www.insightssuccess.com SEPTEMBER July 20172017
The way of business solutions
10 T H E
Exclusive Artificial Intelligence: A Game Changer for Healthcare
FASTEST GROWING
HEALTHCARE
SOLUTIONS PROVIDER C O M P A N I E S 2 0 1 7
Tech-N-Trends Upcoming Trends that will Change the Face of Pharma Industry
Scott W. Thomas CEO
RMS
Revolutionizing Your Revenue
Editorial
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ith the inauguration of the Internet of Things, we can say that everything and everyone is connected. The technological shift of this dimension is felt by every division of the economy, every human being and every sector including Healthcare. Internet of Healthy Things (IoHT) bridges interoperability hurdles to transform radically the way in which healthcare is delivered, driving high-grade results, increasing efficiency and making healthcare affordable to all.
Modern Technology Transcending the Healthcare into Value-based Collaborative Care
Wearable devices and home health monitoring devices assisting patients is a common thing now. Whether data comes from electrocardiograms or temperature monitors, tracking health information is vital for all patients. Connected smart devices facilitate real-time data reporting with the capability to transmit critical data from a patient’s home to the hospital. It allows doctors and hospital staff to have a real-time monitoring of patient’s wellness. Increase in computing power is also a reason behind this disruption. Our smartphones now hold more processing power than entire rooms of early computers, and nowhere is that truer than in the world of medical monitoring. The leaps and bounds that technological progress has taken in the past few decades showcases that whereas once you'd have to go to a medical professional to get more information about. This disruption made possible by IoHT is also creating an opportunity to reduce the cost of healthcare delivery and allowing healthcare to transform into value-based healthcare. Recently published research shows that with remote patient monitoring for the heart, asthma and diabetes patients will enable a total saving of $200+ billion mainly due to the elimination of unnecessary and redundant expenditures. The future is converging more on interconnected devices, and all these methods will help to build products that involve enough with patients to support them in crafting health goals which are relevant to their life. Adopters of the Internet of Things in Healthcare are rising steadily which delivers very compelling messaging, sustain engagement and provide powerful motivators to make health and wellness a part of our everyday lives.
Sugandha Sharma
Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Senior Editor Ariana Lawrence
Managing Editor Sugandha Sharma Co-Editors
Sagar Bhattacharjee Poonam Yadav David Smith Contributors
Nikita, Poulami, Ujal Visualiser David King Art & Design Director Amol Kamble Co-designer Alex Noel Picture Editor Rahul, Shweta Art Editor Vanshika Mittal
Business Development Manager Mathew Smith Nick Adams Marketing Manager Chris Clarke Business Development Executives
David, Joseph, John, Mary Research Analyst Jennifer Circulation Manager Robert Database Management Steve Technology Consultant Swapnil Patil sales@insightssuccess.com
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Contents Cover Story
8
RMS: Revolutionizing Your Revenue Articles
16
Tech-N-Trends Upcoming Trends that will Change the Face of Pharma Industry
20 Health Talk
28 Top 5 Best Practices that Deď€ nes a Successful Wellness Program
Exclusive Artiď€ cial Intelligence: A Game Changer for Healthcare
Medical Pioneer
34 How Innovation in healthcare means going against entrenched beliefs about the nature of charting
Care3: Caring Together
Hi3 Solutions: Establishing the Dynamic Methodologies towards Healthcare Era
Mile High Healthcare Analytics: Re-imagining Healthcare
18 24
26
Scribe: Enabling Healthcare Providers to Focus on What Matters Most - Patient Care
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Simplicity Health Systems: Providing a Unique Healthcare Communication and Content Sharing Platform
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THE
10 FASTEST GROWING
HEALTHCARE
SOLUTIONS PROVIDER COMPANIES 2017
Revolution in Healthcare Industry Overhauling Outmoded Business Models
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onstant and competitive advances in areas ranging from wearables to blood testing as well as artificial intelligence have shaped the conventional healthcare market into a digitized and more competitive healthcare giant. The ageing population across the world and rising incidences of chronic diseases ─ which continue burden the healthcare system ─ has impelled us to innovate and evolve our healthcare methods. Over the years of big disruptions, transformations and innovations, the healthcare industry continues to overhaul outmoded business models and experts look up for innovative organizations which strive & thrive to stay competent. The dire need for proficient healthcare solution providers has made us look out for “The 10 Fastest Growing Healthcare Solution Provider Companies 2017”. On our cover page we have Scott W. Thomas, the CEO of RMS, featured for revolutionizing your revenue by providing ardent revenue management solutions. Revenue Management Solutions (RMS) has accelerated electronic revenue management for healthcare providers, banks and health plans; solves revenue problems and turns data into power with proven workflow automation tools that interface with existing practice management systems. Furthermore, we have Care3, which is the world’s first team collaboration platform for care delivered outside of the hospital. Hi3 Solutions is being listed for providing HIT products, education, and consulting services that enable its clients to engage effectively in health information exchange, health data integration, and healthcare quality measurement required to establish and comply with evidence-based best practices in healthcare. Listed for providing a practical approach towards population-oriented healthcare data analysis to insurance plans, exchange issuers, ACOs, and risk-bearing provider groups is Mile High Healthcare Analytics. In addition, Scribe is empowering healthcare providers to create and manage medical records and gives you the freedom to focus on what matters most – patient care. Lastly, listed for breaking the systemic barriers to content sharing and cooperation in the care of patients is Simplicity Health Systems (SHS). It was founded in response to the federal government's Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), which was a call for the advancement of healthcare technology. So, flip through the amazing folios for insights on organizations striving hard to keep-up with the technological disruption in the healthcare industry. Do not miss out on some important executive acumen on “How Innovation in healthcare means going against entrenched beliefs about the nature of charting” by Richard Low, MD of Praxis® Electronic Medical Records and “Top 5 Best Practices that Defines a Successful Wellness Program” by Dr. Gary Tho, Owner of Chiropractic Works. Find out more about the trends in the industry through articles on ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Game Changer for Healthcare’ and ‘Upcoming Trends that will Change the Face of Pharma Industry’ drafted by our in-house editors for this special issue.
Cover Story
Scott W. Thomas
Chief Executive Ofď€ cer
THE
10 FASTEST GROWING
HEALTHCARE
SOLUTIONS PROVIDER COMPANIES 2017
Revolutionizing
Your Revenue
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owadays, healthcare institutions find themselves bound to ever-changing regulatory specifications and dynamic market forces. All the while, they’re striving to deliver best-possible outcomes to their patients while still adding to their bottom lines and maintaining their own financial health. Financial stability goes a long way in allowing these institutions to operate at peak efficiency, which translates to a stronger, healthier community. What we’re seeing now is a complex relationship between healthcare providers, patients and third-party payers working to maintain solvency. As costs continue to increase, so have the complexities of supporting reimbursement systems, changing the face of Revenue Cycle Management (hereafter: RCM). Revenue cycle management (RCM) is currently undergoing an unprecedented transformation. The processes governing the flow of funds must be continuously streamlined and improved. Healthcare providers, insurers and the banks they work with will look to dexterous and innovative partners, like Oklahoma City-based RMS (Revenue Management Solutions), to revolutionize their electronic revenue management. With their proven workflow automation tools, they work directly with the HCP, providing tailored
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software solutions that work within the existing framework of their clients’ practice management systems. Here are some of the insights RMS CEO Scott W. Thomas shared with us: The Journey Founded in 2006, RMS focused solely on paper-to-EDI conversion. We quickly grew beyond that. Now we’re working in every facet of the healthcare remittance processing and reconciliation process. Over the years, we began developing proprietary software for each of the audiences and sectors we serve. We don’t create off-theshelf products or components because those kinds of products, offered by our competitors, can’t perform the service required in our niche and don’t operate at the standard to which we hold ourselves. Today, more than half of our monthly transactional volume originates as EDI without ever being reduced to paper. Now, we’re not only able to ingest and process all remittance types (paper, EDI, secondary payments, online and return mail patient payments, etc.), we also turn that data into action, helping give our clients a more holistic view of their revenue cycle health. It’s these value-added services that continue to drive business our way. We are currently focused on building out more analytics offerings and facilitating a stronger financial connection between providers and patients/guarantors. With better visibility into payment trends we can work toward meaningfully reducing DSOs for healthcare providers. Challenges Faced by RMS
We don’t have to predict the future; we just have to listen to clients’ needs and work towards it
I’ve said a thousand times: “We were either too tenacious or too stupid to quit.” We were privately funded and singularly focused on remittance. We had to succeed in this niche or the entire company was a failure. Driven by our commitment to investors and our own underlying belief in our team members, we continued to push forward and find success by delivering a solution that no one else can.
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Turning Obstacles into Achievements
Building the technology platform was an arduous path. We didn’t anticipate having to build all of the individual components we have. As we encountered barriers, we looked at available options, and usually found none were suitable for our application. So, we would build our own
solution. Now that we’ve delivered dozens of proprietary applications, we’re comfortably separated from the competition.
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No one else has used technology to create scalable solutions like this. Where others simply employ offshore manual labor to capture data, we deliver a much more comprehensive solution and workflow. The real challenge now, however, is convincing potential customers to embrace the value-added services we can also provide, services that no one else can. Distinctive Strategies & Services that Assure Success
Our success is based on a solid understanding of the issues our customers face. They just want someone to provide solutions to their daily struggles. Once we understand their challenges, we’re able to develop the solution that’s tailored to their needs. We work with some of the nation’s most prestigious and advanced healthcare systems and provider groups, as well as some of the top healthcare banks in the country. We don’t have to predict the future, we just have to listen. Our clients and partners know what they need and what we’re positioned to offer them. All we must focus on is delivering what they ask for.
We listen to
the market and specically our clients. RMS
works with some of the nation’s most prestigious
Innovations of RMS as Narrated by Scott Our payment splitting and payment merging services are something we haven’t seen anyone else offer. Payment reconciliation tools and industry-leading data lift and match capabilities drive a layer of value that our perceived competitors are generally failing to provide. “The Greatest Project” As our platform continues to expand, choosing a single “great” project is tough. We performed a mass migration at one of the largest banks in the nation, a bank that had previously been working with a competitor solution. Migrating their portfolio of healthcare providers from their platform to ours was a huge success story, one that was only made possible through the committed focus on both our own team and the bank’s. Growth Plans to Expand Our growth has been extraordinary and, due to the success of our bank partners and their sales successes, continues to
and advanced healthcare systems and provider groups, as well as some of the top healthcare banks in the country
increase. We don’t see this slowing down at all as we continue to onboard new banks and other partners with significant distribution channels. Key Elements for a Successful Customer Base and a Successful Business Historically our customers have been banks, with the end users of our solution being the healthcare providers. We have to build strong relationships with both groups by understanding their needs and their perspectives in this continuum. The banks want to serve their healthcare clients with thorough subject matter expertise and meaningful solutions. We provide both without interfering with their existing customer relationship. For the healthcare provider, it comes down to an efficient service that becomes part of their daily workflow. Our solutions supplant a lot of labor costs and supplement their processes to maximize the expertise and time of their workforce. The DNA of our team is focused on more subject matter expertise. This includes the Project Management, Account Management, Business Analysis, and Software Development teams. By continuing to add depth to these groups, we are expanding our focus to lowering the technical and informational hurdles that come with implementation and service adoption. Igniting the Future by Revolutionizing Data While it sounds a bit cliché, people are what make our company great. There is great commitment, pride in what we do and a driving desire for excellence that keeps us focused. As we expand our team, our sense of who we are and what helped us get here is always at the front of our minds. While introducing himself, Scott Shared: I have been in healthcare for my entire career, and focused on technology solutions for more than 20 years now. Over time, I noticed a gap in innovation between the claims side of the revenue cycle and the remittance/payments side. Technology has been well-employed on the claims side and insurance companies have done an excellent job promoting market adoption of EDI there. The remittance and payments side continues to lag. We have built a platform that focuses on employing technology and business logic to improve this process, creating efficiencies that have been lacking for decades. Golden Words by Scott for The Younger Generation Dreaming of Entrepreneurship Building something from nothing is harder than it looks. A masterful idea isn’t enough. It requires resources, drive, commitment and an unwavering belief in the objective. There will be dozens, if not hundreds, of setbacks. Each one should be accepted as an obstacle, not a barrier. Surround yourself with people you trust, people who know they can trust you. The path will be difficult, but it's certainly navigable. Learning to set aside my timing expectations and accept that outcomes are more important than deadlines was probably one of the most difficult lessons for me. As an entrepreneur, I wanted the outcome and I wanted it on my schedule. Realizing and accepting that sometimes I couldn’t control the timing, but only stay the course until the result was achieved, was an invaluable lesson.
YOUR RECOVERY IS ALL THE REWARD WE NEED www.sanchetihospital.org
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THE
10 FASTEST GROWING
HEALTHCARE
SOLUTIONS PROVIDER COMPANIES 2017
Company Name
Management
Brief
Care3 care3.co
David S. Williams III Founder and CEO
Care3 is the world’s first team collaboration platform for care delivered outside of the hospital.
Compliancy Group LLC. compliancy-group.com
Marc Haskelson President & CEO
Compliancy Group is simplifying compliance, and allowing small & mid-size organizations ability to Achieve, Illustrate, and Maintain compliance with confidence.
GeoDD Group is a team of management and technical GeoDimensional Decision Greg Reinecke Group, LLC professionals who utilize a holistic, global multidimensional President & Co-founder geoddgroup.com approach to help clients solve seemingly Intractable Problems®.
Stephen Krupa CEO
HealthEdge is a cutting edge software company focused on providing next-generation technology products to the health insurance market.
Hi3 Solutions hi3solutions.com
Abdul Malik Shakir Co-founder
Hi3 Solutions provides HIT products, education, and consulting services that enable its clients to engage effectively in health information exchange, health data integration, and healthcare quality measurement required to establish and comply with evidence-based best practices in healthcare.
Mile High Healthcare Analytics healthcareanalytics.expert
Richard Lieberman Chief Data Scientist
Mile High Healthcare Analytics helps health plans, financial risk-bearing provider groups, and vendors tackle the challenges of a constantly evolving payments landscape.
Becky Quammen CEO & Founder
Quammen Health Care Consultants is a different type of global medical communications agency with a very unique business model; act as trusted advisors by constantly and consistently delivering excellence.
RMS rmsweb.com
Scott W. Thomas CEO
Revenue Management Solutions (RMS) has accelerated electronic revenue management for healthcare providers, banks and health plans; solves revenue problems and turns data into power with proven workflow automation tools that interface with existing practice management systems.
Scribe, Inc. scribe.com
Mark D. Boyce CEO and President
Scribe empowers healthcare providers in creating and managing medical records.
HealthEdge healthedge.com
Quammen Health Care Consultants quammengroup.com
Chad Zerangue Simplicity Health Systems docflock.com Founder and President
Simplicity Health Systems’ docflock is a HIPAA compliant, healthcare workflow and communication platform. Docflock provides healthcare professionals and institutions with a powerful tool for content sharing, document management/storage, data analysis, and reporting.
Tech-N-Trends
Upcoming Trends that will Change the Face of PHARMA INDUSTRY
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he pharmaceutical manufacturing market is flourishing, and is predicted to reach 1.3 trillion US Dollars by 2020. Technological innovations like mobile applications, cloud-based data storage, advanced analytics, and IoT are transforming the healthcare industry. It is also affecting the market, government policies, and forcing the industry to change their business practices. To sustain in the digital market several pharma investors are experimenting with digital initiatives. These trends will help in changing the face of the pharma industry and bring advancement to the industry. Patient Empowerment Shaping the Pharma Industry Patient empowerment helps people gain control over their lives and increases their ability to act on important issues. The empowerment of patient emerged as a new method that can help improve medical outcomes by lowering the treatment costs. This concept seems promising in the management of chronic diseases. According to a survey, 60% of the US population are educating themselves on healthcare and monitoring their health by using apps and websites. Today, empowered people are shaping the healthcare industry. There are several companies that have started an empowerment program to educate the people. Augmented and Virtual Reality Improving Interaction of Customers and Company Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have great potential to change the current scenario of the medical field by making complicated things such as remote surgery, easier. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality both are specially designed as apps that are operated through mobile phones and give a fresh perspective of the world through digital information. It acts as an effective tool to grab customer attention. This technology offers the easiest way to understand the mechanism of drug action in 3D instead of reading the descriptions given on the bottle. Additionally, it also helps the scientists and lab technicians to observe their experiments. This technology provides the manufacturing guidelines to industry workers, so that they can perform their task without having hands-on training. The advancement in augmentation technology is a simple way to communicate with doctors and customers; it lowers the cost of pharmaceuticals that are wasted on marketing. Tailored Medicine Overwhelms Traditional Medicine Before introducing any new drug into the market, it is mandatory to take its clinical trial which is a lengthy and timeconsuming process. Personalized medicines open the gateway for pharma industries to produce drugs according to person’s genetic constitution. These medicines are more beneficial as compared to the traditional blockbuster drugs.
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Tailored medicines lower the chances of getting side effects, it prevents and targets the disease instead of reacting on it, and it also reduces the treatment cost. Many scientists and physicians are working on personalized medicine to make advances rapidly. Recently, several pharmaceuticals have their own personalized medicine programs and are performing basic clinical studies. Genetic Medicines, a Powerful Tool In this era of genomics, we are living in dynamic times. Sometimes genes are the only reason for illness and at such times doctor uses genes to plan a proper treatment. Genomic medicines are different from that of the personalized medicines. Genomic medicines have been used to tackle complex diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. 3D Printing, the way of Drug Delivery 3D printing technology produces biodegradable drugs, and hence is becoming a popular trend in the healthcare industry. This system opens new door for many pharmaceuticals to develop innovative solid dosage forms which are well-known and distinct products. 3D printing is the essential tool that reduces both time and cost of the manufacturing process. This helps the industry to get an accurate, cheap, structured and tailored drug delivery system. In the future, 3D printing will be useful to fabricate and engineer a variety of dosage forms. Body Sensors The wireless systems of wearable computing devices that have been implanted in the body are known as body sensors. Use of body sensors in therapeutics is an emerging trend in pharmaceuticals. The embedded microchips, wearables, robots and other body sensors receive patient’s information and send it to the health experts. This information helps the physicians to tackle the disease. Pharma industry is using this technique for clinical trials and patient monitoring. Artificial Intelligence, Time Conserving Technology The Artificial Intelligence (AI) and super computers help in collecting large or extensive data within a fraction of seconds. With the invention of AI, it is possible for pharmaceuticals to take clinical trials within a few seconds than spending years for that. This method ultimately reduces the time as well as drug pricing. Cognitive computers like IBM Watson have been used in genomic research and biotechnology. The need is rising for such research to enhance the growth in healthcare. Now it is necessary to understand the actual benefits from these evolving trends. The way how they manage with these trends affects not only their future, but also the future direction of patient care, provider decisions, and payment mechanisms. |September 2017|
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Care3: Caring Together
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t is said that all you have is your health, but healthcare is neither equally accessible nor delivered at equal levels for all. Disparities in healthcare access, quality, and delivery are some of the global problems. With a motto to serve the underserved, Care3 is passionately addressing the needs of society’s most vulnerable people. The world’s first team collaboration technology platform for care delivered outside of hospitals, Care3’s goal is to keep seniors and others living independently and comfortably in their homes. The company is called Care3 because it focuses on the three things that together, can drive measurable improvement in global healthcare: Community, Care and Collaboration (C3). The company’s C3 model supports care programs that require interdisciplinary providers to work together with patients and family caregivers to implement a unified care plan to drive the best outcomes. Care3 serves collaborative care programs (e.g. PACE) that deploy interdisciplinary teams to care for each patient in the home and community. Care3 alerts care managers when care tasks are not complete so that providers can intervene BEFORE hospitalizations and emergency visits occur. And finally, Care3 can integrate with any electronic health record system to help track the patient’s care. David S. Williams III, A person for whom Care is the highest priority Care3 is the dream of David S. Williams III, Founder and CEO of Care3. “I was inspired by both my experience caring for my mother for ten years prior to her passing and the ongoing care for my special needs son. My mother had COPD, CHF, ulcerative colitis, and survived multiple cancers – she almost died having me. She ended up living for 28 years after the FIRST time she was told she would
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‘die soon.’ My son’s autism diagnosis set in motion a process that required meticulous coordination among multiple care providers in order to help him develop and thrive. In both cases, there was no technology that allowed my family to collaborate with the teams of providers we had to deal with nor could providers easily communicate with each other.” Each of the Care3 founders has a similar story. When they realized that there were millions of families who experience this pain and frustration everyday while interacting with the healthcare system—and that the healthcare system didn’t have a solution to their collaboration shortcomings – they knew there was an opportunity to build a groundbreaking company. “The most vulnerable members of our society include seniors, the poor, and the disabled and they do not have equal access to healthcare and receive woefully inadequate quality of care in their homes and communities. Care3 is built to fix these unacceptable and unnecessary inequities,” adds David. Care3 Empowering Healthcare Because Care3 must engage consumers while providing the power for the healthcare enterprise users, the founding team has a natural tension between its enterprise healthcare leader and its consumer product leader. Care3 assembled the team with both specialties because typical enterprise healthcare technology isn’t designed for consumer usage; and without consumer engagement, care providers have very little chance at materially changing behavior and outcomes. David reveals Care3’s strategy, “Our aim is to reduce cost of care for the most costly patients by solving two industry problems at once.”
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THE
10 FASTEST GROWING
HEALTHCARE
SOLUTIONS PROVIDER COMPANIES 2017
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Our aim is to reduce cost of care for the most costly patients by solving two industry problems at once
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Over time, Care3 will have the largest repository of realworld outcomes data from care delivered in the home and community. Care3 will have a comprehensive dataset of documented care processes correlated with health outcomes generating actionable best practices for home and community-based care. Caring for others is an intrinsically human action. Care3 will make it easier for all of us to care anywhere and everywhere.
Care3’s enterprise customers operate collaborative care programs for patients outside of hospitals. The key elements of Care3’s success are their customer service and a worldclass platform that enables easy communication and generates structured care data that currently doesn’t exist. It sounds simple, but this balance has been difficult for Care3 to achieve. For Care3, there is one more success factor: fast onboarding of customers. Today, most enterprise health software requires a lengthy setup and onboarding process. Care3’s customers can create accounts and onboard staff online with no long onboarding timelines or setup fees. This will be a major part of company’s ability to scale growth and provide better services to the customers, patients, and families. David’s Future Plan for Care3 Collaborative care has emerged as a leading model for managing patients outside of health facilities, but the technology hasn’t kept pace. “Once care can be delivered
|September 2017|
David S. Williams III, Founder & CEO
using the ‘gold standard’ for technology, it will generate efficiencies and data, and we will see better outcomes at lower cost,” explains David. Care3 is leading this movement for improving community-based care by enabling better operational efficiency and family engagement for interdisciplinary teams. The business case will be clear with the major investments taking place in technology leading to reduced overall costs of care for the most needy and expensive populations. As Care3 grows, the team must balance the rigid compliance and regulatory requirements of its enterprise partners with the beauty and delight consumers demand while using mobile apps. Care3 is proving its hypothesis that when providers and consumers collaborate on care, it increases the probability that patients will live longer and at their highest possible level. “Our clients will benefit from our balanced approach because they have to deliver the same to their patients. For too long, healthcare has focused on the needs of professionals and billing requirements and not the satisfaction of patients and their families. Care3 makes achieving both possible so that everyone can achieve their collective goal: patients living longer and better lives,” concluded David.
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Exclusive
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hink about all the inefficiencies in your daily life; traffic jams, snail mails, long queues, and so on. These inadequacies though annoying are not a matter of life and death. Such is not the case in healthcare. The requirement for efficiency in healthcare is distinct and the potential for applied sciences especially computerization is enormous. Healthcare has a big data opportunity opposed to a big data problem, thanks to artificial intelligence. Initially, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was introduced as a notion to imitate human brain and explore the realworld problems with a wholesome approach. Researchers all around the world are thrilled about the upcoming development of technologies which will help in facilitating the mankind to deliver outside their stature. The implementation of AI in healthcare is escalating and deciphering a variety of issues for patients, hospital and healthcare industries. Take a closer look at how AI is resolving problems and what's on the horizon for the industry.
Maintaining Health One of the major advantages of AI is the ability to assist people in staying healthy. Mobile applications are already encouraging instilment of healthy habits in individuals and assisting in the proactive management of a healthier lifestyle. It also increases the ability of healthcare professionals in understanding the needs of the people they serve and enables them to provide a better direction and assistance for maintaining health. Furthermore, AI chatbots are being used in addressing cases like helping customers select a benefit plan, providing customer service and guiding consumers to resources. Though it is early in the espousal of AI chatbots, indicators of requisite and fulfillment are encouraging. “Chat-bots will continue to get more intelligent over time, thanks to AI and machine learning techniques that will make them
ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
A Game Changer for Healthcare 20
|September 2017|
very efficient, and of course, more timely than a human can ever be,” says Khal Rai, an AI expert at SRS Health.
Early Detection Cerebrovascular Accident or Stroke, for a maximum number of times is caused by blockage in the supply of oxygen and blood to the brain. However due to the lack of detection of early symptoms, very few patients are able to receive timely treatment. Other conditions like Cancer and Alzheimer’s face similar consequences. The utilization of AI is enabling review and analysis of lab reports much faster and with better accuracy. Recently developed AI software at Houston, Texas claims to detect cancer risk 30 times faster than any doctor and with 99 percent accuracy. Moreover, researchers are training AI to detect Tuberculosis on chest X-Rays which could help in screening and evaluation in TBsusceptible zones which lack access to radiologists. The increase of wearable and other medical devices used in accordance with AI are also assisting in detecting early-stage heart diseases and enabling doctors to monitor potentially life threatening events at an early and treatable stage.
Medical Diagnosis Numerous healthcare organizations are applying cognitive technology to unlock enormous amounts of data and promote diagnosis. The ability to store more medical information containing journals, treatments and symptoms is much faster than any human competency. Earlier, diagnostic programs regarding disease specific features were written using predefined assumptions. Now with the development of AI, a wider variety of conditions and diseases can be easily handled. AI is particularly used to improve imaging modalities which include reading X-Rays, CT scans and doubtful nodules and lesions in cancer patients. This technology combines machine learning and neuroscience to generate powerful learning algorithms into a neural network which mimics a human brain.
Treatment Beyond scanning records, AI can help take a more comprehensive approach towards disease management, assist in better coordination of healthcare programs and help patients in managing their long-term treatment plans. Using AI, doctors are able to gather collective information on patient’s visits and analyze which treatment works best for them.
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For more than 30 years, robots have been used in medicine. From simple laboratory robots to highly advanced surgical robots that can assist a human surgeon or execute it themselves. Furthermore, they are used in labs and healthcare organizations for repetitive tasks and in support of those with long-term conditions.
Customer Service Healthcare providers are using healthcare bots to tackle challenges in this area of medicine. Patients can now interact with AI through phones, or a website for all their medical queries and requests. Virtual assistants are replacing humans in booking appointments, scheduling visits, medication and even billing requirements. They offer 24/7 medical assistance and improve service for any basic requests. Moreover it leads to the decrease in administrative costs for healthcare providers.
End-of-Life Care Life today is much longer than the previous generations, and we are dying in a different and slower fashion from conditions like dementia and osteoporosis. It is also a phase of life which is often lonely. Robots have the potential to modernize the end of life care and help people in remaining independent for longer periods of time and reducing the need for hospitalization and care homes. Eventually, all of us will be a patient. We have family and friends who will also be patients. Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence is about improving the lives of individuals so that all the acquired data from lab tests, genomics and so on, can be analyzed and used in real time for the highest quality and most efficient delivery of healthcare needs.
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I
mpetuous exchange of large amount of information is crucial to the delivery of best healthcare solution on all levels of the healthcare delivery system—the patient, the care team, the healthcare organization, and the encompassing political-economic environment.To integrate these critical information streams, organizations need training/education, decision-support, information management, and communications tools. Healthcare Information Integration Infrastructure Solutions (Hi3 Solutions) is leading healthcare information domain in Los Angeles, California. Hi3 provides HIT products, education, and consulting services that enable its clients to engage effectively in health information exchange, health data integration, and healthcare quality measurement required to establish and comply with evidence-based best practices in healthcare. Hi3 Solutions accelerates the widespread adoption and compliance with emerging HIT standards by offering the information integration infrastructure necessary to enable the use of health information exchange standards, meaningful healthcare quality and performance measures, and standardized clinical decision support capabilities. In addition to Hi3’s extensive education and consulting practices, they also bring software solutions to market that are a value-add overall to the existing market leader capabilities. The organization has partnerships with leading interface engine vendors that enable them to deploy their product with added capabilities related to transaction validation, structural transformation, vocabulary translation, and data content integration. They have an Integrated Data Repository (IDR) logical data model derived from the Health Level Seven Reference Information Model (RIM). The IDR has been implemented in a variety of relational
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database management systems, including Oracle, SQL Server, and Teradata. The primary use of the IDR is to serve as an Operational Data Store and function as the single source of truth for data warehousing and business intelligence. It also functions as an intermediate normalizing data store to facilitate transaction transformation, enrichment, and semantic harmonization. About the Pioneer behind This Leading Enterprise AbdulMalik Shakir, Co-founder, President & Chief Informatics Scientist of Hi3 solutions, has an extensive experience of over 40 years in the field of healthcare informatics. He has witnessed the multiple advances in information management technologies including the automation of administrative processes, electronic exchange of healthcare information, and the digitizing of health information in electronic medical record systems. His lifetime pursuit is the establishment and effective use of evidence-based medical practice and policies. He is particularly interested in enabling translational research enabling the discovery and deployment of the greatest efficacies in medical interventions and preventive care. AbdulMalik asserts, “The next revolution in healthcare is the standardization and normalization of clinical data to allow meaningful aggregation of data across domains to enable data mining and clinical decision support.” The Most Innovative Solutions which are Methodically Beneficial for the Clients The mission of Hi3 Solutions is to support continuous improvements in the healthcare outcomes by providing software solutions and professional services that enable their clients to discover, share, and measure compliance with evidence-based best practices in medicine. The company continues to work with clients and industry
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“ “ groups to develop common data element definitions, establish effective health information exchange standards, and facilitate the meaningful acquisition, assimilation, and application of healthcare data. The largest segment of their business is in the United States, but they have been privileged to work with nations throughout the world including Canada, Israel, Switzerland, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya. The strength of Hi3 is in the diversity of their client base and the experience they have gained as a result. AbdulMalik acclaims, “Our clients are benefited from their proven methodologies and they also get profit from their unique problem space in which to apply their knowledge and skills. Continuous learning and the constant quest for information quality and reuse are in the DNA of each of us at Hi3 Solutions.” He added further, “Products we are working to bring to market include pre-defined clinical decision support data marts focused on publically defined clinical and administration performance measures, such as those defined by ONC, JCAHO, and NCQA. The Hi3 data marts will be fed via ETL processes from the HI3 IDR. We also intend to collaborate with providers of software solutions providing clinical dashboards and scorecards to make use of our standards-based clinical decision support infrastructure.” Key Elements of Hi3 towards Success Hi3 believes their foundational strength is the experience and knowledge that they have accumulated in their 17+ years servicing the healthcare community. The company
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AbdulMalik Shakir Co-founder, President & Chief Informatics Scientist
has a lot to learn about also transitioning to be a product company. “We are a learning organization; we will continue to pivot, learn, and pivot again until we obtain the right mixture of experience and expertise to grow beyond our excellent consulting and educational offerings to include IT product offerings as well,” says AbdulMalik. A key distinguishing feature of Hi3 Solutions is the inclusion of knowledge transfer to their clients in every consulting engagement, enabling them to become self-sufficient regarding the necessary skills and experience to address their healthcare information management challenges. “We never just give them a fish, we also teach them to fish.” Utmost Network Strength can make better Future The best part of Hi3 is the relationships that they have fostered over a long period of time. They have access to a large network of skilled individuals, many of them leaders in their field. The company’s openness, integrity, and transparency have fostered trust with their clients, vendor partners, and skilled resources that enable them to tackle problems of any magnitude, large or small. They are willing and able to subcontract when necessary and to be the sole or prime contractor when necessary. The organizations is the living proof of the adage “what goes around comes around.” Their professional network is their greatest strength, which helps them to make better future for their organization.
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T
he healthcare analytics industry is undergoing a revolutionary change from volume to value orientation. The sudden emphasis on an improved quality healthcare, reduced length-of-stay at hospitals, lower costs of healthcare, and fraud detection, are some of the primary requirements of the customers. Accessibility is a major concern for governments and organizations working in this field. Hence, a better quality healthcare facility accessible to each and every one is motivating the public and private organization to adopt analytics. Mile High Healthcare Analytics (MHHA) is one such company which provides a practical approach towards population-oriented healthcare data analysis to insurance plans, exchange issuers, ACOs, and risk-bearing provider groups. It is focused on helping clients optimize their government-regulated programs; Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and health insurance exchanges. It emphasizes on providing business process assessments, data quality and management support, and advanced analytics on risk adjustment operations, quality improvement and valuebased payment designs to help clients best manage patient care and ensure appropriate reimbursements. MHHA’s focus is on ensuring that the data collected by these initiatives is complete and totally compliant with all the nuances of risk adjustment and quality improvement systems. The Mastermind Behind the Success Richard Lieberman, the Chief Data Scientist at MHHA, has dedicated the overwhelming majority of his career to the design, development, and deployment of risk adjustment systems and methodologies. He began his risk adjustment foray in 1991 after becoming a consultant at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Over subsequent years, Richard has supported a variety of health plans, provider groups, and ACOs as they try to navigate the nuances and complexities of risk adjustment to integrate
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it into their operations. Richard along with his partners chose to build a business encompassing risk adjustment and quality because they saw that most plans and provider groups did not adequately grasp all the details for achieving adequate margins or remaining compliant with the government’s regulations. As a “data scientist” who writes algorithms and codes to traverse enormous amounts of data, Richard serves as an “artist-explorer”, navigating content and synthesizing findings. With 20 plus years of experience as an applications programmer, data warehouse designer, and business intelligence system developer, he is able to produce unique analytical work products as well as direct the work of other analysts and programmers. Exceptional Offerings Mile High Healthcare Analytics builds and deploys technology solutions for government-regulated health plans struggling with risk adjustment, quality measurement, and value-based payment operations. Mile High Healthcare Analytics has formed Cortex Data Analytics, the software division of Mile High, and has recently announced the release of an entire suite of software solutions. The Cortex-Data Warehouse is the central data repository as well as the “brain” of all software suite deliverables. It incorporates a vast array of clinical, financial, and socioeconomic data into a fully normalized data warehouse. The Cortex Data Warehouse is designed to collect, transform, and normalize EMR data, claims, pharmacy, lab, and population-level geo-specific data from multiple sources. Connected to the Cortex Data Warehouse are the following products:
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Cortex-Connect: Cortex-Connect is a smartphone application that serves as a connection between the member, their providers, and the health plan. It has realtime data flowing from the Cortex Data Warehouse which synthesize data transmitted by the health plan, provider EMRs, and social determinants impacting patient engagement. The app alerts the member of changes in their medical record, chronic conditions, pharmacy usage, and upcoming appointments. Cortex-Scope: It provides visibility across any healthcare data submission regardless of market. Cortex-Scope addresses the key driver of risk adjustment and quality measurement programs-the need for complete and accurate data. It is the system that allows everyone who is responsible for maintaining or overseeing the risk adjustment process to see the contribution that is being made to the final risk score at every step of the data pipeline. Cortex-Risk: Designed to identify and normalize claims, pharmacy, lab, and population-level data from multiple sources. After the data has been prepared Cortex-Risk applies multiple analytic models to identify clinically significant issues at either the member or the population level. Further it applies various risk-based revenue models giving a much more definitive view of member/population disease profile for better management, reporting, and financial view into the actual cost of care.
Richard Lieberman Chief Data Scientist
multiple quality programs across multiple quality measures for all lines of business. Cortex-QM provides comparisons between multiple entities within a given organization, comparison across multiple competitive organizations, and multiple comparisons between past, present, and future possibilities. Cortex-Focus: It helps government-regulated health plans and provider groups to increase visibility into the members that need attention. Cortex-Focus identifies members predicting their future possibility of an acute hospital admission or ER encounter, assessing their compliance with medication treatment routines and identifying undocumented morbidities that render the enterprise’s risk score to be inaccurate. Forthcoming Intends Mile High Healthcare Analytics has been successful because they have the extensiveness of knowledge to serve as an honest broker on behalf of government-regulated health plans and provider groups. “We don’t just deploy software and head off to the next prospect! We offer operational consulting services that health plans rely on to solve operational problems,” assures Richard. Clients appreciate the fact that they are policy wonks, data geeks, and operational experts all wrapped up in one company. MHHA works with clients to identify and then solve their operational pain points. Providing such service requires them to be very active and consistent with their performance which is valued by their clients.
Cortex-QM: It is designed to simulate, plan, and track
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Health Talk
Top 5 Best Practices that Defines a Successful Wellness Program
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ver recent years, more companies are incorporating wellness initiatives into their office environment. It’s mission critical in todays competitive markets, to attracting and retain the best talents. One crucial measurement is the engagement levels of everyone in the entire organisation. Presenteeism is at an all time high. People are not motivated by money alone, and wellness programs are part of the strategy to improve job satisfaction and productivity. However, only a few companies actually have comprehensive programs that produce better health outcomes among employees. As a result, improved engagement and performance at work, naturally follows since employees are healthier and happier. Unfortunately not all health and wellness programs are successful. The first one or two initiatives may gain traction, but two years on, and the participation rates decline. One main problem is that the participants themselves aren’t part of the creation. Their needs and concerns aren’t addressed so there’s less motivation for them to commit. So what do employees want? Here are 5 best practices that help create successful corporate wellbeing programs that gain true engagement.
Dr. Gary Tho Owner of Chiroprac c Works
1. Programs Are Doable, Accessible and Sustainable Imagine a wellness talk or fitness class is
About the Author Dr. Gary Tho is the owner of Chiroprac c Works, a Family Sports and Wellness clinic in Orchard Road, Singapore. He specialises in pain relief and preventa ve care and believes quality life is essen al for happiness, success and peak performance. Dr Gary is also the author of The PainFree Desk Warrior, Free yourself from aches and pains which is the defini ve guide for those stuck at their desk for more than 2 hours a day.
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starting in 15 minutes. Many employees easily dismiss it and think “I’d love to go, but I really need to get this work done.” Do programs run when employees are most busy? Are run after office hours? And if so, will people stay back for it? Is the wellness program a broad-based and holistic approach? Or is it just yoga classes, cooking demonstrations and nothing else? Is it easy for participants to learn? What looks easy when a trained chef prepares a healthy dinner in 20 minutes could take the average person a lot more time, energy and stress. Are steps provided for one to implement the new habit, accomplish their goal and sustain the success? A comprehensive wellness initiative needs to offer a variety of scheduled programs that are broken down into achievable, sustainable habits that create a valuable outcome. Equally important is that employees can choose what they are interested in, and easily fit into their schedule. 2. The Work Environment Is HealthConscious It’s no use having health and wellness programs if the physical and psychosocial environment within the office does’t support to healthy habits. Great office design that support wellbeing has been the trend, since Facebook and Google showed us how to do it. Creating creative spaces for smaller pod meetings, having standing desks and ensuring the cafeteria and vending machines around the office offer healthier food choices that can be easily seen are some of the simple ways to encourage good health. Ensuring regulated noise, inspiring music, good air quality and temperature and adequate lighting are also simple yet impactful features of a great office space. Allowing ‘down’ times, and work breaks that are encouraged, is essential. Most people don’t take breaks or chit|September 2017|
chat because of its negative perception. However this is absolutely necessary as it create real interaction and real friendships between co-workers that satisfy the basic human need for social connections. People need other people to love, trust and support them, in both business tasks as well as at a personal level. 3. Wellness Is Integrated Into The Company’s Structure Further to point 2 above, choosing a healthier lifestyle and doing well at work shouldn’t feel like a tug-of-war. I’ve heard of companies who pay for gym memberships for their staff, which is great. However, when an employee is working out in the gym, they get a phone call saying they need to get back in the office because of … (some reason). Therefore it’s important that a company establishes wellness programs that are valued and honored in every aspect of the organization. Otherwise, what’s the point? Another example includes the holy grail of “work-life balance”. If your company wants employees to be healthy and have better work-life integration, yet at the same time silently imposes that people must continue working beyond standard office hours, it really does not make any sense. One (partial) solution to this is introducing flexi-hours as well as remote working to allow people to get errands and family engagements done, as well as work from home, or a cafe instead of being physically in the office. It’s a partial solution because giving someone the ability to run errands and come to work later than usual is great, though it does not necessarily promote health, happiness or wellbeing. 4. Wellness Is Linked To Continued Support Programs When a company is genuinely concerned about their employees’ wellbeing, they will naturally ensure that any wellness initiative, game or workshop has some form of continuation. Employee assistance programs (EAP) are common for mental health concerns, however there needs to be other support systems in
place for other health concerns. In 2014, Apple’s Cupertino, Calif.-based headquarters boasted a medical onestop-shop “wellness center” offering in-house chiropractic care, dieticians and more. Collective Works, Singapore, the largest premium coworking space in Asia, now also houses an in-house chiropractor, specializing in pain relief, peak performance for both individual and corporate health. Gamification of corporate health programs usually run for a certain period of time. Workshops and classes may run for 8 weeks or throughout the entire year. Although participation rates are high initially, continued support programs are what sustains engagement, and creates the change both individuals and the CEO’s want to see. Engagement is what creates long term sustainable results. 5. Broad-based Approach Wellness Programs aren’t all about offering free gym membership or just having smoking cessation programs. Health is health - a complete state of physical, mental, and social wellbeing. Fitness is “the ability to perform work (sports, occupations and daily activities) satisfactorily”. Pilates is a great way to exercise and strengthen the core muscles, however it is not equivalent to health. A lot of people know they should quit smoking but doesn’t because they don’t realize how much damage it can do to their body. They may not have a strategy, nor enough motivation to make those changes. One method of offering voluntary health screenings while giving sound education and simple tasks from a variety of professionals is the key. Helping people realise that the company does care, that their colleagues do care, that they too should care about their own health is of the greatest importance. Digging deep, and creating a safe place to improve their lifestyle choices on multiple levels should be the basis of every corporate wellbeing initiative.
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The Apollo World of Care Assuring. Advanced. Accessible WHEN IT COMES TO THE HEART TRUST APOLLO www.apollohospitals.com
S
cribe empowers healthcare providers in creating and managing medical records, and more than 50,000 healthcare professionals use Scribe. Scribe is at the point in healthcare where the “rubber meets the road.” It’s where the patient sees the provider and a wealth of important and useful data is collected. Scribe was created with doctors, practice managers and administrators to mold the latest technology and services to the way providers work. The company’s cloud-enabled platform returns flexibility, control, and productivity to healthcare providers. It restores physician productivity through simplified and easy to use apps and services. With an unrivaled dedication to supporting its clients, Scribe gives its users more time to focus on patients while meeting regulatory requirements and improve back-office productivity. Its responsive approach to meet challenges gives providers opportunity for improved patient care and practice profitability. In the ancient world, scribes were trusted professional assistants and advisors. Like them, the organization supports and advises, so healthcare providers are free to focus on what matters the most. The Man behind the Mission of Simplifying Healthcare Mark D. Boyce is the CEO and President of Scribe. Scribe’s mission of simplifying healthcare through innovative technologies evolved from entrepreneur Mark’s past success in the management of organizations large and small. From founding his own Internet Company to helping organizations get online in the early days of the Internet to developing the winning dot.com strategy that led to
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yesmail.com’s successful IPO and subsequent $770 million acquisition, Mark has always been at the forefront of strategic thinking. He has over 20 years of management experience in finance, operations, marketing and technology with companies such as IBM where he helped to start the IBM PC division and later at Anixter where he helped formulate the strategy that fueled their growth from a $500 million company to $1.5 billion Company. Mark holds a B.A. in Economics and Computer Science from Colgate University and an M.B.A. from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School. He is also currently the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Dean College in Franklin, MA. When it’s All about Getting It Right the First Time Scribe believes that the key to efficiently collecting and analyzing data in healthcare is all about getting it right the first time. That is precisely why Scribe designed the cloudenabled platform that can assist physicians in capturing, creating, and managing appropriate healthcare information—right from the first time a patient visits a doctor. Scribe believes that the healthcare providers need to focus on their patients and medical care, and not on the paperwork and medical documentation. When a doctor tends to a patient that is when the rubber meets the road. If the collection of the patient encounter is not performed properly the rest of the documentation process doesn’t work efficiently. Path Breaking Solutions The Scribe team designed solutions that are customer-
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We enable healthcare providers to focus on what matters most patient care through our documentation solutions that improve pro tability and productivity
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centric, provide flexibility, control, and increased physician productivity for documentation, coding, billing, and analysis. In order to do all these, the company provides path-breaking solutions including: Scribe Create is a complete family of cloud-based solutions to create, manage, complete, and communicate clinical documentation; Scribe Mobile app is the most efficient way for providers to capture patient encounters both quickly and efficiently and then easily review, approve, and access patient documents anytime and anywhere; Scribe Monetize enhances coding and billing workflows to ensure the documentation is optimized to clearly support the provider’s billing, resulting in fewer denials and increased revenue; Scribe Analyze improves efficiencies with innovative tools that use the Next Generation of data and information management technologies to help providers better understand their productivity and profitability status. It’s All about Tackling Turbulent Weather and Cruising Comfortably
Mark D. Boyce CEO and President
Scribe expects to see explosive growth for technology driven services that will take the pain out of capturing, communicating, and analyzing healthcare information. Scribe’s team is focused on solutions, not only products and knows how to work effectively and efficiently in mixed technology environments. Their vast experiences in making the cost-effective solution for the clients are benefiting its clients. Additionally, the company is not afraid to innovate and to bring solutions that can be easily understood, driven by technology, and supported by high-quality services. People are the Best Asset Scribe believes that its people are the best asset for them, followed by their innovative technology. The organization doesn’t stand still. Scribe works to continually be “fleetfooted” and stay informed and ahead of the industry in general & its customers in particular. It has to be flexible to rapidly adapt to changing needs and find technical solutions to healthcare’s biggest challenges to keep costs down and to improve the quality of care.
Sometimes Scribe has been the “pioneer” – getting out ahead of the market. The company constantly suggests “not to pave over the cow path” – don’t do things the same way just because it’s easy. Scribe has created some new paths, and now people are following the company to some exciting new areas and solutions to reduce their pain significantly.
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Medical Pioneer
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merican Medicine is in an unprecedented crisis. Doctors are not happy. A recent study by the AMA shows that physicians are spending twice as much time with their Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) as they are in “direct clinical face-time” with their patients. The study also revealed widespread career dissatisfaction among physicians with 54% reporting “physician burnout.” Doctors are wasting hours a day struggling with their computers to document medicine and provide care to patients with whom they spend less time every day. Patients feel their doctor is more concerned with data on the computer than listening to their problems and caring for their needs. Meanwhile health care costs are climbing while providers are getting progressively more frustrated at playing data entry clerks.
Remarkably, computers were first introduced to the examination room precisely to resolve the chaos that clinicians faced with paper. Initially, computers promised to make documentation easier and more effective. Instead, EHRs severely worsened an admittedly a bad situation. What is even stranger is that in all other fields of endeavor except medicine, information technology has been highly successful in streamlining paperwork and bureaucratic congestion. Why has this not happened in healthcare? One strange explanation propounded many in the IT field is that doctors are “computer-phobic,” that physicians fear technology and lack the adequate technical skills to handle computers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Physicians are highly-trained in the sciences and have used every new technology appearing in the medical field effectively for at least a hundred years. Other pundits argue that physicians are reticent to change and are stuck in their ways. That’s not true either. Doctors are more likely to embrace new approaches than any other profession. The answer must be looked for within the charting software itself. Yet, EHR software precisely replicates the paper charting methodology used for over a century. Maybe that’s the problem. Innovation has not challenged entrenched beliefs in the old paper method of charting. The old paper paradigm remains bound to the past: an electronic
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typewriter regurgitating text inside a dead record. The problem seems to be not with the computer but with the original paper record. Charting on paper never worked well even before the first computer ever saw the light of day in a doctor’s office. Indeed, the charting paradigm had been malfunctioning for at least thirty years, ever since the old three-by-five cards, used for more than a century to remind clinicians of the patient conditions, were replaced by reams paperwork as a response to the medical malpractice litigation beginning in the sixties. Then, with stacks of medical paper records filed and stacked up to the ceiling, third-party payers, particularly the government, began to use this paper as criteria for denial of payment for services rendered. So what was written on the medical record became more important than what was done. And no one questioned the paper approach. As lawyers put it, “res ipsa loquitor” (the thing speaks for itself), meaning: “if it’s not written, it it’s not done!”. Sadly, today’s physician can earn more by spending five minutes with the patient and twenty minutes with the chart, than by spending twenty minutes with the patient and five minutes with the chart. Clearly, there is something profoundly wrong with this charting approach. So why did medical software developers maintained the old charting paradigm in their EHRs instead of giving careful thought to take advantage of the unique power of the computer to handle routines better than humans can? The answer is simple. No one wanted to challenge physicians’ entrenched beliefs that the current way of charting is the only valid approach. Consequently, programmers worked on the wrong premise from the start and, by porting it to the computer, they made it far worse. The argument was simple: “It had always been done this way.” Except it wasn’t. Charting the essence of a clinical visit on a threeby-five-card, as used by our forebears, is not the same as a computer spitting out tons if complex computer codes to explain a clinical encounter only because computers cannot handle human language. Indeed, after the initial CPT and ICD-9 codes developed by
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the AMA and the World Health Organization to describe acceptable treatments and diagnoses, an array of new codes appeared on the scene: G-Codes, F-Codes, RxNorm codes, LOINC Codes, SNOMED codes, the list seems endless. These codes created havoc for busy practitioners who have turned into data-entry clerks of a sort, wasting time and creating stress and confusion, which can lead to clinical errors. SNOMED in particular is meant to describe the entire medical exchange: the patient symptoms, the clinical findings, the diagnoses and all the treatments in “computerese” rather than English, and drives doctors completely crazy in the process. Even a new medical syndrome is being recognized as affecting healthcare providers called the “Alert Fatigue Syndrome.” Now, the law of the land is that doctors are to search all these codes to transmit clinical information to their peers. No one stopped this insanity and realized that we had the basics wrong. So then how should busy clinicians document their clinical exchanges if not the way they were taught for the last two hundred years? We, at Praxis Electronic Medical Records, believe the answer is for the computer to help the providers think and express themselves using their own thoughts and words by retrieving them just in time from an artificial intelligence database so as to learn from their own past encounters of similar patients. As we like to say: “It’s faster, easier, and better to do what you wrote than to write what you did.” Charting backwards? You bet! This is not what physicians were taught to do, but then again, our forebears did not have computers to assist them in the examining room, nor reams of data to fill out, nor attorneys and third party payers to deal with. They did not need to chart up a storm to be able practice medicine. The chart then becomes, not a silly compilation of what is being observed over and over again, but an actual living checklist that ensures than nothing is forgotten or overlooked at the point of care, that all the questions are being asked, all the relevant findings and studies are being evaluated, and yes, it also charts instantly so saves about two hours a day. It seems that doctors had the basics wrong from the start. If the goal is to practice higher quality medicine by taking better care of patients, paperwork should not get in the way. On the contrary, documentation should assist the thought process, guide it along, and not hinder it. The computer can do that if it is programmed appropriately. The concept processing solution works. It has been used for several years. Praxis EMR is consistently rated number one in physician user satisfaction studies performed by the largest medical organizations today, including the American Academy of Family Physicians the American College of Physicians, yet few know why Praxis scores so highly. Indeed, this new charting approach goes against the grain. It fights against entrenched beliefs about the nature of documenting medicine. Often for a major change to take place two things are needed. Technology must represent disruptive innovation, and there has to be a lot of pain with the way things had been done up to that point. The latter is already here among physicians. Doctors today must heal themselves.
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implicity Health Systems (SHS) was founded by three tech savvy entrepreneurs during 2009 in response to the federal government’s Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), which was a call for the advancement of healthcare technology. Recognizing that the direction taken by many IT solutions within healthcare was failing to deliver the benefits normally associate with technology – efficiency, quality, and cost – has allowed the team to uniquely position their technology platform. Thus, SHS is quickly establishing itself as the leader in next generation interoperability solutions for the healthcare industry. The company’s lead offering, the docflock platform, utilizes modern technologies to normalize and index data to enable content exchange and workflow continuity. Through the docflock platform, SHS is focused on solving some of the biggest problems within healthcare today. This goes well beyond IT applications, addressing the core mission of improving patient health outcomes. The suite of products evidence themselves in the simplification of complex workflows, delivering back-end infrastructure to be leveraged in the pursuit of truly open, rules-based information and patient data sharing. While docflock has been used as a replacement for electronic fax and similar technology, the true power of the platform is with the synchronization of content. Additionally, by embracing the critical role that the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) plays in healthcare, the team has developed novel communication solutions, which facilitate healthcare cooperation.
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SHS’ Voyage towards Success In 2010, Simplicity launched its first solution for its customers. This early effort sought to provide healthcare organizations with a simple tool by which their legacy paper-based medical charts could be made usable within an electronic health records system. In 2012, Simplicity Health Systems launched its lead product, docflock, to address the issues of connectivity resulting from the heterogeneous and fragmented approach taken by the EMR/EHR manufacturers, Health Information Exchanges (HIE), and Health IT Services Companies. In 2014, the founders of the company made a crucial decision to go “all in” on building a suite of docflock products. As the products took shape, Simplicity gave it the name docflock. The name docflock was derived from the murmurations of large flocks of birds, particularly the starling flocks outside of Rome. These murmurations contained the attributes of a scale free dynamic network. Each actor in such a dynamic network has the autonomy of individual movement, it stays attached to the network based off the value that that network provides. This is the same mathematical formula used by Google at its inception within the burgeoning Internet market. The challenge for these docflock products was the lack of a market-defined vernacular for the solutions provided. SHS set out to create a new axis for healthcare IT communication that was, part clinical documentation system (EHR), part information sharing and distribution (HIE), and part financial (performance) management system (PM). The main goal of the team was to create a cloud based workflow centric communication network that would simplify the
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simple reveals clarity
“ Chad Zerangue Founder & President
communication and workflow between each step within the distributed care continuum. An Ardent Business Leader Chad Zerangue, Founder and President of Simplicity Health Systems, has led the team since SHS’ inception in 2009. Chad’s vision to improve patient care through a seamless flow of information within a digital health information infrastructure is paving the road to positive change in the overall management of healthcare today. Prior to Simplicity Health Systems, Chad specialized in enterprise content management and workflow system integration. There are no shortcuts to building loyalty. We focus on customer groups for which we can bring true value. We deliver upon our promises. We do what is right for our customers – first – believing that this will benefit the company in the future. – Says Chad. Leaving No Stones Unturned Simplicity Health Systems’s biggest challenge is not technology, it is cutting through the market clutter and noise to communicate the brand’s story effectively. Healthcare is increasingly complex and ever-changing, which creates a whirlwind of activity and a sense of lost control. To address this need / opportunity, SHS has become disciplined at focusing on what matters most to customers.
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This is done by understanding their true needs, which takes commitment. The team has also narrowed their focus to markets where inter-organization communication is fundamental to success. This has not been a straight line journey. SHS has delivered solutions for a broad range of customers, but as the company has matured, the value in specialization has been realized. SHS is confident that, long-term, this approach will ensure deep customer partnerships and sustainable excellence. – Asserts Chad. Future Perspectives Simplicity Health Systems is readying the launch of docflock, Generation II. docflock Gen II is the evolution of Health Information as Content, specifically addressing the reality that the challenges of healthcare technology go beyond the issues of interoperability between EHRs. The goal with Gen. II is to add meaning and intelligence and to contextualize data. Simplicity Health Systems’ future plans focus on continuing to break down the systemic barriers to content sharing and cooperation in the care of patients. Growth will compound over the next several years. SHS is on track to triple revenue for the second straight year, with forecasts that continue this trajectory. SHS’ team is also looking to capture 30%+ share of market within the markets and customer segments targeted by the end of 2018.
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A PERSONAL TOUCH TO YOUR BETTER TOMORROW www.jehangirhospital.com