Electronic Health Reporter

In 2011, hc1 was born from the belief that every patient is unique and should be treated that way. When the high-value care movement began, healthcare organizations focused on increasing value through cutting costs, but hc1 knew that sustainable high-value care could only come through improving patient outcomes.

hc1 set about to determine how it could help achieve this goal: Tap into the heartbeat of healthcare—laboratory data. If labs could organize every individual’s information intelligently, they could unlock an unprecedented level of clinical decision support to personalize and improve care for all patients.

Today the hc1 High-Value Care Platform eliminates waste and personalizes care for health systems and diagnostic laboratories nationwide by turning previously static lab data into actionable healthcare insights. Its flagship products, hc1 CRM and hc1 Test Utilization, helped forge a broad set of laboratory and health system partnerships.

Building upon this foundation, in 2018 it introduced a new era of high-value care—precision prescribing—when we invented hc1 Opioid Advisor and hc1 PGx Advisor, which leverage the hc1 platform to optimize medications using targeted pharmacogenetics and medication usage analysis. hc1 PGx Advisor empowers physicians to make personalized prescribing decisions supported by clinical pharmacists with access to holistic patient information, including genetics.

Using the hc1 platform, health systems can improve clinical outcomes and reduce medical spend in these ways:

• Helping labs better serve their physicians and patients
• Ordering all of the tests (and only the tests) a patient needs to achieve timely, accurate diagnosis and treatment
• Identifying the right drugs based on each patient’s unique genetic markers
• Prescribing drugs with the lowest risk of therapy failure and adverse side effects based on a patient’s complete pharmacological history and lifestyle

hc1 is based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

What is the single-most innovative technology you are currently delivering to health systems or medical groups? How is your product or service innovating the work being done in these organization to provide care or make systems run smoother?

hc1’s High-Value Care Platform is able to improve clinical outcomes and reduce medical spend at an unprecedented rate by:

1) helping labs better serve physicians and patients;

2) helping healthcare providers order all of the tests (and only the tests) patients truly need to achieve timely, accurate diagnosis and treatment;

3) identifying the right drugs for patients based on unique genetic markers; and

4) helping healthcare providers prescribe drugs with the lowest risk of therapy failure and adverse side effects based on complete pharmacological history and lifestyle.

The hc1 platform powers six different solutions and processes about 30 million results each day to deliver clinical decision-making support to more than 1,000 health systems, which combined touch 84 million patient lives.

What is the primary need fulfilled by the product or service?

For decades patients have been inadvertently over-tested, misdiagnosed and over-prescribed ineffective medication cocktails – simply because doctors, pharmacists and laboratories didn’t have access to complete patient information. In rare cases when these data sets were accessible, there was no user-friendly framework in place to make them actionable to personalize patient care.

hc1 believed if labs could organize patient information intelligently, they could unlock an unprecedented level of clinical decision support to personalize and improve care for all patients. In response, in 2011, the hc1 High-Value Care Platform was built.

What is the ROI of said product or service? Provide real examples of verifiable ROI of the product or service when used in or by a health system or medial group. 

hc1 has shown proven success and ROI for their clients. Many clients are able to utilize the clean data provided through the platform to inform growth-oriented decisions that further boost the client’s ROI. Below are just a few examples that illustrate hc1’s proven success for clients.

Example 1: In 2017, Bronson Healthcare Group was able to utilize hc1 solutions built on the platform to access real-time insights. These insights influenced Bronson’s decision to implement an impactful outreach program to increase long-term lab revenue. The results were outstanding. Implementing the new strategy that was developed using hc1’s platform, the outreach program in a Midwest lab location grew by 90% in 4 years and Bronson’s outreach program was projected to grow at 80% in the following 7 years.

Example 2: Incyte Diagnostics realized the impact of unifying data for their employees to log all client interactions and proactively manage client issues was profound. In 2016, with the addition of hc1, Incyte was able to exceed their sales growth goal by 107%, retain 99.51% of current business, reduce the overall workload of the Client Services team by 6.25%, and gained 32 additional days-worth of field time for sales reps. The lab even began using data analytics to negotiate better payor reimbursement rates. Instead of being viewed as a cost-center, Incyte is known as a value-add healthcare organization. The lab equips payors with the data necessary to show clinician ordering behaviors and methods to influence test utilization and reduce unnecessary orders.

Example 3: Eskenazi Health was experiencing issues regarding patient engagement. “No shows” were costing the health system millions of dollars a year. hc1 activated a streamlined process of patient experience reporting and patient communication processes. The results were outstanding. With detailed insight into the patient experience, the health system saw a 9% decrease in no-shows from January through March of 2015. This is in spite of an increase of 1,750 more appointments scheduled in March compared to January of the same year. With the average surgery cost estimated to be around $15,000, a 9% decrease in no-shows recaptured Eskenazi millions in just three months. At that rate, they were on pace to capture upwards of 10 million dollars in twelve months. By treating patients as individuals instead of just a number, Eskenazi can now “mass customize” the care experience on a scalable level. Within three months of using hc1’s automated communication, the hospital saw the patient no-show rate dip below 31% for the first time ever with the help of hc1’s engagement solution. In addition, targeted marketing campaigns and expanded patient communication touchpoints build a culture of engagement, resulting in both a large near-term return and a long-term partnership that enables them to continuously enhance the patient experience moving forward.

Who are some of the clients and organizations served by the company? Name them.

Today, the more than 1,000 health systems using hc1’s High-Value Care Platform. hc1’s largest client base consists of Quest Diagnostics, Sonora Quest Laboratories, McLaren Health System, and DrugScan.

In early April 2020, hc1 utilized the power of the platform and created the CV19 Lab Testing Dashboard for any public health, public policy, healthcare, and laboratory decision-makers who need hyper-local insights into COVID-19 testing rates, positivity rates, and risk of increasing viral activity. Some of the highest volume labs in the United States have joined hc1 to deliver the data contained in this dashboard, resulting in more than 20,000 ordering locations included in the dashboard. Within two months, over 1,000 registered users are utilizing the CV19 Lab Testing dashboard to prevent and mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

How has the innovation advanced the field of healthcare or the practice of care?

At the outset of the high-value care movement, healthcare organizations focused on increasing value simply by cutting costs, but hc1 knew that sustainable value enhancement could only come from reducing cost by improving outcomes. The High-Value Care Platform was created to drive high-value care to patients by making sure healthcare professionals had access to complete data and patient information.

hc1’s flagship products built on the platform, hc1 Lab CRM, hc1 Lab Operational Analytics and hc1 Test Utilization, have helped forge a broad set of lab and health system partnerships. In 2018, hc1 expanded the promise of the platform by introducing a new era of high-value care – precision prescribing. hc1 PGx Advisor, a pharmacogenomics tool, empowers physicians to make personalized prescribing decisions by providing data-rich insights on medications that have a lower risk of therapy failure and adverse side effects. hc1 Opioid Advisor, automates the complex tasks opioid prescribers face when monitoring patients according to guidelines. The solution creates a clear picture of patients’ medication use by comparing drug test results with state prescription drug monitoring program data.

With the creation of the CV19 Lab Testing Dashboard for any public health, public policy, healthcare, and laboratory decision-makers, hc1 is able to provide local lab testing insights that include state, county, and sub-county views of hc1’s Local Risk Index, COVID-19 testing rates, de-identified test results, and key demographic filters for those tested. These insights can be used to understand where COVID-19 infection is accelerating, identify where local resources will be strained in the next 5 to 21 days, and prepare before they are required. The Local Risk Index (LRI) at the local county and sub-county level traces the acceleration (or deceleration) of the % of those tested that have Detected (+) CoV-2 results. Over 1000 registered users are currently utilizing the CV19 Lab Testing dashboard to prevent and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 with additional users registering each day since the product launch.

How is the innovation changing lives — specifically?

Since its creation in 2011, the platform has completed more than 20 billion clinical transactions, ingested more than 160 million unique patient profiles, and is impacting more than 95 million patients.

The hc1 Platform is helping healthcare providers order all of the tests (and only the tests) patients truly need to achieve timely, accurate diagnosis and treatment, identify the right drugs for patients based on unique genetic markers, and prescribe drugs with the lowest risk of therapy failure and adverse side effects based on complete pharmacological history and lifestyle.

Illnesses and deaths resulting from non-optimized medication therapy cost the U.S. healthcare system more than $528 billion a year. Reducing overall costs while improving treatment requires an accurate and optimized medication regimen. Among typical working-age adults, average savings expected from implementation of PGx Advisor, one of the solutions built on the hc1 Platform, are more than $720 per person, per year. Among seniors, who carry even higher polypharmacy risk, savings are expected at more than $1,228 per person per year.

What is the company’s go-forward strategy? What’s next, which problem is the organization working on now, and in the future?

hc1 is continuously focusing on the company’s mission of ensuring patients get the right test and right prescription at the right time. Because of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, hc1 utilized the data gathered and ingested through the hc1 High-Value Care Platform to create the CV19 Lab Testing Dashboard powered by hc1.

hc1’s dedication to bettering care for patients influenced the decision to provide this dashboard as a free resource to public health, public policy, healthcare, and laboratory decision-makers who need hyper-local insights into COVID-19 testing rates, positivity rates, and risk of increasing viral activity.

In the future, hc1 is helping employers come back to work with hc1 Workforce Advisor™, the only solution to securely integrate real-time lab results into a Command Center and Digital ID to use in assessing and monitoring adherence to COVID-19 policies. Added mobile app features enable Entrance Control and Contact Tracing when needed. hc1 was able to utilize the CV19 Dashboard data and insights provided through the High-Value Care Platform in order to create Workforce Advisor and help employers bring their workforces back in confidence.

What is the most significant lesson learned by delivering the innovation, product or service to health systems or medical group?

The most significant lesson learned is the realization that when organizations have access to streamlined and real-time data across all services and departments within their organizations, they are able to unlock and understand more about their work and services than they ever were able to before. And, in turn, they can improve in the areas where they are lacking.

hc1 has seen significant amounts of time, resources, and money saved by their clients. One lab organization was able to reduce the labor necessary to pull their daily performance report from 5 hours a day to just 45 minutes a day. Another client, American Senior Communities, stated, “We saw immediate value in the transparency hc1 brought to our team. hc1 equipped our team with the ability to proactively track and manage everything in one platform across multiple facilities, in turn becoming a strategic, value-focused partner to our referring providers.”

Quotes similar to these are not uncommon. Cordant Health Solutions shared that through hc1 they now have the real time knowledge necessary to anticipate client challenges and better prepare their team to provide top-tier customer service that further differentiates its laboratories.

The hc1 High-Value Care Platform is the missing ingredient for any health system, laboratory, or health plan looking to improve their business. It allows a shift in focus from data management and organization to more time spent on improving organizational practices, and more importantly, to allow more time to be spent on making sure the patient gets the right test, the right prescription, and the right treatment.