Innovation. It’s such a loaded term these days, especially in the world of healthcare IT. Depending on whose company you’re in, a conversation about innovation can go one of three ways: excited dialogue about movers and shakers behind up and coming clinical IT solutions; a shaking of heads due to the plethora of nearly identical health and wellness app companies that have sprung up; or a diatribe about the lack of truly scaleable innovation and barriers to adoption thanks to government regulation.
Still, I’m intrigued by the concept, and the potential anything labeled innovative has for improving patient care. I’m nearing the end of a yearlong event-marketing project (part of a two-year stint) for the Health IT Leadership Summit, which traditionally has included presentation of the Intel Innovation Award to one deserving finalist. Now that I’m an organizing committee “insider,” I decided to dig a little deeper with each of the four finalists – IPG, Greenway Medical, Bioscape Digital and Velocity Medical – to determine what makes each of their solutions truly unique, and, more importantly, game-changing for providers and patients.
Bioscape Digital offers technology that utilizes movie-quality, 3-D imagery to create customizable content to help patients visualize information in an intuitive and engaging manner, rendering posters, plastic models, pamphlets and outdated websites obsolete. This makes me wonder if my college friend’s degree in medical illustration will soon become obsolete (if it hasn’t already). CEO Stuart Bracken tells me that “Patients love the fact their providers are making the ‘extra effort’ to deliver care. Whether it’s a patient with high anxiety about her mammogram, or a patient being discharged from the ER, our platform enables providers to efficiently alter the entire experience and ultimately drive care that leaves a lasting impression.”
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Bracken mentioned the Bioscape solution can integrate with EMRs and help providers meet several Meaningful Use criteria, but it seems his team is focusing more on communication with the patient, rather than data collection. My take is that Bioscape’s innovation may well take off if it can find that perfect foothold in the world of patient engagement technologies. It might also have some play in helping providers ramp up patient satisfaction scores, and subsequent patient referrals.
Velocity Medical has developed a dashboard for oncologists and their care teams that embraces the workflow for cancer care, enabling the entire team to work together in creating treatment plans and assessing a patient’s response to therapy. Tim Fox, co-founder of the company and an associate professor at Emory University, tells me, “Silos of treatment and clinical unstructured data for cancer patients are scattered in many different sources including PACs, EMRs, CDs and oncology information systems. Using advanced imaging registration algorithms, Velocity aligns the unstructured imaging and treatment data, giving the care team a more complete picture of the patient’s longitudinal record. By using Velocity, cancer care teams create a clinical knowledge base with new opportunities for understanding patients, both as individuals and as part of a population.”
Fox adds, “Velocity’s clinical intelligence solution provides the platform to create a clinical knowledge repository on every patient treated, and to deliver analytics to assist providers with medical decisions. Using this knowledge base, population-based analytics can be performed to help oncologists understand how they are treating their patients for outcomes research and reporting.”
I think it’s the population health management angle that makes Velocity’s technology exciting – and that’s speaking from both an idealist’s and an investor’s point of view. I wonder if this will ultimately compete or complement clinical decision-making tools like IBM’s Watson.
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Greenway Medical, perhaps the best known of the bunch, offers PrimeMOBILE, part of the company’s core PrimeSUITE EMR. Just as the name implies, PrimeMOBILE enables healthcare providers to access patient data and other functionality remotely, whether it’s making rounds in the hospital, responding to an on-call question while at home, or giving a provider the option to enter data in the exam room without turning away from the patient. According to Brian Bracey, Industry Affairs Manager at Greenway, PrimeMOBILE can help reduce costs, increase volume, improve accuracy, streamline workflows, save time by reducing manual input of data and improve care quality and safety. He also tells me that providers love the virtually anywhere, anytime access to patient data PrimeMOBILE provides, as well as the fact that it syncs with a number of different mobile devices.
As more and more providers look to mobile solutions as part of their overall Meaningful Use strategy, it seems logical to think that adoption of PrimeMOBILE will catch on. We’ll have to wait and see how the Greenway/Vitera acquisition plays out to see if it will move beyond the next iteration, which Bracey tells me will include eprescribing and clinical documentation.
And last but not least is IPG, the sole finalist that touches on the payer and medical device space. Its Device Benefit Management Solution streamlines the management and delivery of implantable devices by providing a collaborative solution with health plans, clinical providers, facilities and medical device manufacturers. It enables health plans and employers to compare device costs and utilization with quality and outcome performance to assess affordability and quality of their networks.
While I couldn’t get in touch with anyone at IPG, it seems that a solution like that has the potential to decrease costs for a number of stakeholders, makes sense, at least in theory. And with possible repeal of the medical device tax in the news lately, it might be an innovation that resonates more than it might otherwise have (Thanks government shutdown!).
So tell me, who do you think should win? Which innovation is the most innovative? More importantly, which one has the biggest potential to improve patient care? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
