Sep 15
2015
Health IT Startup: ACT.md
Physicians can now get reimbursed for the coordination effort that is involved in managing a patient following a hospital discharge. ACT.md’s TCM-specific Health ACT Sets facilitate a structured, standardized, and proven process for optimal care coordination to reduce hospital re-admissions and support TCM billing. The ACT Sets are structured in a way for providers to assess complexity, complete care actions required by CMS, and follow specific time sensitive requirements for care delivery and billing. ACT.md takes the complexity out of the TCM Billing process and pays for itself within months.
Elevator pitch
ACT.md is the platform for team-based care. Care teams need a way to jointly manage medical conditions in concert with behavioral, social, and functional needs. With ACT.md’s high-tech, high-touch platform and project management-like approach, healthcare organizations can engage in collaborative care planning, efficiently manage in-between visit care, and make safe, reliable handoffs across the care continuum. Our customers have seen a 30 percent reduction in the time spent on care coordination activities and improved compliance to care plans through meaningful caregiver and patient engagement.
Product/service description
Through an elegant and intuitive cloud-based technology, the web-based solution connects all members of a dynamic care team, including the patient and their trusted caregivers. We enable our customers to efficiently develop, reliably execute, and securely communicate a patient-centered care plan across their teams. The technology is complimented with a flexible care coordination workforce service offering to ensure nothing falls through the cracks and clinicians are working at the top of their license.
Origin story
“At ACT.md we are patients, caregivers, physicians, nurses, public health professionals, engineers, and operational leaders. We have personally experienced the significant challenges associated with managing complex care and are working to make life better for patients and everyone supporting them,” said Ted Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder, ACT.md.
Founder’s story
The company was founded by Ted Quinn along with Ken Mandl, MD and Zak Kohane, MD, both nationally-renowned healthcare informatics experts. The company was incubated at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Innovation Lab.
“We were inspired to launch ACT.md after observing for decades the constant dropped handoffs across the various providers caring for patients. So we created ACT.md as an operating system for team-based care that drives action toward improved outcomes and reduced costs,” said Dr. Kenneth Mandl, co-founder, ACT.md, professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Every healthcare entity is dealing with change management around care delivery and care coordination. We’re sharing our vision of team-based care and it is resonating with the market.
We’re proud to work with our world-renowned advisory board – including John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Troy Brennan, MD, CMO at CVS Caremark – who help us share our vision with the nation’s leading providers and payers.
Market opportunity
According to Frost & Sullivan, the care coordination software market is expected to grow at a 26.1 percent compound annual growth rate between 2015 and 2020.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition
EMR/EHR vendors are the incumbents in the market, but they are not designed to do this job. Up to 70 percent of provider/patient work is conducted in the informal region outside the EMR, especially work related to the coordination of care. We have heard directly from healthcare organizations we are working with that with the leading EMR there is no way to track the status of handoffs, connect with outside providers and family caregivers, and that they really need a Care Coordination Record. This is the job that ACT.md is being hired to do, and we are getting traction with large health systems across the country.
ACT.md shines in complex care settings. The company is focused on powering team-based care for high-risk, high-cost patients.