University of Minnesota & Partners Develop Winning Concept to Improve Patient Participation in Healthcare

MINNEAPOLIS, MN- March 11, 2019 - A multidisciplinary team from the University of Minnesota is giving patients a more interactive role when making decisions about their care through a new award-winning app.

It’s called PRISM, which stands for PROMIS Reporting Insight System from Minnesota, and was developed by experts from the University of Minnesota Medical School, Institute for Health Informatics, Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and the Carlson School of Management, in partnership with Fairview Health Services, EMF Consulting, and Perk Motivation.

PRISM recently won the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Step Up App Challenge, a competition to address the need for greater use of standardized patient-reported outcomes (PRO) data in clinical care and research. The app’s data can be used to provide insight into a person’s health status, function, and quality of life as well as evaluate the physical, mental and social health in adults and children.

“Improving healthcare quality can’t happen without the patient,” said Steve Johnson, Director of Informatics Innovation Dissemination, University of Minnesota Institute for Health Informatics and Clinical and Translational Science Institute. “This app facilitates the broad implementation of PROMIS measures while integrating the patient’s responses with their medical records so clinicians can easily access the information and see trends during a clinic visit.”

PRISM can show patients how their data compares to the overall population and provide personalized recommendations on how to improve their health. Perk Motivation provided the software development for PRISM and incorporated engagement techniques from their experience developing other healthcare apps.

“Validated patient-reported outcome instruments, like the PROMIS measures, are uniquely effective in capturing the subjective patient experience,” said Andrew Portis, M.D. Chair, Fairview HealthEast Kidney Stone Institute. “We have leveraged unnecessarily complex systems to great success, and we are optimistic that the PRISM app should make it easier for other centers to better adapt care to serve their patients.”

“Technological advancements in healthcare have evolved at a rate that outpaces our ability to apply these new tools in a meaningful way,” said Michael Borofsky, M.D., assistant professor, University of Minnesota Medical School. “Similarly, huge efforts have been made to create instruments that accurately capture our patients’ health; however, finding a way to integrate these into daily clinical practice has been challenging. With PRISM we are hopeful to bring technology and outcome reporting together in a simple to use way.”

The AHRQ Step Up App Challenge is part of an ongoing effort to help shape the nation’s digital healthcare ecosystem.

“This app could not have been created without each of the project's collaborators,” said Pinar Karaca-Mandic, Ph.D., Academic Director, Medical Industry Leadership Institute (MILI) at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. “We named our app as a ‘solution from Minnesota’ to celebrate the innovation coming from our university; our state. This app truly represents what can be created when you put great minds from education and industry together to tackle a grand challenge.”

PRISM will be piloted in nine practice settings affiliated with MedStar Health in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

Other PRISM collaborators include De Liu, Ph.D., associate professor of Information and Decision Sciences and 3M Fellow in Business Analytics at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota; Carla Pavone, Ph.D., associate director of the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship and program director of Minnesota Innovation Corps (MIN-Corps); Elisha Friesema, M.B.A, founder and principal consultant of EMF Consulting, and a member of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute alumni board; Sue Neises R.N., M.A., CPHQ, manager at Fairview/HealthEast Kidney Stone Institute; Zach McGill, founder and CEO of Perk Motivation; and Doug DeBold, founder and CTO of Perk Motivation. PRISM is co-led by Drs. Johnson and Karaca-Mandic.

This application was developed with support from the University of Minnesota Medical School's New Opportunities to Improve Outcomes (NOTIO) grant and the University of Minnesota’s National Institute of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences Clinical and Translational Science Award, grant UL1TR002494. Seed funds were also provided by the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management’s Medical Industry Leadership Institute.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA OFFICE OF ACADEMIC CLINICAL AFFAIRS 
The Office of Academic Clinical Affairs (OACA) provides leadership and is home to centers and institutes that facilitate clinical research and training at the University of Minnesota. Our mission is to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations that strengthen clinical practice, advance patient care and serve as a national model for innovation and discovery.