MEA|NEA Acquires The White Stone Group to Secure Patient Data, Close Healthcare Communication Gaps

Guest post by Lindy Benton, CEO and president, MEA|NEA.

Lindy Benton
Lindy Benton

For nearly 20 years, MEA|NEA has provided secure health information exchange to medical and dental providers. We are growing, in an effort to provide our clients with even more options to achieve the best in secure information exchange and healthcare communications. Recently we announced that MEA|NEA acquired The White Stone Group, Inc., a best-in class provider of healthcare communication management solutions. The reason why is simple: To create a single, integrated platform for the secure exchange of protected health information and communication management between patients, providers, payers and health plans.

The White Stone Group’s products, led by its Trace communication suite, strengthen and complement MEA|NEA’s current portfolio of HIPAA-compliant solutions for health information exchange and revenue cycle management. Combining the two proven technology solutions gives our clients one place to find the best in secure exchange of health information and efficient management of healthcare communication including voice, fax, image, data and electronic documents. Our clients will benefit by seeing a reduction in denied claims, improved cash flow, increased up-front collections, reduced readmissions and improved HCAHPS scores.

Even though we’re growing, the work we do will remain committed to empowering medical and dental providers, payers, health plans and partners who work with us to achieve efficiency and cost-savings. In fact, together as a collective effort, our solutions will better serve clients in their ability to more effectively manage critical patient information that typically resides outside the electronic health record, and close gaps in documentation and improving the continuum care through a fully accessible patient record.

As a combined effort, we’ll go forward serving more than one million customers across the medical and dental markets. Specifically, MEA|NEA will now consist of two complementary business units — one focused on providers, patients and payers in the dental space and the other focused on the same audiences in the medical space. We are now more dedicated than ever to advancing healthcare delivery by improving coordination of patient information and closing gaps in communication processes across the continuum of care. We’ll do this through a suite of highly-integrated software solutions that facilitate the secure exchange of health information and the efficient management of healthcare communication.

As such, we’ll continue to deliver added functionality for each solution in our set and support our clients in their current environments while bringing the best of each solution together on a common client-facing delivery model. We also plan to add new functionality to the foundation of the combined platforms to create best-in-class solutions that establish competitive differentiation in the markets we serve, even expanding into new areas as opportunities present themselves. We also remain dedicated to ensuring that physician, patient and payer information is protected with state-of-the-art security while maintaining client confidentiality.

Medical and dental organizations now only have to partner with a single provider for secure, centralized management and exchange of critical healthcare information and communication through one electronic platform. The result is a complete view of patient information exchanged across the continuum of care from pre-service to post-discharge. Today, more than 500 hospitals and 55,000 dental offices leverage this data to boost financial and operational performance, streamline care coordination and enhance patient experiences.

Our clients will experience benefits in the areas including, but definitely not limited to:

We’re excited to be able to provide all of our existing MEA|NEA clients with access to the Trace® platform, which provides centralized access to communication for more efficient scheduling, coordination and reimbursement of care among hospitals and dental practices. The White Stone Group’s existing client base of more than 400 hospital organizations will gain access to secure electronic information exchange technology from the nation’s leading CMS Health Information Handler (HIH) in the Electronic Submission of Medical Documentation (esMD) program. The White Stone Group’s clients also will have access to MEA|NEA’s FastAttach electronic claim attachment solution, which will enable providers to submit secure documentation via the CONNECT gateway for participation in the esMD program.

Going forward, the new company will maintain operations in Norcross, Georgia and Knoxville, Tennessee. As you might expect, there will likely be some changes in the works, like new branding and marketing efforts, as well as new product offerings. We’ll also seek to identify ways to gather feedback from clients as we focus on how to best serve their needs and provide the most appropriate solutions for secure information exchange and communication management.

It’s an exciting time for our current and future clients in medical and dental practices, hospitals and health systems as well as the hundreds of payers and partners we work with across the US. We look forward to the days ahead and thank them all for being a part of this journey and for supporting our work now and in the future.


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