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
Serving the healthcare and life sciences industry gives us a strong appreciation for the resource dedication and demanding processes that result in life-saving innovations. We understand that IT is critical in its function to accelerate research and development. That’s why we’re committed to simplifying IT and optimizing the entire enterprise. We provide customers with comprehensive technology and support solutions that help increase productivity while streamlining compliance readiness and improving communication throughout the care continuum. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that IT is improving patient care.
Founder’s story
As a pre-med student at age 19, Michael Dell founded PC’s Limited with $1,000 and a game changing vision for how technology should be designed, manufactured and sold. After just four years, Dell completed its initial public offering in 1988, raising $30 million and increasing market capitalization from $1,000 to $85 million. Dell’s commitment to the healthcare industry is exemplified by his ongoing efforts to improve the efficiency and quality of care today. Speaking at the Health Evolution Partners Leadership Summit in 2011, he encouraged healthcare organizations to expedite adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) and cloud computing to create new information-driven efficiency and care advantages. “Digitizing patient information and making it available in a secure and convenient way across our healthcare system are among the best opportunities we have to improve U.S. healthcare and create a better system for future generations of Americans,” Dell said. Dr. Cliff Bleustein, chief medical officer, supports the company’s strategic initiative to revolutionize the way healthcare is managed with patient-specific data that spans the entire continuum of care and leads to better outcomes. Dell Healthcare & Life Sciences’ focuses on improvement of quality, patient safety and efficiency starts at the intersection of information and technology.
Market opportunity
When healthcare is information-driven, data is interconnected and available when and where it is needed to save lives. Data becomes knowledge and moves healthcare beyond episodic care to preventative, precision medicine. And data ultimately allows patients to take control of their own health. Dell’s four-part information-driven healthcare approach is a reflection of our commitment and expertise:
What follows is a nice, yet concise, infographic developed by Clearwater Compliance — an organization that helps health systems ensure patient safety and improve the quality of care by safeguarding the confidentiality, integrity and availability of protected health information (PHI) – that provides a nice overview of the current state of healthcare breaches.
Clearwater Compliance states that according to Breach Level Index, there were 336 healthcare data breaches reported in the U.S. last year; “the Office for Civil Rights portal on the HHS website cited 165 breaches affecting 500 or more individuals in 2014.”
Interesting, the organization points out that non-digital breaches remain an issue. “Paper data breaches accounted for 9 percent of compromised records in the first half of 2014 – and a surprising 31 percent in the second half. In total, nearly 200,000 paper records were compromised last year, along with nearly 60,000 pieces of individually identifiable health information ranging from lab specimens to radiology film,” wrote the Clearwater Compliance team.
Additionally, insider mistakes and malice can be costly. In breaches examined, there were 45 incidents involving insider actions that resulted in the compromise of more than 478,000 records. “That means that about half of all the incidents we studied involved either mistakes or malice by an organization’s own employees and business associates.”
Clearwater Compliance makes the case that, despite an organization’s best efforts, “it’s almost impossible to eliminate all workforce-related data breaches. But organizations can take steps to foster an atmosphere of compliance and prevention.”
Lindy Benton, CEO of MEA|NEA, recently wrote in a piece for MultiBriefs: “According to the Wall Street Journal, Forrester Research recently conducted a survey of more than 2,100 healthcare IT pros and found that only about 60 percent of them said they encrypt devices like laptops, smartphones or tablets. Also according to the research, 39 percent of healthcare security incidents since 2005 have included a lost or stolen device.
“For some additional perspective, since federal reporting requirements started, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has tracked major breaches (those affecting 500 people or more) and has identified more than 945 incidents affecting patients’ personal information, affecting more than 30 million people.
“A majority of these breaches are tied to theft (17.4 million people), followed by data loss (7.2 million people), hacking (3.6 million) and unauthorized access of accounts (1.9 million people), according to The Washington Post. And these numbers do not even include the Community Health Systems numbers.
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
Apervita, the fastest-growing health analytics community, empowers health professionals from around the globe to collaboratively share expertise and content through evidence-based point-of-care analytics. Apervita is a secure, self-service platform that enables health professionals and enterprises to author, publish and subscribe to a market of evidence-based algorithms, quality and safety measures, pathways, and protocols, easily connecting them to data and workflow. Available to every health professional and powerful enough for the entire health enterprise, Apervita provides health analytics at a tenth of today’s cost, in a hundredth of the time.
About Statement
Apervita is the leading health analytics community, where together with health professionals from around the globe, Apervita is transforming the world’s health knowledge into thousands of point of care health analytics. Apervita is a secure self-service platform that enables any health professional to connect health data to a market of trusted algorithms, protocols, assessments, pathways and measures, published by leading authors.
Founder’s Story
Paul Magelli is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Apervita, Inc. An accomplished entrepreneur, he brings together a pioneering vision for computable health with seasoned leadership and experience building global ecosystems. Paul brings together a broad range of leadership qualities, an acute focus on customers and a pioneering vision for digital health strategies.
Market opportunity
Apervita believes health researchers and practitioners have already created the greatest wealth of health knowledge that has ever existed and it is just waiting to be unleashed to improve health.
Today, the majority of this knowledge is paper-based or locked into proprietary systems. Apervita’s market is already unlocking them, turning them into computable and shareable analytics and putting them to work to improve health. They are addressing some of the biggest health challenges, such as the 100,000s of patients that die prematurely every year in the United States from chronic disease, complications and preventable adverse events.
CommonWell Health Alliance announces the addition of five new members enhancing the association’s nationwide footprint, share of the EHR marketplace and diversity across the care continuum. MEDITECH, Merge and Kareo join as contributing members while PointClickCare and Surgical Information Systems (SIS) join as general members.
With the addition of these new members, CommonWell membership now represents 70 percent of the acute care EHR market and 20 percent of the ambulatory care EHR market. CommonWell membership also represents market leaders in imaging, perinatal, laboratory, retail pharmacy, oncology, population health, post-acute care and others across the care continuum.
“We know it takes collective experience and dedication to break down barriers to nationwide data exchange, so we are especially pleased to welcome these industry innovators to the CommonWell family,” said Nick Knowlton, Vice President of Business Development at Brightree and CommonWell Membership Committee Chair. “Each organization will contribute to our effort by providing a commitment to action and new perspectives for additional use cases that will help us accelerate our current deployment of real-world interoperability services.”
• MEDITECH is one of CommonWell’s largest members to join since inception. It provides fully integrated technology solutions for hospitals, ambulatory care centers, physicians’ offices, long term care and behavioral health facilities, and home care organizations. MEDITECH’s membership increases CommonWell’s share of the acute care market from 50% to 70%.
• Merge is a leading provider of enterprise imaging, interoperability and clinical systems that seek to advance health care. It offers solutions in radiology, eye care, cardiology, orthopedics and clinical trials—all of which provide the opportunity for CommonWell to develop new use cases across a broader spectrum of the health care continuum. Additionally, Merge has the most complete radiology solution on the market, from small-volume sites up to the largest practices and chains in the country.
“Merge embraces the opportunity to join CommonWell at a critical moment in health care,” said Steve Tolle, Chief Strategy Officer at Merge Healthcare. “Industry leaders must actively come together to make interoperability real, and the Alliance provides an effective platform for meaningful dialogue and collaboration to help chart the future trajectory of the health care industry.”
• Kareo brings more than 30,000 providers and 60,000 users of its cloud-based medical office software suite into CommonWell. As CommonWell continues to deploy services nationwide, Kareo’s ambulatory experience and reach will accelerate universal provider access to critical health care data.
Guest post by Tom Giannulli, MD, MS, chief medical information officer, Kareo
Quality assurance (QA) in healthcare is exactly what the name implies — the process of implementing programs to improve and assure quality care for patients. In a hospital, these programs are often quite robust and monitored closely, but in a small practice, the picture can be quite different.
Smaller practices have limited resources and staff. There is already a huge burden to stay compliant in so many areas while keeping up changes to reimbursement and other programs like meaningful use. Often, there isn’t much time left over for QA.
Unfortunately, measuring and monitoring patient satisfaction and outcomes is becoming more important as reimbursement shifts to a more value-based model and patient expectations change. Whereas patients once stayed with the same doctor forever, now the majority would change providers for a wide range of reasons. While 80 percent of healthcare providers think that patients depart because of relocation or change in insurance, the reality is far different. Nearly 60 percent of patients switch physicians because of better service or treatment from a new provider.
For practices that are stretched for time, dollars and staff, technology can play a valuable role in improving the patient experience, compliance, and outcomes. Ultimately as the industry shifts to value-based reimbursement it can also help the practice improve revenue. Here’s how:
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
Tools4ever is focused on ensuring secure and compliant user and authorization management, which is often complicated within healthcare institutions because of the relatively high employee turnover and absenteeism. Deploying an automated identity administration solution that integrates with EHR systems will automate the user account lifecycle and help to resolve these problems. In addition, healthcare employees often need quick, but secure access to many different systems and applications. Tools4ever’s password management solution can help reduce many of the password issues clinicians’ experience.
About Statement
Tools4ever distinguishes itself through a no nonsense approach and a low total cost of ownership. In contrast to comparable identity management solutions, Tools4ever delivers a complete solution in just weeks rather than months or years. Thanks to this approach, Tools4ever is one the largest vendors in IAM with more than 5 million managed user accounts. Tools4ever delivers a variety of software products and integrated consultancy services covering identity management and access management, such as user provisioning, password management, and single sign-on (SSO).
Founder’s Story
Jacques Vriens established Tools4ever in 1999 and has expanded Tools4ever into a global software company. The initial focus was on tools for system administrators but building upon the knowledge and experience gathered in the early years, he quickly expanded the product portfolio into identity and access management.
A new study by Health eCareers found that nearly one-third of healthcare recruiters in the U.S. rank employee turnover as their greatest staffing concern this year and say hiring the best healthcare employees is only half the battle – once you have them, you need to keep them.
Turnover in hospitals has high numbers and results in high costs in the industry. According to 565 healthcare employer respondents in Health eCareers’ 2015 Healthcare Recruiting Trends Survey, almost 30 percent expect that they will have more job openings in 2015 than last year, and 45 percent expect to have about the same. But 43 percent of respondents say finding qualified talent is their number one obstacle.
Retention is the Solution
Employee retention should be the first line of defense to combat the challenges created by turnover and is a key strategic imperative for 90 percent of hospitals.
“According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the healthcare unemployment rate is 3.5 percent. Many economists feel full healthcare employment is between two and three percent, so this means we are very close to full employment,” says Bill Thomson, a healthcare staffing expert and account representative at Health eCareers.
This finding raises the question: where will healthcare get its new workers?
Thomson says because most healthcare professionals are currently employed, it’s much more effective and efficient to invest in retention than to go out, recruit and train new employees.
When Infinite Computer Solutions was founded in 1999, it was started with little more than $1,000 and ambition. We launched with a telecom tech focus, as I worked for Verizon and IBM before, and this was the industry I was connected to.
What was clear even early on was the explosive possibility in the healthcare domain. The move from a fee-for-service payment model to outcome-based managed care is driving huge opportunities for companies in this space. We looked to establish ourselves in the industry quickly, made possible by our early telecom successes. We saw that we could leverage the commonalities between the two verticals, including evolving standards, convergence of numerous systems, high transaction volumes, data security concerns, and a larger user base.
When we first started in healthcare, we helped companies by improving existing processes using Infinite’s IP: our first healthcare customer was a Fortune 500 business that administered Medicaid programs in a couple of states. We helped them transition from a legacy Medicaid Management Information System to a more modernized and automated one.
We expanded quickly to take advantage of the other exciting developments in the Healthcare space that was driving patient-focused care. For example, soon after that first customer, we also helped another develop an electronic medical record/electronic health records product, implemented across various providers in the U.S.
We’re especially excited and focused on the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) trend for patients that need chronic and acute care. We’ve had our proudest successes providing technology that helps continue the link between doctors and their patients outside a hospital environment, leveraging electronic health records to make it easier for patience to receive care from home and allowing doctors easy access to complete patient history.
Serving the healthcare and life sciences industry gives us a strong appreciation for the resource dedication and demanding processes that result in life-saving innovations. We understand that IT is critical in its function to accelerate research and development. That’s why we’re committed to simplifying IT and optimizing the entire enterprise. We provide customers with comprehensive technology and support solutions that help increase productivity while streamlining compliance readiness and improving communication throughout the care continuum. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that IT is improving patient care.
Apervita, the fastest-growing health analytics community, empowers health professionals from around the globe to collaboratively share expertise and content through evidence-based point-of-care analytics. Apervita is a secure, self-service platform that enables health professionals and enterprises to author, publish and subscribe to a market of evidence-based algorithms, quality and safety measures, pathways, and protocols, easily connecting them to data and workflow. Available to every health professional and powerful enough for the entire health enterprise, Apervita provides health analytics at a tenth of today’s cost, in a hundredth of the time.
