Health IT company RegisterPatient has created a flexible system to cut doctor office waiting times.
It hopes the platform for physician practices will make the process of going for doctors’ appointments less stressful, more efficient. Using a HIPAA compliant Facebook app, it helps patients start the registration process from home, request appointments, prescription refills and send secure messages and documents to a practice’s office.
It is also expanding its enterprise side, which has services for physicians and electronic medical record vendors that can be provided one module at a time.
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When CEO and founder David Williams was in the early days of setting up his Gainesville, Florida business, the technology landscape was quite different from what it is now, according to Chief Operating Officer James Davis. Internet connection outside of major cities was relatively slow, video-facing technology was not common and the smartest phones were Palm Pilots.
In 2009, about a year after RegisterPatient entered Synogen’s incubator program, the company got a board together. But the board members would invest only if Williams quit his full-time gig as a nurse and joined RegisterPatient full time, a move that required a big pay cut. Five of his six children are currently in college, with the youngest in high school. It graduated from the incubator in 2011.
The company believes that if patients can fill out registration documents from home, it will reduce the amount of time wasted in the doctors office, particularly if patients are running late for an appointment. If patients have the time to fill out the documents ahead of time, they won’t be liable to feel as rushed and won’t be as likely to leave out vital information, the company reasons.
“If patients are rushed, you don’t get good information. There are ramifications for their treatment plan and for billing codes,” said Davis.
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Its personal health record, Patient PHR, helps users locate new providers, list appointments, medications, allergies and insurance information. If the physician uses an integrated version of the company’s enterprise solution, the patient data flows into and is shared with any provider the patient approves, like a patient-centric healthcare information exchange.
The company’s enterprise system for EMR vendors helps them more easily integrate content into their systems and reflects feedback collected from EMR vendors over several years, said Davis. Although Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements only came out last month, the company already has a module for companies that reflects those new requirements. Davis said it provides services to EMR vendors that would be too costly for many of them to develop themselves.
