Catavolt did not start small with its health IT modernization push. The software company has been hunting for whales in the healthcare world since the beginning.
“Our system works best for organizations that have enough breadth: multiple back ends, many users, a regulatory environment,” said George Mashini, the CEO and co-founder of Catavolt.
The company’s first healthcare client was a large home healthcare and hospice provider. Mashini said that this company was an early adopter because their employees were out in the community collecting lots of data.
“They were dealing with multiple backend systems due to consolidation,” he said.
The system had to work for point of care aides, nurses and care managers and work for many skills sets, and the data had to be shared among all these groups.
Catavolt has grown to work with medical device companies, hospitals and even pharma companies.
The company’s original thesis was that the way people maintain and store information is going to change slowly, but that the way that they will want to interact with the information will change quickly.
“Ten years from now, or even five, every business process is going to be impacted by mobility and access to data,” he said.
Mashini promises customers that his team can help them move from idea to business returns in 60 days.
“In 60 days you’ll know if it worked,” he said. “And if it didn’t, it didn’t leave a scar.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Here’s how it works.
An app for a particular function is usually the initial deployment. Catavolt works with a client to figure out what data or process needs to be available on mobile devices.
“It’s not an off-the-shelf thing,” Mashini said. “They could rethink their business processes at this point.”
Catavolt puts its software inside a hospital’s firewall and talks to the existing system in its native code. The next step is to translate all this data into a single, generic language and use the cloud to deliver the information where it needs to go.
Catavolt’s software doesn’t store any back end enterprise data in the cloud or on the mobile device. The application streams encrypted enterprise data through the cloud to mobile devices, using the cloud as a presentation layer.
Mashini and Catavolt’s CTO Glenn Osborne hold a patent for the company’s technology, a system and method for mapping requests on a logical model to requests on a physical model.
Mashini said that one of the top five payers in the country is on his platform.
“With them, it’s the first time they are able to get data from inside their four walls onto people’s devices,” he said.
Mashini described how Catavolt worked with a medical device company to speed up the production process. The client makes devices for surgeries and each one has to be made for each patient. With the old process, the hospital rep would first talk to the surgeon, then go back to the manufacturer to get a specification, then go back to the doctor for more revisions.
Catavolt moved the process to an iPad and streamlined the data collection, allowing one data entry session to get the information into multiple backend systems.
“The rep can review the device with the docs right then and there which reduces the lead time to surgery,” he said, “which makes them a better provider for the doc.”
He said that company plans to expand to other business processes, such as patient intake and resident review.
“Mobile in general in a very hard business,” Mashini said. “Powerful and simple is a hard combination.”
Machini said that selling his software has gotten easier over the last nine months. He said he has seen process improvement move from a nice to have on the priority list to #2 on the list.
“If I tried to sell this 5 or 6 years ago, they wouldn’t have wanted to move as fast as 60 days,” he said.
The company was founded in 2008 and is based in Alpharetta, GA. Catavolt raised an investment round in 2013 and doubled its revenue base last year. Mashini said he wants to do the same this year. Customers are charged by the number of users on the system. Mashini said that in the first half of 2014, customers increased their subscriptions.
“We want to be the mobile platform for business process modernization,” he said.
https://flic.kr/p/61fuU pete ashton
https://flic.kr/p/st5Gc Barney Livingston
