Intiva Health is the first truly integrated career platform for healthcare professionals. It redefines the medical credentialing process by making it faster, more efficient and more secure.
Elevator pitch
Intiva Health provides healthcare professionals with a single place to manage their credentials,continuing education, new job opportunities, secure messaging needs and more. It is built on the Hashgraph digital ledger platform, which means it is faster, more secure, and more error proof than blockchain.
Founders’ story
Intiva Health was founded in 2006 as a staffing agency for surgical services and emergency rooms. Today the Austin, Texas, company it has reinvented itself as a digital health startup featuring a next generation blockchain technology that cuts the time it takes for the medical credentialing process from months to seconds, improves HIPPA compliance,and makes document tampering or theft almost impossible.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Intiva Health focuses its marketing and PR efforts on licensed medical professionals (LMPs), practice managers, and the facilities where they work including medical groups, hospitals and professional associations.The company launched a new brand awareness campaign in March 2018 that includedthe introduction of the Intiva Token, a new cryptocurrency that LMPs can use to purchase continuing education classes, cyber insurance and other services.
Intiva is also partnering with the National Osteoporosis Foundation to test the advantages of using the Intiva Token for charitable donations.
Market opportunity
The Intiva Health Platform automates the burdensome tasks of credential and licensure management, continuing education, and discovering job opportunities for healthcare professionals. Intiva Health’s new ReadyDoc™credential verification solution, built on top of the Hashgraph distributed ledger technology, disrupts the existing broken, slow, and error-prone healthcare credentialing system, which today can take weeks or months to verify credentials, and is subject to tampering.
Intiva believes that ReadyDoc can replace the current processes of credentialing and primary source verification by storing documents and credentials in a Hashgraph-based distributed ledger. Providers and facilities can obtain information that is pre-verified, securely stored, and readily available, creating an ongoing, self-auditing verification of provider work history and clinical reputation.
ReadyDoc will act fluidly between health systems and facilities across the U.S., allowing organizations to instantly verify work history and clinical reputations. In the event of an emergency like the Houston hurricane, facilities will be able staff up by vetting the credentials of qualified providers instantly. ReadyDoc eliminates redundancy and the need for third party verification organizations, letting medical professionals get to work sooner.
Who are your competitors?
We believe that Intiva Health is the first integrative platform to manage healthcare career information from one seamless dashboard. It is certainly the first to use the Hashgraph digital ledger technology and offer a cryptocurrency utility token. However, Doximity also offers a career management application for medical professionals.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates Intiva Health?
Intiva Health can replace the current processes of credentialing and primary source verification by storing documents and credentials in a Hashgraph-based distributed ledger. Providers and facilities can obtain information that is pre-verified, securely stored, and readily available, creating an ongoing,self-auditing verification of provider work history and clinical reputation.
VigiLanz and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center announces a collaboration that leverages Cincinnati Children’s research on pediatric nephrotoxic kidney injury and VigiLanz’s capabilities to commercialize a solution for Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) in pediatric patients. Dubbed NINJA, or Nephrotoxic Injury Negated by Just-in-time Action, the solution enables real-time identification and monitoring of patients at risk for AKI due to exposure to nephrotoxic drugs.
Dr. Stuart L. Goldstein
“Pediatric acute kidney injury is a serious problem that traditionally could not be identified in real-time, which impacted our ability to identify the patients who most needed treatment,” stated Dr. Stuart L. Goldstein, MD, FAAP, FNKF, Director of the Center for Acute Care Nephrology and primary researcher on NINJA. “By partnering with VigiLanz, Cincinnati Children’s is applying our unprecedented research to a commercially-available solution that accurately characterizes pediatric AKI epidemiology, reducing AKI and improving patient outcomes.”
Commercially available to hospitals and health systems focused on mitigating pediatric AKI, NINJA automates a time-consuming manual screening process that includes evaluating patients for exposure to 57 nephrotoxic medications, imaging contrast dye, and recent renal testing. For medications, manual screening is limited to the last 24 hours, while the contrast dye evaluation requires reviewing records for the previous seven days to determine if it was received by the patient.
Leveraging NINJA algorithms built into VigiLanz rules, an AKI monitoring dashboard lists all patients that meet the NINJA exposure criteria, as well as the criteria that put the patient in the at-risk category. These criteria include medication exposure, serum creatinine data and patient history of AKI. When patients meet at-risk criteria, they are placed on the monitoring list in real time, where they remain until 48 hours after their risk has passed.
The platform also features metric outputs that can be customized with respect to service lines and time periods, while robust reporting tools provide the ability to trend conditions over time via automated run charts. It also enables automatic and customizable data extraction for all metric elements, including inpatient census by location or service line.
By B.J. Boyle, vice president of product management, PointClickCare.
B.J. Boyle
Interoperability, as it was envisioned, should be built on transparency and connectivity, allowing a patient’s critical health information to be easily accessible, regardless of where treatment is being administered. By creating an infrastructure that supports the sharing of patient data along the care continuum, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities (SNF) and long-term post-acute care (LTPAC) facilities can offer the best care possible. As a result, organizations that participate in interoperability best practices are positioned to become preferred providers.
Unfortunately, interoperability is still a work in progress for many organizations. While more than 95 percent of hospitals and 90 percent of office-based physicians are now utilizing electronic health record (EHR) platforms, many struggle with — or have reservations around — sharing information outside of their facility. As such, silos represent a great barrier to realizing a fully implemented state of interoperability.
The current data gap can drastically impact care. For example, a patient experiences a serious medical incident — such as a fall or stroke — and arrives at the hospital where staff may not have access to existing patient data which could inform the best delivery of care. Or perhaps they’re able to access that data, but not right away. Care is now delayed, which can be additionally concerning depending on the time-sensitivity of the patient’s condition.
Taking this example a step further, let’s explore what happens after care at the hospital has concluded. The patient requires rehabilitation, and a continuation of care document (CCD) is issued to a post-acute care facility. From there, the patient’s information is transferred by less-than-foolproof methods such as fax, for example. A glitch as simple as a jammed paper feed could prevent critical information from reaching the appropriate caregiver.
As value-based care and payment-care models are moving toward the forefront, blind handoffs of patient information are no longer viable, as they drastically increase the financial risks hospitals and payer groups are subject to — not to mention the clear detriment the system has on delivery of care.
Closing the gap
The larger question is how does the industry get from Point A to Point B? The easy answer is to liberate the data through a cloud-based infrastructure that supports an efficient, easy-to-access data exchange between all caregivers. An integrated solution would connect stakeholders across the care continuum, providing accurate insights when needed, eliminating data silos between care partners, and enabling more confident decision-making.
These systems would promote:
Optimized transitions: Data needs to travel with the patient — or before movement — discretely across all systems.
Patient visibility: Data should reflect the most current ADT information, identifying and sharing where a patient is and from where they’ve been discharged.
Central view of LTPAC patients: This facility-agnostic feature should offer automated updates of a patient’s functional progress.
Ongoing status and monitoring: Maintaining continued care is facilitated through alerts and notifications to caregivers regarding any change to their status or well-being and meaningful feedback on care pathway progress.
Facility performance: Beyond understanding a patient’s status, it’s also helpful to understand how facilities in and out of their PPN have performed.
Overcoming concerns
The concept of interoperability, in some ways, seems contradictory to traditional best practices. Healthcare organizations are charged with protecting patient data at all costs, and the idea of sharing data in a way that opens access to a wider group of stakeholders could give pause. Regulatory infractions for data loss in the healthcare industry can be steep, and the number of well-publicized data breaches in recent years reinforces how valuable health records are to both the organizations who keep them and those who try to steal them.
So, it should go without saying that an EHR “superhighway” must be developed with security in its DNA, taking stringent regulatory requirements into account. The good news is that the newest breed of information exchange platforms is being built with security roles in mind, drastically reducing the possibility of data loss.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, was enacted in the United States in 1996. The legislation creates data security and privacy requirements for safeguarding medical information. In recent years, HIPAA compliance has become a hot button issue for software developers in the healthcare space, as a number of high profile data breaches compromised millions of patient records across the country.
If you’re developing an eHealth or mobile health app, it is vital that you determine whether your software could be subject to the requirements of HIPAA for medical software applications. Failure to do so could subject you to thousands or even millions of dollars of liability if the use of your application results in an unauthorized disclosure of health information that is protected under HIPAA. Here’s how to tell whether HIPAA applies to you, and how to know if your software is HIPAA compliant.
Does HIPAA apply to me?
Before you start worrying about compliance with the security and privacy requirements of HIPAA, you should determine whether they can be applied to you and your organization. Both the HIPAA privacy rule and the HIPAA security rule apply to all covered entities under HIPAA, such as health plans, healthcare clearinghouses and healthcare providers. The website for Centers Medicade & Medicaid Service offers a Covered Entity Guidance Tool that can help you determine whether your organization is a covered entity.
HIPAA was expanded in 2009 with the introduction of the HITECH Act and again in 2013 with the HIPAA omnibus rule which clarified the responsibilities of business associates of covered entities when it comes to managing privacy and security of patient records. Further guidance was issued in 2016 indicating that cloud service providers would also be covered by the HIPAA privacy, security and breach notification rules.
Software developers in the healthcare space need to tread carefully here – the original regulations of HIPAA that deal with covered entities probably won’t apply to most organizations creating eHealth or mobile health products, but if your app will manage protected health information and share it with any covered entities, such as health plans or doctors, then HIPAA applies to you and you must comply.
If your software collects protected health information from patients but does not share it with a doctor or another covered entity at any point, the HIPAA rules won’t apply to you and you don’t need to worry about compliance.
Required safeguards for software HIPAA compliance
The available data indicates that while theft of computing hardware was the primary cause of healthcare data breaches in 2017, the greatest vulnerability that was exploited was health IT networks. For software developers, the HIPAA security rule is the most likely potential source of compliance issues. The rule mandates three types of safeguards that protect patient data – administrative, physical, and technical. In creating these safeguards, software developers must establish a secure application where authorized personnel have access to the required patient information while unauthorized persons do not. Patient information must also be protected from alteration or destruction.
Administrative safeguards ensure that software administrators who make have access to the data are acting responsibly. If your software stores medical data, anyone with access to that data must be authorized and trained on the ethical and legal requirements of that access. Administrative safeguards include:
Security management process
Security personnel
Information access management
Workforce training and management
Evaluation
Physical safeguards help to mitigate data breaches by ensuring that only authorized users can access the facilities and machines where protected health information is stored. Physical safeguards include managed policies for:
Facility access and control
Workstation and device security
Technical safeguards present the greatest challenge for software developers building HIPAA-compliant products, as software bugs represent the best opportunity for data attacks against your organization. HIPAA does not detail exactly what firewalls, anti-malware devices or encryption tools should be used to secure your software against a data breach, but it does indicate the need for several types of controls:
By Freddie Tubbs, communication manager, Academized.
Freddie Tubbs
So much has changed in terms of healthcare over the last decade. Technology has advanced and improved processes – what used to take hours can now take seconds. This means a lot both to the medical community and patients alike.
It seems that almost every day, there is a new technological breakthrough.
Here we examine eight of the very best.
Online interaction
So called portal technology. Such a simple idea but so groundbreaking in its application, it simply means both doctors and their patients having access to their medical records and can interact with each other. It gives physicians the benefit of being able to see a patient’s full history while the patient can challenge and question any aspect they feel is incorrect. Acting as a safety net, it helps both sides spot any problems before they arise and gives patients more power over the information that is held about them.
Genomes
Understanding genomes and sequencing has lead to impressive breakthroughs in the treatment of cancers. Patient testing has allowed specialists to tailor treatments entirely towards individual patients, making it much more effective than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Theresa Kelly, a healthcare writer at Stateofwriting and UKwritings, said: “In my opinion this is probably the most relevant breakthrough in healthcare over the last decade. Being able to tailor treatments towards the exact needs of individuals is breathtaking”.
Fighting waiting times
Advancements in technology mean that hospitals and clinics needing to track down specialists, beds and even equipment can now use an electronic kind of tracking device. This made the waiting times much shorter which inherently relieved the stress off both the patients and the medical staff. Things happen quickly and everything is much easier to track.
Safer remotely
Gone are the days when older or vulnerable people have to wear a large buzzer around their neck in case of a fall. Nowadays, with the advancement of voice activated technology, these people have much easier time with all aspects of their lives. As a bonus, everything can be monitored remotely, and medical staff can react faster.
Messaging the smart way
With the advent of smart messaging services healthcare providers can receive the results of urgent test, the moment the are concluded and act upon them fast, especially if there is a need for a surgery or examination.
“Removing some of the anxiety that can build up while waiting for a result is almost as important as having the tests done. Healthcare professionals also get frustrated by long delays so with this advancement, everyone wins”, so says David Evans, a Tech Blogger at Boomessays.
By Ken Perez, vice president of healthcare policy, Omnicell, Inc.
Ken Perez
As widely reported, based on exit polls, healthcare—not the economy—was the top issue on voters’ minds in the 2018 midterm elections. This was due in part to the nation’s sustained economic recovery of the past two years, resulting in the current healthy state of the economy in general. In addition, Democratic Party political advertising emphasized healthcare—61 percent of pro-Democratic House ads from Sept. 18 to Oct. 15 mentioned healthcare, compared with just 10 percent of all Democratic ads in 2016.
According to several analysts, the Democrats’ success in taking back the House was largely due to their riding the “train of healthcare,” with a large proportion of Democrats in Congress supporting the idea of single-payer healthcare as embodied in Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” bill that he introduced in Sept. 2017.
Many of the most likely Democratic candidates for president in 2020 have publicly expressed their support of Medicare for All. Five of the seven most likely Democratic candidates from the Senate cosponsored the Medicare for All bill: Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Some of the possible Democratic candidates from the House (e.g., Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas) and current and former Democratic governors (e.g., former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick) are also Medicare for All backers.
At this point, what is the plausibility of Medicare for All becoming law after the 2020 elections?
It would obviously require the election as president of Sanders or a Democratic candidate who supports a single-payer system. In addition, the Democrats would need to retain their new majority in the House, and they would also need to attain a 60-seat majority in the Senate to overcome a possible minority party filibuster by the Republicans, assuming their united opposition. Note that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in the Senate by a 60-39 vote, with not a single Republican senator voting for the bill.
A 60-seat Senate majority for the Democrats is not very likely to happen in 2020. Evidently, the Democrats will have 47 seats in the Senate once the 2018 midterm election results are finalized. The most aggressive current projection from a Democratic perspective regarding their Senate prospects in 2020 is a flipping of five seats presently held by Republicans (in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, and North Carolina), resulting in a 52-seat majority. However, even that outcome would be eight seats short of the 60 needed. Thus, it appears that it would take some combination of executive branch meltdown (e.g., impeachment proceedings) and retirements by multiple Republican senators during the next two years in order for voters to flip an additional seven seats in the Senate to the Democrats in 2020.
High-quality affordable healthcare is important to help eliminate healthcare disparities and works to improve the overall health of the population, whereas more expensive healthcare increase the disparity between health of the affluent and the less well-off.
The cost of healthcare varies dramatically around the world. Many health systems are struggling to update aging infrastructure and legacy technologies with already limited capital resources.
As healthcare costs increase, affordability and insurance coverage remain problematic.
In the United States, deductible cost increases are far outpacing increases in costs covered by insurance.
Brazil’s private health insurance sector lost 2.5 million beneficiaries between 2014 and 2016 due to the country’s high unemployment rate. Added to that, companies in Brazil had to cut expenses, and changing their employees’ health insurance plan to a cheaper one was a popular option.
As mentioned previously, lack of access to care causes an increase in hospital and urgent care visits.
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 79.7 percent of non-admitted emergency room patient visits were due to lack of access to a healthcare provider. A recent study published in the Journal of American Medical Association estimated $734 billion (27 percent) of all healthcare spending was wasted on unnecessary services, inefficiency and inflated prices.
Similarly, according to Truven Health Analytics, 71 percent of emergency room visits with employer-sponsored insurance coverage are ambulatory sensitive, and could have been managed in an outpatient care center.
Moreover, as shown by the rise in medical tourism as a new industry, there is now a greater cost disparity in accessing healthcare than before. This new industry shows the cost of healthcare is such that patients are increasingly willing to travel overseas in order to take advantage of more competitive pricing for healthcare in other countries.
This makes it easier to connect patients in one geographic location to physicians in another, which can dramatically reduce costs, and create a freer and competitive market for high-quality medical services.
Today’s consumers want to take responsibility for managing their own health. Yet, most feel they don’t have the information and tools to do so. In other industries, customers can easily access comparisons of features, benefits, and costs to guide their purchasing decisions. In contrast, the healthcare industry presents a huge array of confusing choices, contact points, and service flows without any upfront pricing information.
Seventy-five percent of consumers consider their healthcare decisions as the most important and expensive decisions they make. Yet, the process of choosing and paying for medical services can be so daunting that patients often decline treatment simply to avoid the confusion and expense.
To make better decisions, healthcare consumers are increasingly expecting—and demanding—better information and more transparency from healthcare providers. They’re also asking for more of a partner relationship rather than a one-way dialog from medical provider to patient.
At the same time, as healthcare costs continue to rise, consumers are required to assume responsibility for a larger share of the costs of health plan premiums, co-pays, and out-of-pocket expenses, with no way to offset the cost.
By Christine Alfano, senior director of marketing, Vyne.
Christine Alfano
Most practices are looking for ways to keep their chairs full by attracting new as well as continuing treatment with existing patients. Keep in mind that all of the things we’re going to discuss in this article, also apply to your existing patients. After all, with so much competition in the market today, you can never assume that just because you have seen a patient in the past they will return to your office.
What’s the first encounter or first impression that most prospective new patients have with your dental practice? At a recent conference, dental professionals gave a multitude of answers like phone calls, the front desk person, the building/office, but most of them missed the mark.If you said, visiting your website or searching online, you get an A+! Nowadays, the way people find a new dentist is by searching online and visiting your website, so, if you’re not actively working on those two things in your practice, and want to grow your patient base, you’d better get started!
If you have a website, make sure it’s relevant and up-to-date. A site that looks 10 years old and has out of date information or events, gives the impression that you don’t care and that’s not a good first impression.
If SEO and responsive websites are terms that make you scratch your head, it’s okay. You don’t have to be the online marketing expert. There are a lot of great resources online for creating an online presence and there are a lot of partners and services available as well. Just be sure to invest your marketing dollars wisely, measure the results, and you will see the ROI.
Hire friendly people and greet your patients.
This may sound really simple, but hear me out. Once a prospective patient has visited your website and decided to make an appointment, your people are up to bat. Your team members and their attitudes are the thing that will leave the longest lasting impression on a patient. Make sure that you’ve properly trained everyone on office etiquette, greetings and expectations.There is nothing worse than getting to a practice, walking in and not being greeted immediately.
Here’s a real-life example that happened to me recently. I walked into my dentist’s office for a 1 p.m. appointment, there were about four ladies at the front desk: one was on the phone, and no one else was in the waiting room. I’ve always had a great customer service experience at this practice and I love my doctor, but to my surprise, when I arrived, no one said a word to me. I went ahead and scribbled my name on the sign-in list and sat down while they all discussed what to order for lunch. They never acknowledged me, but a couple of minutes later, the hygienist came to the door and called me back for my cleaning. The appointment itself went great (as usual) but that initial experience left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and go back, of course, but I wonder if I’d been a new patient with no other good experiences to recount, would I be so forgiving? Think about it …
Solicit feedback from your patients
The best way to know how you’re doing is to ask. Whether you ask them on their way out as they setup their next appointment, send them a follow-up email survey or text message, or call them a day or two post-appointment, ask your patients if everything went okay with their appointment, if there’s anything your team could improve upon and if they have any suggestions for ways that you could better serve their needs. People like to be heard and while, not everyone may be as willing to complete a survey, you’ll never know unless you ask.
If you have a referral program, let your patients know about it when you ask how the appointment went so that it’s more of a conversation than just a satisfaction survey. You may even want to try incentivizing them to participate. For example, if they are happy with the services provided, ask if they’d like to provide an online review or give them a card to share with a friend. Once the review is posted or the referral card returned by a new patient, you can reward them with a gift card as a token of thanks.
Intiva Health is the first truly integrated career platform for healthcare professionals. It redefines the medical credentialing process by making it faster, more efficient and more secure.
