MobileSmith is an online app development platform, enabling hospitals and health organizations to create custom, native apps, across iPhone, Android and iPad devices, without any coding required.
Elevator Pitch
We have a platform that allows a marketing department with no development experience to create custom, native mobile apps. With us, any hospital can enhance their patient engagement strategy, without coding, and without the cost of hiring developers.
Founders Story
The earliest foundations of the company that would become MobileSmith, were laid in 1993. Back then, the company, known as SmartOnline, sold software to assist small businesses. SmartOnline became one of the early pioneers of the SaaS (Software as a Service) model that we use today. The company worked to adapt to the constantly changing technology. In 2010, the company hired Bob Dieterle as senior VP and general manager. He advocated and orchestrated a complete overhaul of the company services, and focused the company, instead, on the budding industry of mobile applications. The company wanted to deliver organizations a means to quickly create and manage apps to connect to their consumers, without having to rely heavily on an IT department. Working to that end, the MobileSmith online platform was developed, and in July 2013, the overhaul was complete, as the company rebranded itself as MobileSmith Inc. and has since focused entirely on delivering quality and cost-effective mobile apps to organizations.
Market Opportunity and Strategy
There are several app development platforms out there, such as Appcelerator or Kony. These platforms still require a programmer or developer to write code for the apps. Our platform requires no coding whatsoever. A designer or marketer can easily come to us and use our platform to design, prototype, build and deploy an app. While we have clients from a variety of fields, healthcare providers have found our platform particularly useful. With healthcare IT departments swamped with EHR implementation and marketing desperately trying to enhance patient engagement options, our platform has been able to fill their needs without placing any further burden on their IT, and avoiding the higher labor cost of developers. As only 35 percent of healthcare providers offer mobile apps, according to the HIMSS Analytics Survey, there is a clear need in the healthcare industry for our platform, and several organizations have found us to be an excellent means of enhancing their patient engagement via mobile apps.
Healthcare IT Leaders, an award-winning consulting and staff augmentation firm that connects hospitals and health systems with top healthcare IT talent, announces its picks for the Best Healthcare IT Blogs of 2014. The winning blogs were chosen for their timely content, insightful writing and subject matter expertise on topics important to the HIT industry.
Electronic Health Reporter was among one of 15 sites nominated, and selected, for the honor of best healthcare IT blogs of 2014.
“It’s exciting to see the healthcare IT industry unfold from so many perspectives,” said Alex Gramling, chief marketing officer for Healthcare IT Leaders. “The blogging of CIOs, physicians, consultants, tech journalists, industry experts and lawmakers, whether they’re behind the scenes or right there in the action, helps inform, educate and entertain all of us.”
Site nominations came from social media followers and readers of the Healthcare IT Leaders blog.
Healthcare IT Leaders matches skilled IT talent to contract and full-time HIT consulting jobs. Through its blog, the company provides content, infographics, and news updates as well as insights from its chief medical officer, Dr. Frank Speidel. In 2013, Healthcare IT Leaders was named by Staffing Industry Analysts as one of the Best Staffing Firms to Work For in the US.
Here’s the complete list of sites selected as this year’s best:
Guest post by Ken Perez, vice president of healthcare policy,Omnicell.
In the wake of mixed initial results for the Pioneer ACO Model and Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), this is the year for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to take the feedback it has received and revamp its ACO programs.
The proposed rule for the 2015 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS), a 609-page document released on June 19, 2014, interestingly included the first installment of modifications to the ACO programs. The proposed rule devoted 52 pages to changes to the quality measures for the MSSP. Throughout the document, CMS emphasized its intent to align the numerous physician quality reporting programs, such as the Medicare EHR Incentive Program for Eligible Professionals and the MSSP, as much as possible, to reduce the administrative burden on the eligible professionals and group practices participating in these programs.
The final rule for the MSSP, issued in November 2011, presented 33 quality measures against which ACOs would be measured. These quality measures also apply to Pioneer ACOs. The measures pertain to four domains: patient/care giver experience, care coordination/patient safety, preventive health, and at-risk populations.
The proposed rule recommends the addition of the following 12 new measures:
You’re passionate about helping people. It’s why you got into this field and what drives you to do your best. But it’s very likely that your day-to-day life is filled with paperwork and admin tasks instead of spending time doing the clinical work that you love.
As a side effect of your success, you’ll find yourself consumed by the quotidian responsibilities as an administrator, including:
Invoice preparation and billing
Managing timely and accurate payments from school systems, insurance companies, private and governmental payer sources
Completing applications for insurance companies in order to become an “in-network” provider
Managing ever changing staff schedules
Managing issues related to human resource (e.g., hiring, payroll, progressive discipline and employee rights issues)
Managing public relations
And more
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
The more successful your practice becomes, the more these tasks eat up your days. You’re pushed away from the reason you entered the field – and you come to a point where you need to make a decision.
All successful small business owners have been at this point of realization. They are suddenly faced with a “stay or leave” decision about the business. If they decide to stay, an infusion of additional capital and resources is necessary to build or maintain the quality business they envisioned at the start. A decision to leave will mean a significant shift in their perceived autonomy and sense of success.
It’s a difficult decision to make, but it’s essential. Staying in this state for too long can have a negative impact on your professional life, relationships with friends and family, personal health and overall quality of life.
If you don’t have the capital and resources to add, you need an exit strategy for the situation you’re in. But your exit strategy doesn’t always mean selling or closing the business.
Why Not Choose Option 3?
Opting for a merger relationship with a larger entity can help a practice expand without putting additional pressure on your individual practice’s time or resources. There are multiple benefits to a merger decision that can help you do the work you’re passionate about and reduce the administrative load.
You gain access to an infrastructure for clinical excellence.
As a clinician and business owner, you encounter complicated circumstances that need to be managed expeditiously and responsibly. You need a “clinical home” to handle the circumstances involved in managing treatment resistant behavior disorders, complex behavioral presentations (e.g., a child with an anxiety disorder) and sensitive family situations (e.g., families impacted by psychiatric problems, separation, divorce, substance abuse and domestic violence).
Guest post by John Squire, president and COO, Amazing Charts.
According to the 2014 Exclusive EHR Study conducted by the MPI Group and Medical Economics, 70 percent of clinicians said their EHR investment has not been worth the effort, resources and costs. Widespread dissatisfaction with electronic records systems is casting an unfortunate shadow over the great potential they hold for making today’s medical practices more efficient and for improving healthcare delivery. However, practices can help avoid future disappointment with their EHR decision and save time and resources by understanding how to avoid common implementation pitfalls.
1. Choosing the wrong EHR
The intuitiveness and ease of use of your EHR will affect every area of your practice. If you don’t consider yourself to be technologically savvy, finding an intuitive solution should be at the top of your list. (After all, presumably you’re a clinician, not an IT expert.) Was a clinician was involved with the development of the EHR system? If a clinician wasn’t involved, chances are your idea of “usable” won’t line up with that of the vendor’s.
Another aspect to consider is cost, which can vary across a wide spectrum from free to several thousand dollars a month. Decide on the maximum price that you are willing to pay. This will reduce the list of vendors for consideration. Oh by the way, beware of the word “free.” Your biggest hidden cost is not the dollars spent on software, but the hours of lost productivity from a system that impedes you with banner ads and other annoying distractions.
To be certain that the EHR you choose is the right one for your practice, do everything in your power to expose yourself to the software prior to purchasing. It is worth asking the vendor whether they offer free trials. If not, consider watching video tutorials, attending webinars and shadowing another clinician using the EHR.
2. Underestimating the importance of an implementation plan
To ensure the smoothest transition possible, develop an implementation plan that will introduce you to your new EHR and also help you identify specific questions to ask the vendor. Your EHR vendor will likely have one to give you – just ask.
At a minimum, a useful implementation guide should tell you how to do the following:
Guest post Michelle Blackmer, director of marketing, Healthcare, Informatica.
The Affordable Care Act is commonly surrounded by words, such as “analytics,” “electronic medical record (EMR)” and “population health,” routinely trumping the word that matters the most, the center and driver of the law: the “patient.”
A recent EMR Patient Impact Survey compiled by Aeffect, Inc. & 88 Brand Partners, illustrates that patients are experiencing a personal benefit of EMR adoption:
82 percent of patients visiting doctors that use an EMR believe they are receiving better care,
68 percent appreciate the convenience of being able to check for medical records and test results, and
44 percent, or almost half, of these respondents say they have a more positive impression of their doctor because he/she uses an EMR.
However, beyond these early and obvious benefits offered by information technology – convenience and improved service – there are more meaningful benefits ahead. Insights will be revealed that will change healthcare in ways we can’t even imagine. The adoption of EMRs is generating useful, consumable and sharable electronic data. It is also creating a forum to inspire and collect patient-generated data, including health history, symptoms, biometric data, treatment history and lifestyle choices.
According to a new report from digital health consultancy DrBonnie360, there are now an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare realm, and this volume is rapidly increasing. In fact, many Informatica healthcare customers have reported significant data volume growth. For example, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center recently communicated that its data storage (storage alone) is growing at 40 percent a year.
Today’s healthcare system is becoming progressively technology dependent. With the need to meet meaningful use requirements, convert to ICD-10, or work with health information exchanges (HIEs), healthcare organizations must have effective IT solutions, but building and implementing one successfully is not an easy task.
Below is a list of 10 fundamentals of successful healthcare IT project implementation, management and execution that will help your organization, whether clinical, business, or IT, design and develop a functional, patient-centered IT solution that fits its needs. It’s easy to let the highly technical elements overwhelm healthcare IT projects, but following these guidelines will help your team focus on the delivery of care.
Plan
Develop your plan with a detailed project introduction, clear scope, deliverables, schedules, project methodology, roles and responsibilities, and change management procedures. Consult ISO 9001/13485/62385 for information on best practices for quality management systems.
Healthcare IT projects involve a lot of moving parts and many people from different professional backgrounds. Setting clear expectations that every project member agrees on will ensure a project runs efficiently. Meeting regulatory requirements, including meaningful use goals, is a crucial aspect of carrying out a successful healthcare IT project.
Set goals and objectives
Early on in the process, involve key players – clinical, business, and IT – in determining the goals and objectives of the project. Ask your team to agree on a definition of success. Depending on the project, involving patients may be valuable. A patient portal project is an ideal situation to solicit feedback from patients.
Adapt to changing objectives
Implement effective change management procedures to your plan to ensure that the project meets the goals on-time and within budget.
Change management is important in every project, in every industry. It is particularly important at this time in healthcare. Healthcare reform and government mandates, such as Meaningful Use, are ever-changing. Recently, the deadline for compliance with ICD10 was pushed back a year. If your organization was close to a switchover, ask your project team how those changing objectives impact your plan and your goals.
Mobile devices are completely ingrained in the fabric of our daily lives – from personal use to business – throughout the world.
The healthcare industry, usually resistant to the whims of technology trends, has been a fast and significant adopter of mobile devices. Apple’s introduction of the iPad appears to have been a watershed that brought healthcare IT into the 21st century. Besides improved efficiency in communication and administrative functions, clinicians found the devices much more practical to incorporate to patient interactions – from consultation to education. Now mobile devices have become almost indispensable in the daily care of patients. Physicians use smart phones and tablets wherever they review patient records, receive updates or alerts by secure text messaging and coordinate care among other clinicians. Care professionals are connected to health information like never before.
Telehealth has “connected” patients and physicians for decades in an attempt to deliver proactive healthcare, but mobile devices and cloud-based technologies are making remote healthcare more practical. Still, we are just scratching the surface as to what a “connected healthcare system” can look like. Despite strides, we still need to tie it all together: patients, physicians, devices, data, analytics, decision support, monitoring services and education – to achieve the best outcomes for our patients.
A connected patient is more compliant with a better chance to attain better outcomes. A connected provider has access to better information to make better decisions. The common goal is to keep the patient out of the hospital, lower costs, reduce the strain on an already strained healthcare system and provide better outcomes. How we implement the goal of a connected healthcare system is the challenge.
In assessing how to best utilize mobile technology with patients and providers, my belief is that one solution doesn’t fit all. We must align the right technology with the right patients. Smart phones and tablets with complex apps and expensive data plans may be common in demographic groups that may skew younger, or those with higher technical literacy and dexterity and more disposable income. Simpler technology using month-to-month or prepaid service plans may better suit seniors and those with limited and fixed incomes. Meaningful change will come faster by focusing on the 15 percent of the population that consumes 80 percent of healthcare costs. This segment traditionally includes the elderly and indigent, Medicare/Medicaid population. This group doesn’t overwhelmingly consume the “latest and greatest” devices with the hottest apps and seamless connectivity – 4G, Bluetooth, WiFi and syncing to the cloud is not reality. We must be realistic when we propose solutions to address something as important as the delivery of patient care, providing the right technology to meet the needs of the people using it. Acquiring the right data, at the right time, and right cost, to achieve the right (better) outcome for the patient.
