Analytic Software Wins Janssen Prize to Reduce Hospital Readmissions

A team developing analytic software that scores patients for the risk they pose to being readmitted within 30 days after being discharged from a hospital is the winner of the inaugural Janssen Connected Care Challenge. The prize is sponsored by Janssen, a unit of New Brunswick, NJ-based Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: [[ticker:JNJ]]) .

Kim Park, a founding partner with Janssen Healthcare Innovation, declared the Discharge Decision Support System (D2S2) as the winner this morning at the 6th Annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) Convergence Summit in downtown San Diego. The D2S2 team also was awarded $100,000 to advance the technology, which is under development by RightCare Solutions, a Philadelphia-based startup founded last year by Eric Heil of Domain Associates and Kathryn Bowles, a professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania.

The company describes the D2S2 system as a decision-support tool that uses key data from a patient’s admission to analyze the risk that the patient could be readmitted within 30 days after discharge. The software algorithm also “learns” by tracking patient outcomes and adjusting the way it scores a patient’s risk for readmission.

Because the D2S2 risk assessment is done upon admission, RightCare says hospital officials can better plan the discharge and follow-up care for at-risk patients. The company says a second-generation system will be able to recommend whether a patient at-risk for 30-day readmission should be referred to a skilled nursing facility, home care, rehab, or nursing home.

The D2S2 system was

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.