Health IT, Payers

In health IT, workflow and integration matter

Data must be easy to access because there will be little compliance with quality-improvement activities if physicians have to log into more than one system and click through multiple screens to find relevant clinical data on their patients, said Health Fidelity CEO Steve Whitehurst.

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions used to have an unofficial slogan: “If doctors don’t use it, nothing else matters.”

That phrase came to mind today while talking to Steve Whitehurst, CEO of Health Fidelity, a San Mateo, California-based supplier of analytics and natural-language processing technology that counts the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center among its investors.

“The data has to be at the point of care,” Whitehurst said. It must be easy to get to because there will be little compliance with quality-improvement activities if physicians have to log into more than one system and click through multiple screens to find relevant clinical data on their patients, he explained.

That means the analytics and NLP technology has to be integrated with electronic health records. “Our 2016 plan is to provide integration workflow” for customers, Whitehurst told MedCity News.

Whitehurst joined the company in November 2014, in time to lead Health Fidelity’s rollout early this year combined analytics/NLP tool. The software was originally designed for payers to aggregate and manage data in the context of risk adjustment, but it’s increasingly being used by providers; Whitehurst said 30 percent of business in recent months has come from the provider market.

“It’s almost a connector to the population health market,” he said.

 

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