The growth of the e-health industry is spurring a symbiotic data management movement, as evidenced by the recent growth of health IT startups.
The healthcare industry has been undergoing a massive operational transformation which requires the move to electronic records, digital patient engagement methods such as online portals, health information exchanges and electronic prescribing, technology interoperability, significant security overlays and the use of technology to improve clinical processes across the board.
The goal? Optimized and efficient healthcare delivery that cuts costs for providers and patients alike—and which contribute to better health outcomes. But, the problem is that many providers are in need of accompanying data management strategies in order to get there. Converting everything to digital data leads to immense complexity that can result in an operational quagmire if not addressed.
An increasing number of startups are wading into the market to fill the need with domain-specific IT expertise. Two good examples are SwiftPayMD, which specializes in medical billing, and Toledo, Ohio-based CeutiCare, which supplies digital pharmaceutical expertise at the point of care.
SwiftPayMD has developed mobile physician charge-capture apps, and provides cloud-based medical billing software that’s more flexible and automated than traditional, manual, data-entry-based medical billing approaches, which helps eliminate errors and shorten time-to-invoice. Office staff and the physicians themselves can use mobile devices to dictate, upload and submit charges as services are being provided.
This “fills a critical gap between the hospital point of care and the physician’s back office, eliminating lost charges and converting accounts receivable to cash more quickly. The end result is more revenue and cash flow for the physician practice,” said David LaBorde, MD and CEO/founder of Iconic Data, the parent organization for SwiftPayMD, speaking to Health Data Management.
CeutiCare meanwhile applies software to chronic care management for diabetes, cholesterol and blood pressure management, asthma, chronic kidney and cardiovascular disease, and non-narcotic pain management. Working collaboratively with patients' primary care physicians (PCPs), CeutiCare equips clinical pharmacists in the office with the proprietary CeutiCare ICGTM system, which uses disease-state algorithms to guide the clinician toward optimal patient specific medications.
It’s a concerted effort: The pharmacist monitors the patients on an ongoing basis and, during scheduled office visits, evaluates the patient and discusses medication needs with the physician. CeutiCare provides education to the patient, encouraging lifestyle changes, and then the software recommends medication adjustments to achieve better outcomes.
Lately, the company has seen the opportunity for a much broader Implementation of its wares.
“We are finding success with self-insured entities, third-party administrators, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacist organizations and pharmacist networks, as well as private insurers,” Ken Bachmann, vice president of ‘pharmaco informatics’ at CeutiCare, told HDM. We’ve developed clinical intervention models and financial models for each of those lines.”
Edited by Rory J. Thompson