Dr. Lyle Berkowitz
The idea that application programming interfaces can help get electronic medical records closer to the elusive goal of interoperability has gained steam in the last couple of years, particularly with APIs being included in Meaningful Use Stage 3 regulations. It’s not a new notion, though.
“The idea of the EMR as a platform was something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” said Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, chairman and co-founder of healthfinch, a Madison, Wisconsin-based startup that builds what Berkowitz called “EMR extender tools.”
As the year began, healthfinch announced that it had closed a $7.5 million Series A round of venture capital, led by Adams Street Partners. Healthfinch has raised $10 million to date, including a $1.5 million pickup in March 2015.
At Mayo Clinic’s Innovation Summit in 2010, Berkowitz gave an eight-minute presentation on the future of electronic medical records. “The future will be extenders that sit on top of the EMR,” Berkowitz recalled saying then.
Jonathan Baran, then a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, saw that talk and approached Berkowitz afterwards to discuss starting a company to make such extenders. At the 2011 HIMSS conference, they signed the paperwork to start healthfinch, then quickly built the minimum viable product and put it up on the Web. That evolved into Swoop, a tool that integrates with EMRs to automate workflow for refilling prescriptions.
“There are a lot of errors in refills,” noted Berkowitz, a practicing internist who also serves as associate CMO of innovation at Northwestern Memorial Healthcare in Chicago. For example, pharmacists frequently send physicians refill requests for medications the doctors have discontinued. Swoop looks for dosage changes, laboratory results that could change prescriptions and records of preventive care.
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.
With the new money, healthfinch plans on building out a practice automation platform called Charlie and hiring engineers, implementation experts and salespeople, said Berkowitz. Healthfinch currently has about 30 employees, and expects that number to top 50 by year’s end.
Berkowitz said healthfinch operates under a philosophy called “SAD,” for “simplify, automate and delegate.” The idea is to automate and delegate whenever possible, and simplify repetitive processes that physicians do not get paid for, he explained.
Technology needs to make life easier for physicians, according to Berkowitz. “Usability isn’t about making interfaces prettier,” he said.
“We use refills as a proxy for an engaged patient,” Berkowitz said of Swoop. “It’s a perfect time to see if they’re due for other care.”
With Charlie, healthfinch is now focusing on pre- and post-visit processes, including the filling out of patient history forms, insurance authorization, referrals and scheduling of follow-up care — processes related to contacting patients.
“We’re trying to bring the joy back into medicine,” Berkowitz said.
