AirStrip CEO Alan Portela is hoping that his experience at the upcoming HIMSS conference will be a lot better than last year. No, he’s not referring to the water contamination problems that affected downtown New Orleans. He’s talking about when he was hit as he crossed the street by a car of “loaded” teens. Portela jokingly recalls that he wondered if an EHR provider hadn’t called in a hit on him.
One year after it launched AirStrip ONE — a platform that allows clinical data from vital signs, allergies, medications, medical images and lab results to be pulled from disparate EMR systems and aggregated in one screen for mobile devices and desktops, it has done more to further interoperability than a lot of EMR providers have. Some have called for federal oversight to get these healthcare IT companies to make more of an effort.
To date, Portela says, the company works with 500 providers with Airstrip ONE as well as its FDA-cleared solution that aggregates data from cardiology and fetal monitoring devices onto mobile devices to allow physicians to provide remote monitoring for patients.
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Now the company is adding more tools that will help it support accountable care organizations. AirStrip launched a program that partners with providers, technology companies, academic institutions and the public sector and provides a way to drive commercialization of clinical decision support tools that support interoperability. Some will focus on heart disease and critical care. It can aggregate demographic data for cardiology patients, ancillary results, provide diagnostics and clinical protocols and view performance.
This week AirStrip said it was collaborating with MedStar Health health system in Maryland and Washington D.C. to develop enhanced cardiac diagnostic visualizations. A collaboration with University of Michigan’s Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (MCIRCC) will involve physicians and engineers working with AirStrip to develop a commercially viable clinical decision support platform that will enable clinicians to make faster decisions and implement patient-centric treatment options to improve outcomes.
The goal is to commercialize applications using its mobility platform to improve outcomes and reduce costs. In addition to cardiology and women’s health, its innovation marketplace program will also include diabetes and oncology.
Although groups are still trying to figure out how to make the ACO model work so that they can reduce the cost of care and still improve outcomes for patients with one or more chronic diseases, interoperability challenges between providers with disparate EMR systems has been one of the obstacles. Helping providers exchange and easily aggregate patient data is essential to getting beyond that.
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In September last year it began rolling out Windows compatable versions of its AirStrip One platform as part of Microsoft’s AppsforSurface program. Portela said it will soon partner with telemedicine providers.
Portela has made the case that AirStrip’s platform helps address the problems that the consolidation of healthcare systems has exacerbated: a group of hospitals with totally different electronic medical record systems that need to share patient information with each other.
With the healthcare industry facing a growing physician shortage if the millions that are expected to be added to the healthcare system materialize and with reimbursement rates projected to fall for Medicare, hospitals are under more pressure than ever to reduce costs. That “perfect storm” of market pressures is what Portela has been counting on and he believes that Airstrip’s approach to building a platform that aggregates data from disparate medical device and EHR and EMR systems will make it indispensable in the future of healthcare.
