Deploying POKE Within Intermountain Healthcare

POKE was developed and implemented at Dixie Regional Medical Center's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) over the past 10 years to eliminate waste and reduce harm in healthcare. POKE is a combination of a unique culture and process, with a supporting database, that is designed to guide and inform care decisions while minimizing POKEs. The program utilizes an implementation framework, educational materials, electronic health records (EHR), and decision support analytics. POKE's initial deployment showed extremely promising results for Intermountain, which included: (1) eliminating 11,000 POKEs per year (a 50% reduction in overall POKEs), (2) realizing $940,000 per year in cost savings (a 28% reduction of overall cost), (3) reducing length of stay by 2 weeks per average stay (a 21% reduction in length of stay), and (4) eliminating Hospital Acquired Infections (i.e., Central-line Associated Bloodstream Infection and Ventilator-associated Pneumonia), translating into 10 lives saved and a $5.2M savings over a decade. POKE will now be deployed and routinized within all Intermountain Healthcare NICUs and be developed as a commercial product for external customers. To assess the impact of POKE on babies, the investigators will longitudinally track several outcomes before and after implementation at Intermountain NICUs. Process outcomes will include the number of total POKEs per baby and the number of painful POKEs per baby, each measured at both the patient-level and NICU-level. Clinical outcomes will include hospital acquired infections, length of stay, and mortality. Financial outcomes will include total variable costs and backfill rate.