In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator Pitch
TigerText is a secure messaging app for the enterprise. It keeps communications safe and improves workflow by providing end-to-end encryption and ephemerality via its real-time messaging platform.
About Statement
TigerText provides secure, real-time messaging for the enterprise, empowering organizations to work more securely. TigerText’s encrypted messaging platform, which keeps communications safe, improves workflows and complies with regulations in industries like healthcare, finance and government, was developed to address the security needs, BYOD policies and message restrictions in the enterprise. More than 5,000 facilities and four of the top five largest for-profit health systems in the nation rely on TigerText to comply with HIPAA and replace unsecured SMS text messaging that leaves protected health and other confidential information at risk. TigerText was launched in 2010 and is based in Santa Monica.
Founder’s Story
Brad Brooks is the CEO of TigerText, the leader in secure mobile messaging for the enterprise, and the co-founder of Whisper, an anonymous social app that lets people share confessions and secrets that garners more than 3 billion page-views per month. Brad invented the notion of ephemeral messaging on mobile devices (for which he has a patent pending) and was a pioneer in the field of “anonymous social,” which is quickly becoming a major counter-movement on the web against Facebook’s identity-based social network.
Founded in 2012 by former home health agency owner Dan Hogan, Medalogix has been recognized by Harvard University, HIMSS and Fierce Healthcare IT as an innovative solution that’s improving America’s Healthcare system. Medalogix currently offers two solutions, Touch and Bridge.
Medalogix offers patient outcome management (POM) solutions that use a combination of predictive analytics, workflows and business intelligence engines to improve quality and reduce costs.
Elevator pitch
We’re a healthcare tech company that provides analytics and workflows to home health providers so they can improve care and reduce costs.
Medalogix currently offers two predictive analytic workflow solutions to home health providers:
Touch, which helps ensure a patient’s successful care episode by identifying patients at risk of transferring off census (i.e. hospital readmission), falling or who would benefit from an additional care episode. After identification, Touch then automates a clinical team’s patient touchpoints to encourage the best care and cost outcome.
Bridge, identifies which patients would benefit from hospice care and then offers a workflow to help clinicians have the right end of life conversation with the right patient at the right time.
Founder’s story
Dan Hogan
Prior to founding Medalogix, Dan Hogan owned and operated a home health agency. As the industry moved toward digital patient records, he realized there was an opportunity to analyze those streamlined data sets to detect health risks the human eye might miss. He researched to find a tool that could do this, and came up empty handed. He decided to take matters into his own hands and incorporated Medalogix in February 2009.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Currently, Medalogix integrates with leading home health and hospice EMR. We market to their users through webinars, industry conferences and referrals through existing satisfied Medalogix users.
Girish Navani is CEO and co-founder of eClinicalWorks, an electronic health record company exceeding in the B2B field since 1999. Under the leadership and foresight of Navani, the company is expanding its services to B2C with the launch of healow – an app for patients to easily find new doctors, schedule appointments online and access their personal health records.
Here, Navani speaks about his path to eClinicalWorks, he offers his expert insight on EHRs and their benefits to healthcare, and he speak of likely trends that will continue to change the healthcare landscape.
Tell me your story. About how you got here, how you developed your technology and the reasoning for a private company set up?
We wanted to use technology as a way to completely transform the healthcare delivery model to streamline processes, prevent errors and provide easily accessible information to both providers and patients. Not only was our primary goal to make doctors’ jobs easier by providing them with a way to operate more efficiently, but we also wanted to improve the patient experience.
I’m a strong believer in keeping my company private and concentrating on building a solid product. Selling shares and depending on investors means that they will always have a say in how we conduct our business. We use our profits to continue building our company and our products.
What about the leadership inside the company? Is it true the no employees have titles? What’s the reasoning?
I have an open-door policy, which allows the opportunity for anybody to approach me to ask questions and brainstorm ideas. Over time, I’ve learned to listen more. I’m okay with second guessing my own decisions and receiving feedback from my colleagues, even if what they say is “no.”
Yes, our employees do not have titles, but instead, the whole company is team-based with team leaders being the only leadership position. Employees’ careers grow with bigger projects. I think titles are self-fulfilling and short-term objectives that people quickly get tired of. With a team-based structure, employees can work together to achieve successful results instead of individuals striving for the next title.
What drew you to healthcare? Why does it stand out for you?
I have always worked in technology, and in 1999, I heard a lecture in Geneva about using wireless computing in healthcare and the idea of “connected healthcare” really stuck with me. I loved the idea of a doctor and patient sitting in the doctor’s office reviewing charts on a tablet instead of pieces of paper, so I wanted to build a technology that connects all parties involved in healthcare, including the doctor, patient and insurance company.
DataMotion, an email encryption and health information service provider (HISP), offers the results of its third annual survey on corporate email and file transfer habits, revealing significant security risks. While companies in all industries increasingly have put security and compliance policies in place – nearly 90 percent of all respondents affirming that in 2014 (compared to 81 percent in 2013) – the growth is largely from healthcare entities.
More than 97 percent from the industry report their organizations as having policies in place, compared to 90.4 percent in 2013. However, challenges remain for healthcare when it comes to implementing these, ranging from low employee comprehension to policy violations. Additionally, a lack of encryption, risks in mobile device usage and low awareness of Direct Secure Messaging (Direct) pose serious issues for the highly regulated industry.
DataMotion polled more than 780 IT and business decision-makers across the U.S. and Canada. In particular, the survey focused on individuals who routinely work with sensitive data and compliance regulations in a variety of industries including healthcare, financial services, education and government.
More than 300 respondents were from healthcare. Key insights/comparisons on the industry include:
Healthcare Security and Compliance Policy: Gains Undermined by Implementation Failure
36 percent of healthcare respondents said within their entity, security and compliance policies are at most only moderately enforced.
81 percent of all respondents said employees/co-workers either occasionally or routinely violate these policies. While healthcare fared better, nearly 73 percent admitted the same.
Key to making policies work is ensuring employee comprehension. When asked if they thought employees fully understood these types of policies, more than a third in healthcare said no, just a slight improvement over those from other industries.
When asked about common reasons why policies are violated, 52.7 percent from healthcare said it was because employees were not aware of the policy or that they were in violation. Another 29.1 percent said employees didn’t understand policies. Most troubling,18.2 percent said policies were intentionally violated by employees to get their job done.
These healthcare findings raise a “red flag” whereas key to passing an HHS/OCR HIPAA audit is demonstrating implementation of policies.
Prior to launching Webbed Marketing (the previous name of Fathom Columbus), founder Bill Balderaz worked with some of the largest publishers in the world to plan, execute and measure Internet marketing programs. He began working on search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising and link-building in 1998, prior to the launch of Google. He has spoken on Internet marketing topics at events sponsored by the Public Relations Society of America, the American Marketing Association and the National Fuel Funds Network. Bill holds a bachelor’s degree in public relations journalism from Bowling Green State University and an MBA from Franklin University.
Here, he discusses health IT trends, the future of wearables as he sees them and the consumerization of healthcare.
What are the biggest changes we will see in 2015 in terms of healthcare technology?
Hospitals and health systems across the country will be adopting or upgrading EHRs, telehealth capabilities, and mobile tools. Look for increased reliance on and more sophisticated use of data analytics, as well as individualized medicine, ‘doctor-less’ patient models, and quantification of population health via social media. Patients will take more control of their health.
Also look for integration. Patients have so many inputs: lab results, wearable data, fitness plans. Then they have outputs, newsletters, emails, patient portals. The smart money is on the technology to connect and simplify.
What is driving these changes?
At the consumer level, where patients are more informed and involved than ever, what some call the ‘democratized future’ of healthcare is bringing more accountability and transparency to both the methods and costs of care. The parallel needs to cut skyrocketing costs, increase access to care, improve quality of service, and encourage patient engagement are all factors contributing to the growing potential of health IT to transform the delivery and experience of healthcare at fundamental levels.
You work with healthcare systems across the country in a variety of markets. What trends are common to all hospitals and healthcare systems? What differences do you see?
In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator Pitch
Using pre-defined rules based on a combination of patented technology and natural language processing and machine learning techniques, Seal Software offers a disruptive technology that automatically locates and provides insight into unstructured contract data wherever it resides in an organization. This easily deployable solution can rapidly process thousands of contracts, reducing years of manual process time to hours.
The Seal Contract Discovery and Analytics solution is the only contract optimization technology available on the market that is truly customizable by the client across any healthcare organization. The Seal Platform delivers “non-standard” clause detection based on customer-defined boundaries and is able to continually learn and create reusable content, improving accuracy and relevancy as it relates to an organization’s specific needs. In contrast, Seal Software’s competitors require significant customization before they can adequately process contracts.
About Statement
Seal Software is committed to disrupting the way healthcare is managing, analyzing and optimizing their contracts. Seal’s Contract Discovery and Analytics solution provides complete contract visibility and customizable review and analysis through its unique blend of proprietary technology, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques.
In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, even the slightest delay in responding to market fluctuations, regulatory compliance reforms and organizational changes can pay a heavy toll on an organization. With the Seal Platform, healthcare organizations around the world can effectively access and manage their contract portfolio to maximize revenue opportunities, mitigate risk and reduce expenses, reducing manual review time from days – even years – to hours.
Founder’s Story Seal Software was founded by Ulf Zetterberg (current CEO) and Kevin Gidney (current CTO). With their vast knowledge and experience in the field of content management, they were able to isolate two of the biggest challenges faced by customers – migration of legacy data and consolidation of information from multiple data sources into new applications. This idea was the foundation for Seal. They built the Seal platform as a means for transforming unstructured contract data into searchable information, and facilitate smoother and quicker contract hand-off processes within the various stakeholders and systems.
HIMSS organizers, in preparation of its annual conference and trade show and as a way to rally attendees around several trending topics for the coming show, asked the healthcare community how it feels about several key issues. I’ve reached out to readers of this site so they can respond to what they see as the future of healthcare innovation, data security, patient engagement and big data.
Their responses follow.
Do you agree with the following thoughts? If not, why; what’s missing?
Innovation
Sean Benson
Sean Benson, vice president of innovation, clinical solutions, Wolters Kluwer Health Future innovations in health IT, big data in particular, will focus on the aggregation and transformation of patient data into actionable knowledge that can improve patient and financial outcomes. The ever-growing volume of patient data contained within disparate clinical systems continues to expand. This siloed data often forces physicians to act on fragmented and incomplete information, making it difficult to apply the latest evidence. Comprehensive solutions will normalize, codify and aggregate patient data in a cloud system and run it against clinical scenarios to create evidence-based advice that is then delivered directly to the point of care via a variety of mobile devices. This will empower physicians with patient-specific knowledge based on the latest medical evidence delivered to the point of care in a timely, appropriate manner, ultimately resulting in higher quality treatment and more complete care.
Susan Reese
Susan Reese, MBA, RN, CPHIMS, chief nurse executive, Kronos Incorporated
Gamification — the trend of creating computer-based employee games and contests for the purpose of aligning employee productivity with the organization’s goals — is currently a popular topic with business leaders and IT. For proof, consider that Gartner recently projected that by 2015, 50 percent of all organizations will be using gamification of some kind, and that by 2016, businesses will spend a total of $2.6 billion on this technology.
With numbers like these, it is clear that that gaming is serious business and that it is here to stay. But at this point, you may be asking yourself, “Could gamification work in my healthcare environment? What potential benefits could it have?””
Today, many healthcare organizations are looking to the future and considering gamification as a way to increase employee engagement, collaboration, and productivity as well as to align their behavior with larger business goals – but they don’t know how to do it quite yet. Also, gamification can be a delicate decision, complete with advantages and risks. After all, employees’ day-to-day work responsibilities and careers are not games and can’t be trivialized. Healthcare organizations must be careful to avoid sending the wrong message to their workforce, or the whole program could backfire, or even lead to more negative consequences.
Mike Lanciloti
Mike Lanciloti, vice president of product management and marketing, Spectralink
In today’s digital age, healthcare IT needs to come a long way to get up to speed in innovation and connectivity. However, as we begin to see mobile play a larger role in the industry, healthcare is moving the needle on innovation as well.
The mobile revolution has picked up in healthcare for both health IT professionals and in patient care. Primary as healthcare providers find ways to utilize smartphones, mobile devices and Wi-Fi networks to improve the communication and efficiency of their workforce.
Through mobile devices, clinicians have the ability to access what they need, when they need it. Mobile devices ensure nurses and mobile staff are equipped with the right technology to promote timely, efficient and reliable communication. This not only allows healthcare professionals to perform their jobs more effectively but also helps deliver a higher quality of patient care.
The growing mobile trend does present several questions for the industry. Hospital managers are quickly learning that an influx of smartphones into the hospital setting can become a larger problem than anticipated. Not only do personal devices lack the security required for enterprise-owned devices, they pose other risks, calling into question issues surrounding encryption, authorized access and mobile security. Personal phones aren’t designed to be equipped with the same encryption capabilities as enterprise-owned mobile devices.
Seems all the chittering was right: The meaningful use Stage 3 proposed rule has been released prior to the annual HIMSS conference, to give all conference goers and government officials in attendance something to talk about.
The news of the rule’s release now comes as no surprise.
The feds like to make these kinds of splashes, to be the bearers of news – any kind of news – especially at big venues where they’re likely to get lots of ink and face time with those in attendance, and the supposed powers that be.
The same thing happened last year at HIMSS when officials, peppered with questions, were vehement that the ICD-10 roll out deadline would not be delayed. Only a few weeks later, federal officials had to walk that back and, untimely, wound up changing the deadline.
These are apples and oranges, I understand, but the grandiosity of the occasion (HIMSS15) means that everyone attending the conference really does need to “bring it.” Vendors, presenters, the feds. At HIMSS, to capture hearts and minds, this is a simple truth — we need to bring it no matter who “we” are.
I’m not trying to be cynical about the announcement or the timing of the proposed Stage 3 rule, but there seems to be something about the nature of its timing that seems suspect. It’s as if CMS wants the news about meaningful use to be relevant. But, as we know, on its own, it is relevant; we all know this.
It’s as if CMS is trying to secure the legacy of a failing program – where as of January 0nly 4 percent of eligible professionals had met meet Stage 2 requirements. It’s sort of like the agency, to make people talk about a once relevant product, is bursting through the HIMSS gates like a has-been celebrity and is announcing, “Don’t worry, we’ll be there.”
How could we forget?
We know you’ll be there, we know we’ll be looking to you for guidance, we know what you have to say is important to us because it impacts the very professions in which we have built our lives.
CMS will make their claims, get us to talk then they’ll ride off into the sunset like Shane.
TigerText is a secure messaging app for the enterprise. It keeps communications safe and improves workflow by providing end-to-end encryption and ephemerality via its real-time messaging platform.
Founded in 2012 by former home health agency owner Dan Hogan, 
DataMotion
