PointClickCare is bringing its technological successes back to Canada

NEW ORLEANS – PointClickCare co-founder and CEO Dave Wessinger bounds up to the stage of the cavernous Ernest Morial Convention Centre in New Orleans. In the fashion of today’s conventions, there’s thunderous rock n’ roll music and applause from his adoring employees and customers. Unlike most CEOs, he does a somersault when he hits the stage.

It’s not too often that you’ll see this kind of flip from the chief executive officer of a company that generates revenues of more than $500 million a year.

“My back is still aching from the rehearsal yesterday,” he cracked, in his folksy, self-effacing manner.

Wessinger was kicking-off the company’s annual summit, a gathering of staff, customers and business partners for education, business and a bit of fun. Well, a lot of fun.

PointClickCare was created by Dave Wessinger and his brother Mike about 30 years ago in the Toronto area. It’s now one of the largest healthcare IT providers in North America. It now supplies long-term care software – and more – to 2,600 LTC homes in Canada and about 27,000 in the United States.

Moreover, PCC software connects with more than 2,800 U.S. hospitals, 3,600 ambulatory centres and 70 state and government agencies south of the border. “We’re the largest care collaboration network in the U.S. and Canada,” Wessinger asserted.

It’s the leading software vendor in the long-term care sector, and it appears to have gotten to the top with a mixture of cutting-edge technology and a warm company culture. The summit in New Orleans – with over 2,000 attendees – seemed part family get-together. There was much hugging to be seen, and frequent mentions by Wessinger of his brother Mike, who used to be CEO and now serves as Chairman.

Dave Wessinger also spoke fondly of mom, Sheila, who also worked at PCC for many years. “She must have done a thousand installs,” said Wessinger.

A key point, as noted by the CEO, is that the company is no slouch on technology development. It invests about $140 million a year in research and development, and nearly 20 percent of that goes into data and technology foundation IT work, including AI.

“Companies act like AI is something new,” said Wessinger in an interview with CHT. “We’ve been doing it for years.”

For that reason, the company has already launched two AI-driven products and has three more major applications in the pipeline.

B.J. Boyle, chief product officer, described a new application that’s essentially an early warning system for long-term care facilities. One of the users, Lisa Leatherwood, noted in a video presentation how one of her patients rocketed over a weekend from a score of 32 to 68. By flagging the resident, staff were immediately able to take special care and eliminated a trip to the Emergency Department.

In the United States, PCC has implemented a secure, instant messaging system that ties LTC to clinicians. In the case of the EWS patient who was crashing, staff were able to quickly contact a physician.

Called Secure Conversations, the process can be actuated with one click of the keyboard, and a clinician is available for consultation around the clock.

“You don’t have to rush the patient to Emergency at 2 am,” said Boyle, explaining that help is always at hand. As well as this text-based service, PCC also enables virtual care with physicians, again supporting patients and staff in emergencies.

Addressing the issue of staff shortages and burnout, PCC last year launched an AI-powered clinical summaries app that dramatically reduces the time nurses spend on documentation.

The app guides the nurse as he or she is documenting, making sure they’re not missing anything. As one care home director put it, “standardized assessment is critical.” It enables managers to track how individual patients are doing and to see wider trends over time and across facilities.

Where does AI come in? PCC demonstrated how its LLM can create full progress notes, pulling from days of assessments to find the key points and produce a succinct clinical summary.

The application, said Boyle, has just been released to early users. As it’s rolled out to additional customers, it’s expected to make a significant impact by reducing the time spent by nurses on documentation.

While AI is certainly today’s technological wunderkind, Wessinger also emphasizes the advantages that PCC’s extensive network offers to customers. In the United States, it offers a free system that connects the data of long-term care facilities with acute care, government agencies, pharmacies and public health. “We run the largest connected provider network in the U.S.,” Wessinger says, with pride.

It’s through this system that tremendous gains can be made, he said. Especially when you add a layer of intelligence that provides analytics and insights.

“You can easily connect the acute care provider with the long-term care centre to perform a medication reconciliation,” said Wessinger, noting that many re-hospitalizations occur due to medication mismatches and errors.

Users can also see if patients are getting opioids from multiple pharmacies, or if certain patients are visiting EDs at different hospitals. You can even drill down further, he explained, to see if the patient has a history of behavioural health issues. “You can then take steps to care for the person afterwards, to get them the right attention, or else they’ll be right back in the emergency department,” said Wessinger.

It’s this kind of value that a connected network can add, he said. Of course, the connected network makes it so much easier to move documents when patients are moved from a skilled nursing facility to hospital, or vice versa. Indeed, it was largely to facilitate this process that PCC created its network in the first place.

“It was quite startling when we realized that at discharge from hospital, an LTC patient would have the hospital record stapled to his sheets on the gurney,” said Bill Charnetski, executive VP of health system solutions and government affairs. Not only could the document be easily lost, but “someone would have to re-input the data. That pulls people away from care and leads to new sources of error,” added Charnetski.

To some extent, PCC is now taking technologies it has developed in the United States and it’s bringing them to Canada. Its networking technology is at the heart of Project AMPLIFI, which started as a demonstration project to link the Epic health information system at St. Joseph’s Health Care Hamilton to a local skilled nursing facility using PCC.

The project has been so successful that it was quickly expanded by the province. It currently reaches 47 Ontario hospitals and 367 long-term care centres, although more are being added.