reducing avoidable harm and leveling disparities in care, etc..

About Robert J. Birnbaum, MD, PhD
Robert J. Birnbaum, MD, PhD is the Vice President of Continuing Professional Development at Partners Healthcare. Dr. Birnbaum is a practicing psychopharmacologist. His PhD research was in molecular neurobiology. He has devoted much of his career to managing large-scale CME efforts, developing courses and studying education methodology and impact. Dr. Birnbaum is the founding Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Psychiatry Academy and the founding Executive Director of the MGH Academy. He serves on the Education Review Board (ERB) of Partners Healthcare and the Partners Education Committee (PEC). He is a member of the Foundation Board of the Alliance for Continuing Education in The Health Professions (ACEHP). Dr. Birnbaum has served on Harvard Medical School’s Standing Committee on Continuing Medical Education and is the Member-at-Large of the Education Research Committee of the Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME).

About the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance
The Amplifire Healthcare Alliance is a collaborative of leading health systems across the country to work to develop evidenced-based proven clinical knowledge engineering solutions and share best practices, courseware and analytics toward the common goal of eliminating hospital acquired conditions and adverse events in hospitals.

Intermountain Healthcare and Amplifire Reduce CLABSI by 51% and CAUTI by 36%

BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Intermountain and Amplifire partnered to produce clinical knowledge engineering courses targeted at reducing CLABSI and CAUTI incidents. Together with the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance, Intermountain co-developed two courses, Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infection Prevention and Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection Prevention. Using the latest evidence-based information and best practices, these courses were designed to eliminate Confidently Held Misinformation (CHM), uncertainty, and knowledge gaps that lead to avoidable infection. The courses were deployed to 3,707 nurses and 4,511 nurses respectively through the Amplifire knowledge engineering platform. The result was a 51% reduction in CLABSI and a 36% reduction in CAUTI incidents. The personalized online training took just 26 minutes on average per nurse.

Intermountain and the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance are now partnering to make these clinical knowledge engineering courses available to health systems across the country to help solve this important patient infection risk nationwide.

CAUTI: In the US, about 30 million Foley catheters are inserted each year, leading to nearly 1 million catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs). These infections are the most commonly reported hospital-acquired condition (HAC). Intermountain employed the Amplifire platform to acquire data on what its nurses knew and didn’t know about managing urinary catheters, and to find and fix any misinformation. Following deployment of the Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection Prevention course and seven months of measuring efficacy, CAUTI rates had fallen by 36% compared to the previous 32 months.

CLABSI: Central venous catheters (CVCs) are used for the administration of intravenous fluids, blood products, medications, and nutrition. They also provide access for hemodialysis and other forms of long-term treatment, such as chemotherapy. Widespread and essential, CVCs are also a frequent cause of healthcare-associated bloodstream infections. It is estimated that 250,000 cases of central line–associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) occur in the U.S. every year. According to the CDC, CLABSIs are associated with a mortality rate of 12–25% and each episode costs approximately $22,000 of unreimbursed care to the health system. Following deployment of the Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infection Prevention course and seven months of measuring efficacy, CLABSI rates had fallen by 51% compared to the previous 12 months.

According to Tammy Richards, Intermountain’s AVP of Professional Practice and Learning, “Intermountain has an international reputation for excellence in patient safety and quality. Our work with Amplifire helps us continue to improve by focusing our training on critical topics that will demonstrate significant new achievements in patient safety.”

Bob Burgin, CEO at Amplifire noted, “We recognize that learning must lead to behavioral change and that the ultimate measure of effectiveness is found in better patient outcomes and a reduction in unreimbursed care. We have seen larger reductions in adverse events in 2018 then we ever expected, thanks to Intermountain and other healthcare systems deployment of the Amplifire platform to detect and correct confidently held misinformation. With these results, we have developed, in partnership with our member health systems, highly targeted clinical knowledge engineering courses around critical areas of risk, including SSIs, Patient Falls, Sepsis and others.”

About Intermountain

Intermountain Healthcare is a Utah-based not-for-profit system of 23 hospitals, 170 clinics, a Medical Group with close to 2,300 employed physicians and advanced practice clinicians, a health plans group under the name SelectHealth, and other medical services.

About Amplifire

To date, Amplifire has delivered 1.8 billion learner interactions and remediated 194 million instances of confidently held misinformation. Healthcare, education, and Fortune 500 companies use Amplifire’s patented learning algorithms, knowledge analytics, and diagnostic capabilities to save time, money, and lives.