On any given day in the hospital, there are more referrals for physical and occupational therapy than there are therapists to provide the care. To help prioritize these patients, clinicians at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center devised the Rehabilitation and Healthcare Analytics Platform (ReHAP).

“It narrows patients down based on their ability to move, walk and perform daily activities out of more than 100 patients a day,” says Krishnaj Gourab, a physiatrist and director of physical medicine and rehabilitation consult services. “If patients are not walking the way they should or performing daily activities, they are priorities.”

The proof of concept for ReHAP was developed with SharePoint and Tableau software in 2014. It has since been custom-coded in MATLAB software, with assistance from the Johns Hopkins Technology Innovation Center, to use data extracted from electronic medical records.

Occupational therapist Barbara Ruzicka says she would spend an hour each day reading through the paper cards used to keep track of patients. Now she can access any computer in the hospital to see the priority patients or sort patient data by date, therapist name, location, function and more. Each therapist using the system saves 20 minutes a day, while therapy coordinators save 150 minutes a day—valuable time that now goes toward high-priority patients.

John Adamovich, administrator of innovation and research for Johns Hopkins Home Care Group, is coordinating with Gourab to use ReHAP to follow patients after they leave the hospital. If a patient’s function starts to decline after going home, updates from Home Care staff members will appear in the system and alert clinicians to respond.

Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures is helping to commercialize ReHAP. “Interviews with outside hospitals and home health agencies found almost everybody needs something like this for therapy case load management,” Adamovich says. “It directs resources in real time to the patients who truly need them.”