South Carolina-based mobile health startup ChartSpan Medical Technologies would like you to quit wasting so much paper.
Although recycling and avoiding waste is obviously important for environmental reasons, for ChartSpan this is more about giving patients a way to store, manage and transport health records (from many providers and sources) in a comprehensive way. Its way only involves your mobile device – providing a new level of interoperability for the future and involves less people losing their minds in a pile of files.
ChartSpan recently raised $3 million in capital thus far, which is allowing them to continue growth in development and marketing. But as CEO Jon-Michial Carter explains, for ChartSpan, the goal is to focus on healthcare, not just medical care.
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“Even the head of the ONC said recently, that [medical care] only represents 10 to 20 percent of your total healthcare experience,” Carter said. “So while we are focused on medical, what about vision – what about dental – what about homeopathic – what about over-the-counter medications? Who’s capturing all of that information?”
ChartSpan has spent time in the past month with one of the top five research hospitals in the country (which will remain unnamed due to the negotiation-phase collaboration), and the head of nephrology, according to Carter, said that one of the most important things he needs to know is a historical record of patients’ over-the-counter medications. Carter replied, “Is that more important than prescription medications?” In response, he was told that in some cases it’s even more important, and they struggle to get their hands on that data. If someone has been taking Prilosec for an extended period of time, kidney problems can go up by a multiple of five.
Without data like this, it can dramatically affect research and clinical trials. This research hospital is potentially planning to prescribe ChartSpan to its research patients, essentially requesting them to provide all areas of healthcare records, including things like over-the-counter drugs to provide real, comprehensive data.
As far as the consumer product already out there (ranking the highest downloaded medical app in December of last year), Carter presents ChartSpan as an example of patient engagement at its best. Providing tools and technology that make it “absurdly simple and easy” is the only way it will be effective.
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“When people ask us – ‘Who’s your competitor?’ – we chuckle. There is no electronic competitor. Our primary competitor is the manila folder.”
Beyond the manila folder, there are in fact some companies like Humertix that are engaging in similar endeavors that will likely expand to further areas. There are new competitors scattered through the country, too. Orb Health has similar motives but with a particular focus in providing a patient personalized understanding of what the information actually means; it launches at the end of March. (I do have a conflict here because my brother is the CEO of Orb Health.)
The main demographic for ChartSpan is people with chronic illnesses who inevitably have a lot to manage, although only some of them do so. More so are women and mothers, according to Carter, who based on statistics tend to primarily manage health records for families. This is why the company’s website leans toward promoting the application for easy access to immunization records for distribution when young children are starting at new schools or being enrolled in camp and community programs.
For a mother of three, for example, having the ability to send immunization and health records to multiple school nurses or program administrations with a swipe on your phone makes juggling papers and folders and printers and fax machines seem like a cruel joke.
So how it works currently: Patients can get records from many different providers, different patient health record (PHR) portals and incorporate them all into one location, both to store information but also to send to future providers. Say you get a fax or email document, it can go straight to ChartSpan. You can even photograph a prescription with your phone and back-end conversion will turn that into data that is actually “structured and has semantic meaning,” according to Carter.
The first revenue product will be “ChartSpanEngage,” which comes out in June and Carter says has a dozen customers ready to buy. As Carter described the product in an email:
“It’s focused on providers trying to satisfy ‘Patient Engagement’ outcomes in Meaningful Use, Stage 2 & 3. ChartSpanEngage is an innovative web-based analytics dashboard giving providers real time access to Patient Engagement metrics, including all records ‘viewed, downloaded or transmitted’ in electronic fax, email or clinical form. The product is EHR agnostic. We plan to price the product dramatically less than any other product in the marketplace. It will require zero I.T. footprint for our customers, with no integration or implementation required.”
ChartSpanEngage is a SaaS product and sold through an annual license, with prices varying depending on how many physicians are using the license.
What’s also next for ChartSpan includes the use of Blue Button – which will allow a patient to have an ongoing-information connection with a provider or through PHR portals so future visits and healthcare results will be added to ChartSpan instantaneously – forever.
In the near future, Carter says they plan to merge into predictive analysis based on the collection of data. With years of records stored, the ability to indicate trends will bring a new level of sophistication to this technology and the ability to ultimately improve healthcare for those involved.
Carter calls ChartSpan a source for “the most robust patient data sets we’ve ever seen in healthcare.”
[Cover photo from Flickr user himmelskratzer]
