For years, DaVita has invested in and built technology that supports better care-delivery—such as OneView’s care documentation and access for nephrologists who round in DaVita® centers and DaVita Care Connect® for patients on peritoneal dialysis. Even as these solutions continue to create connections between nephrologists, DaVita care teams and patients, the nephrology community voiced a need for a streamlined data ecosystem.

“Kidney care is data-heavy,” Dr. Adam Weinstein, chief medical information officer for DaVita explains. “And an individual receives care in many environments, whether it’s in their nephrologist’s office, their dialysis center, in an acute setting or even at home. It’s important that an individual’s care data is conveniently accessible to clinical caregivers when and where they need it—and this portability and interoperability will only continue to become more and more critical as we push for more holistic care.”

In 2022, DaVita started rolling out Center Without Walls™ (CWOW™), a first-of-its-kind cloud-based patient data platform for DaVita teammates. CWOW serves to streamline workflows and facilitates access and interoperability, creating access to crucial patient data center-to-center seamlessly. CWOW is patient-centric, enabling better collaboration across care teams and between different locations of care.

While rollout began in 2022, the development team put in several years to collect feedback from thousands of clinical teammates and hundreds of subject matter experts to evaluate whether the new platform provided solutions for addressing data needs and delivered an intuitive user experience.

“This multi-year journey has required us to delve into crucial care processes, consider opportunities to better integrate data and transform how both individual and population clinical information traverses the traditional boundaries you see in health care,” explains Alan Cullop, senior vice president and chief information officer for DaVita. “Working with Google to develop this innovative platform, we’re pushing away from decentralized architectures and driving digital transformation through integrated, cloud-based data management.”

After building and piloting CWOW in a small number of dialysis centers over the past several years, DaVita began deploying the platform at scale in mid-2022 with teammates receiving four-to-six weeks of training prior to implementation. Because CWOW effectively replaced several other platforms, teams have cited a more convenient experience: fewer systems to navigate, a more intuitive workflow and a more holistic view of the patient.

“The biggest improvement [we’ve] seen is consolidation, which leads to better use of time and materials, and easier decision making along the way,” Chris Price, division vice president for DaVita, says. “We have a much better view of the patient’s overall care.”

DaVita projects all of its U.S. dialysis centers will utilize CWOW by mid-2023 and that the platform will continue to evolve, strengthening the connection between organizations where the exchange of data is primed to drive innovative care, help reduce costs and support better patient outcomes.

As health care models and value-based arrangements continue to evolve, CWOW will support DaVita’s patient-centric, integrated care models through centralized data access.

“Value-based care has provided an important impetus for the health care community to reimagine how we can drive toward improved population and individual health,” Dr. Mark Kaplan, vice president of medical affairs for DaVita, explains. “CWOW helps care teams work smarter, centralize crucial information, and drive the right care activities at the right time. As we seek to create new solutions, we believe that we have created a powerful foundation that has just scratched the surface of centralizing care management.”