Alive Sciences is offering an innovative early warning system to help providers deliver high-quality, cost-efficient care to their at-risk patients and residents.

"Our goal is to help providers monitor a patient’s health throughout the continuum of care, helping to avoid costly emergency room visits and hospitalizations," said Steven Rothman, founder of Alive Sciences in Sarasota and co-creator of the Florence Rothman Patient Monitoring Index.

Rothman Index extracts more than 50 health indicators from each patient’s electronic medical record (EMR), such as vital signs, nursing assessments and psychosocial evaluations – utilizing these to form a composite score.

As scores are displayed, "trends" become visible, which the clinician can easily understand. By detecting critical changes that might otherwise go unnoticed, the Rothman Index can save lives and prevent suffering, said Rothman. For example, a Sarasota assisted living home, which piloted the index, reduced its patient fall rate by 50 percent.

Alive Sciences is offering the Rothman Index to retirement centers, skilled nursing homes, assisted living facilities, nursing and rehabilitation centers, hospices, home healthcare agencies, PACE programs and any providers who care for patients after discharge from an acute-care hospital.

"Our index is available to providers through licensing agreements, and includes proprietary software that integrates with existing digital records systems," said Rothman. "The benefits for post-acute care facilities include potential improvements in the quality of care, and reduction in costs by tailoring services – and staffing – to the changing needs of patients and residents."

The Rothman Index is already in use in more than 30 hospitals, including top-ranked academic medical centers like Yale New Haven, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Seattle Children’s Hospital and University of Florida Health Shands Hospital, and has been validated in numerous studies.

Rothman is a former MIT think tank analyst and current Director of Research at the F.A.R. Institute of Sarasota, a nonprofit medical research foundation. His brother, Michael Rothman, Ph.D., is the Chief Science Officer of PeraHealth in Charlotte, North Carolina, which markets the Rothman Index to hospitals. Together they developed the index after their mother, Florence A. Rothman, died from hospital mistakes following a successful surgical procedure.