Tee Green is CEO of Greenway Health.
Tell me about yourself and the company, which seems to have gone through a rebranding.
We’re certainly in the midst of an evolution. Now that we’re over a year and a half past the Vitera acquisition, we’re looking back out externally to tell the industry and our customers, “Here’s where we’re at now.” If you look at our original business plan, it was written around the concept of electronification, consumerism, and a thirst to improve health. Those were the guiderails behind Greenway. As we looked into the next decade, we asked, “How do you take that and build a brand?” We looked at three things and asked ourselves, “What is the mission behind our organization?” Greenway Health is about three things. It’s to serve and it’s to connect and it’s to care.
What you’ll see with our rebranding is an evolved logo and our three pillars, which really build off the three tenets of that original business plan. The branding has evolved into three specific words – serve, connect, care. That’s what you’ll see in the new logo as it rolls out.
How will this evolution impact the company’s investment strategies?
You’re seeing an industry, certainly Greenway, taking the lead and moving away from being just a software provider to being a services provider. We’re building one of the most innovative platforms that our customers can use, especially our enterprise customers. I think this is the fundamentally key difference in Greenway and some of the other companies out there. We don’t operate under the Hotel California model where you can come but you can’t leave. What we recognize is that to truly improve health in this country, we have to be an open platform, and so we’re building technology like Greenway Practice, Greenway Exchange, Greenway Clearing Services, Greenway Patient, and Greenway Community. This is an innovation platform that we use to deliver clinically driven revenue cycle services to our customers.
This is especially vital to that 10-doc practice that wans to remain independent, doesn’t want to build a care coordination team because they don’t have the expertise or the know-how, realizes that managing a billing team internally doesn’t create a lot of scale, and is always having to deal with HR issues and turnover, not to mention that ICD-10 is coming down the pipe …. You can outsource that to us, because we’re experts at it. We’ve designed the technology to do it. We also have larger customers, or enterprise-like environments, where they do have their care coordination teams. They do have professionalism, or experts, in the revenue cycle business. What they don’t have is the platform. Greenway Health gives physicians the ability to use the same platform to drive those services, or outsource them to us. We know that the business models are changing so fast in this industry, that the Hotel California model just doesn’t work anymore. If I want to use your innovation, I have to use all of your services. That just doesn’t make any sense in the next decade.
Given Greenway’s experience with enterprise environments, does the company have any plans to get into acute care?
If you look at our chronic care management service, those will be services that’ll be offered to the acute side, especially in managing discharge patients. What does the CFO of an enterprise most care about right now? Those bounce-backs. The services that we’re introducing are able to act as air traffic controllers for patients after discharge. Enroll him in our chronic care service and we’ll make sure that patient gets into the right provider’s office. We can eliminate those bounce backs to the hospital system. Will we build an HIS system like a Cerner or Epic? Probably not. Will we offer services on top of our platform to acute settings? I think absolutely.
What was the impetus for getting into population health management with your Community solution?
That goes back to one of the core tenets when we talk about care, or improving health. We can’t offer some of the services that we’re offering without that Greenway Community, without the population health technology platform.
You mentioned openness, and the necessity for that to drive healthcare forward. Update us on what Greenway is doing with CommonWell and how that alliance is moving interoperability forward.
From day one we have believed that, with our Greenway Exchange platform, it was about creating liquid data that flowed across the healthcare ecosystem. We’ve been a leader in every interoperability project that I can think of in the United States, with CommonWell being one of the frontrunners. We are participating in a number of different pilot sites with CommonWell. We’re also part of the group that’s making the Greenway-CommonWell exchange free to our customers. We’re announcing that at our user conference coming up.
If you go back to Reagan when he stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said, “Tear down these walls,’ that’s a very serious time in our nation’s history, and I’m not saying this is equivalent, but when you talk about lives, I think it is equivalent. Greenway’s been at the forefront of saying, “Tear down these walls.” I think we’ve shown that through our leadership in CommonWell, Carequality, and Healtheways. We just launched Greenway Interoperability University, probably one of the first interoperability university courses in the country, where we’re taking people that didn’t know anything about interoperability and they’re going through our university program, graduating, and contributing to tearing down these walls.
Do you have any plans to open up that program to the greater community?
We’re actually discussing that right now. We’re looking at opening it up to our business partners and customers, especially our enterprise customers that have staff. We’re asking ourselves, “How do we make them champions of this tear-down-the-wall mentality?”
What are you hearing from physician practices right now with regard to challenges? What’s keeping them up at night? What are they clamoring for?
Two things: care coordination or managing chronic care; and how does that drive their financial processes, these risk-based programs. I think those are the two biggest things right now, outside of ICD-10. You can always throw ICD-10 at the top, but that’s just too easy. I think it’s really around, “How do I manage a patient inside of a community, and move that patient in and out of different environments?” I think that’s one of the fundamental issues we’re going to wrestle with, and it really comes down to how providers are going to manage consumers.
I think people miss that sometimes. The consumer is what’s having the biggest impact on this industry right now, more so than anything else. And the consumer is not only the patient, but also the employer. If you look at the number of employers that have gone self-insured and introduced high-deductible health plans since 2013, it has skyrocketed, and it’s only going to continue to do so. We are creating this consumer movement, which I think is just awesome, but healthcare, as a system, has never dealt with the consumer. They’ve never dealt with somebody like Tee Green who’s not only a patient, but he’s a CEO that has 1,900 team members. Every dollar we don’t spend at Greenway Health on healthcare drops to our bottom line. Am I interested in negotiating directly with the health system? Absolutely. Those are new days, because the CEO of the health system, or the ACO, is not necessarily used to negotiating with me. They’re used to negotiating with a group of payers. Well, I am the payer. That’s this fundamental shift that providers are struggling with. Most of them don’t recognize that it’s happening, but that’s where Greenway becomes a real value proposition for our customers.
I know you mentioned ICD-10 as an easy area to pick on. What are your thoughts on the work that CMS and the AMA has done to give physicians a year of transition?
I applaud it. We have to see if Medicaid and the commercial payers are going to follow suit, or is it just Medicare? If it’s just Medicare, then what does it really mean? Does it mean anything different for our customers or Greenway? No. Everybody’s got to be ready. Everybody’s got to be prepared. Everybody’s got to have fallback plans if payers can’t process this information in a timely and efficient manner. I think the headlines read well. I’m not sure it fundamentally changes anything for us or our customers unless all payers participate.
Do you have any final thoughts?
I think as we usher in this next decade, we can look at Greenway as being a leader in helping providers really effectively manage chronic disease and wellness. As we extend our platforms all the way into the home, we’ll certainly be increasing our footprint in the United States. We’re able to create liquid data across our platforms, and we’re able to introduce services that truly enable our providers to thrive clinically and financially.
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Top News
Former CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner will join AHIP as president and CEO later this summer. She’ll assume the duties of Karen Ignagni, who helped the trade group become a driving force behind passage of the ACA – legislation that, under Tavenner’s watch, prompted the creation and much-maligned roll out of Healthcare.gov.
Webinars
July 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Achieve Your Quality Objectives Before 2018.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; Dennis Swarup, VP of corporate development, CitiusTech. The presenters will address best practices for building and managing CQMs and reports, especially as their complexity increases over time. They will also cover quality improvement initiatives that can help healthcare systems simplify their journey to value-based care. The webinar will conclude with an overview of how CitiusTech’s hosted BI-Clinical analytics platform, which supports over 600 regulatory and disease-specific CQMs, supports clients in their CQM strategies.
July 29 (Wednesday) 11:30 ET. “Earning Medicare’s New Chronic Care Management Payments: Five Steps to Take Now.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Robert J. Dudzinski, PharmD, EVP, West Healthcare Practice; Colin Roberts, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare’s new monthly payments for Chronic Care Management (CCM) can improve not only patient outcomes and satisfaction, but provider financial viability and competitiveness as well. Attendees will learn how to estimate their potential CCM revenue, how to use technology and clinical resources to scale up CCM to reach more patients, and how to start delivering CCM benefits to patients and providers by taking five specific steps. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others put their CCM programs in place.
July 30 (Thursday) 3:00 ET. “De-Silo Your Disparate IT Systems Around the Patient with VNA.” Sponsored by Lexmark. Presenters: Steven W. Campbell, manager of diagnostic applications and interfaces, Piedmont Healthcare; Larry Sitka, VNA evangelist, Lexmark. The entire patient record, including both DICOM and non-DICOM data, should be available at the point of need. Disparate, aging systems that hide data inside departmental silos won’t cut it, nor will IT systems that can’t integrate medical images meaningfully. Learn how Piedmont Healthcare used a vendor-neutral archive to quickly and easily migrate its images and refocus its systems around its patients.
Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by July 31.
Tweet Chat
Don’t miss the next #HIStalking tweet chat on July 16 at 1pm ET. Dave Chase (@chasedave) and Leonard Kish (@leonardkish), co-authors of “95 Theses for a New Health Ecosystem,” will host. Check out discussion topics here.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Twenty federal agents raid the Jackson, MI offices of Anesthesia Business Consultants on suspicion of healthcare and Medicare fraud. The self-proclaimed “largest physician billing and practice management company specializing exclusively in the practice of anesthesia and pain management” recently made news for the launch of its Anesthesia Valet quality reporting and analysis tool.
Telemedicine
Portland, OR-based Zoom+ announces the addition of video visits to its service line, which also includes health insurance plans. The company, formerly known as ZoomCare, is no doubt looking to cash in on Oregon’s recently passed legislation requiring payers to cover all telemedicine consultations.
Research and Innovation
An AMGA survey of 251 medical groups finds that 75 percent of physician specialties saw an average 2.8-percent compensation increase last year. Primary care specialists – a group that saw an increase of 3.8 percent in 2013 – brought down the 2014 average with a compensation decrease of 0.3 percent. As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, primary care docs are likely to see their salaries increase, albeit slowly, as they become scarce, yet increasingly valuable, commodities.
New York University researchers invite fitness enthusiasts to share data from their RunKeeper apps as part of the Keeping Pace study, which looks to better understand how urban environments contribute to exercise routines over time. The de-identified data transfer is made possible via ResearchKit and the Open Humans Project, a website where people can store various health data collected by assorted trackers.
Announcements and Implementations
PerfectServe announces that its unified clinical communications and collaboration system reaches 50,000 physician users, a 51 percent increase in 18 months.
The Urgent Care Integrated Network selects Forerun as its vendor of choice for urgent care documentation. The Waltham, MA-based company offers the cloud-based UrgiChart HER for urgent care centers and EDs.
John Rudd, MD an internist at Cedar Grove Medical Associates (TN), launches GetRx, an app that transfers prescription information to pharmacies, eyeglass makers, and other parties. A patient version offering prescription refill and pick-up location requests is also available.
Theranos partners with Medicaid managed care organization AmeriHealth Caritas to offer members in underserved areas low-cost, less-invasive diagnostic tests. Theranos received FDA approval of its hardware, software, and testing platform earlier this month. (Forbes contributor Dan Munro offers a compelling, inside look at the consumer side of the Theranos process here.)
People
Jacob Reider, MD (Kyron) joins Uniphy Health’s Board of Advisors.
Other
UPMC Health Plan alerts 722 of its members to a June data breach stemming from a data file that was sent to an incorrect email address rather than the physician’s office it was intended for. PHI included member names and ID numbers, birth dates, phone numbers, primary care office names, and types of insurance plans.
The local paper highlights the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center’s plans to use a $3 million HHS grant to help 50 primary care practices across the state with on-site coaching and EHR support. The initiative and grant are part of AHRQ’s EvidenceNOW project announced in May, which seeks to help primary care practices reduce patient risk for cardiovascular disease.
The Commonwealth Fund offers an interactive snapshot of Medicare quality and spending for physician practices, hospitals, nursing homes, and home health based on geographic area. Vermont seems to set a high bar for physicians when compared to New York and New Jersey.
I do love a good shoe story: Nike bases its latest shoe design on the idea of Florida teen and cerebral palsy patient Matthew Walzer, who posted an open letter to the company online suggesting it design a shoe that wouldn’t require him to have someone else tie his laces. The design’s zippered, wrap-around entry-and-closure system is a first for the company, which wanted to create a shoe for people like Walzer with disabilities that impair their hands.
Sponsor Updates
Sponsors on the 2015 HCI 100
EClinicalWorks
GE Healthcare
Greenway Health
Leidos Health
Nordic
Contacts
Jennifer, Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan
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Top News
CMS announces that its Fraud Prevention System has helped it identify or prevent $820 million in inappropriate Medicare payments in its third year of use. The system, which uses predictive analytics to spot suspicious billing patterns and claims, was a driving force behind the recent HHS and DoJ crackdown on 243 individuals involved in false billings worth $723 million. “We are proving that in a modern healthcare system you can both fight fraud and avoid creating hassles for the vast majority of physicians who simply want to get paid for services rendered. The key is data,” explains CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt. “Very few investments have a 10:1 return on taxpayer money.”
Webinars
July 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Achieve Your Quality Objectives Before 2018.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; Dennis Swarup, VP of corporate development, CitiusTech. The presenters will address best practices for building and managing CQMs and reports, especially as their complexity increases over time. They will also cover quality improvement initiatives that can help healthcare systems simplify their journey to value-based care. The webinar will conclude with an overview of how CitiusTech’s hosted BI-Clinical analytics platform, which supports over 600 regulatory and disease-specific CQMs, supports clients in their CQM strategies.
Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by July 31.
Tweet Chat
Don’t miss the next #HIStalking tweet chat on July 16 at 1pm ET. Dave Chase (@chasedave) and Leonard Kish (@leonardkish), co-authors of “95 Theses for a New Health Ecosystem,” will host. Check out discussion topics here.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Medical Transcription Billing Corp. acquires the clearinghouse, EDI, and RCM divisions of SoftCare Solutions, the US subsidiary of Canada-based QHR Corp. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, though QHR President and CEO Mike Checkley did note that QHR will now focus on its core healthcare technology businesses including EHRs, secure messaging, virtual care, and online booking.
Announcements and Implementations
TheHappyMD.com launches The Burnout Proof app to equip physicians with skills to overcome stress and successfully unplug when off the job.
Minnesota-based HealthPartners develops Beating the Blues, an online cognitive behavioral therapy program for its members and patients that treats stress, sadness, tension, depression or anxiety.
The Indiana Health Information Exchange selects Clinical Architecture’s Symedical terminology management software for content updates, advanced mapping, and central control of terminology to improve interoperability.
Government and Politics
Deputy Director of the US Office of Management and Budget Beth Cobert takes over the responsibilities of US Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta, who resigned late last week after the OPM reported that the personal information of 21.5 million military and civilian government workers was compromised during a May 2015 cyberattack on its federal background investigation system.
The Alliance of Specialty Medicine, a coalition of national medical societies representing 100,000 specialty physicians, takes to Capitol Hill this week to meet with lawmakers about a number of issues including a delay of Meaningful Use Stage 3.
Telemedicine
New York City-based startup Pager makes funding headlines, though I can’t be sure if it’s for the amount of money raised or the celebrity star power behind the financing. The doctor-on-demand and telemedicine service raised $14 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates and actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures. Kutcher and investment partner Guy Oseary launched the firm earlier this year after dabbling in the tech startup scene via investments in Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb. Fun Fact: Uber co-founder Oscar Salazar also helped to found Pager, and is now its chief product officer.
Co-working space HQ Raleigh names RelyMD the official telemedicine provider for its businesses, offering the group of nearly 100 companies a discounted rate of $10 per video consult. RelyMD is itself a startup, founded at the beginning of this year by a group of providers from Wake Emergency Physicians (NC).
The local news station profiles Mend, a telemedicine and house call startup serving patients in Orlando and Winter Park, FL. Consumers can choose from a $99 video consult via the Mend app, or schedule a house call for $49 plus the cost of a co-pay.
Appalachian State University’s Beaver College of Health Sciences receives a $175,000 grant from the Golden LEAF Foundation to develop a Rural Health Outreach Collaborative, which will initially establish telehealth access and programming for senior centers in several North Carolina counties.
Research and Innovation
Physicians’ Alliance of America releases the latest set of findings from its recent EHR efficiency survey. Of the 250 practices surveyed, internists fared the worst when it comes to lost productivity, charting at least two hours a day. PCPs noted their own set of troubles related to EHR utilization: Nearly 65 percent cited working with payers as their most time-consuming and frustrating administrative EHR task.
Contacts
Jennifer, Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan
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Laura Adams is president and CEO of Rhode Island Quality Institute, a nonprofit organization that provides a range of services to healthcare stakeholders across the state, including management of the CurrentCare HIE.
Tell me about yourself, Rhode Island Quality Institute, and its role in CurrentCare.
I became the founding CEO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI) in 2001 after having experience in hospital administration, entrepreneurial startups, the system-wide application of quality improvement science, governance and leadership consulting, and bedside clinical care delivery.
CurrentCare, an independent nonprofit, came about through a strong partnership with the State of Rhode Island and the statewide collaboration of our hospital/IDN, provider, insurer, consumer, and employer partners. It was clear to us that if we were truly committed to the health and wellbeing of the people of our state, we needed to find a way for their healthcare data to be available anytime and anywhere it is needed, regardless of proprietary, geographic, and/or payer boundaries. As time passed and we observed others struggling with “data hoarding” challenges, we realized the power of keeping our eye on the “north star”— that is, what is best for the people we serve. To paraphrase Don Berwick, MD, the former head of CMS, the enemy was disease, error, and waste – not each other.
The RI Dept. of Health received HIE grant funding from AHRQ in 2004, which resulted in the development of CurrentCare’s governance structure, privacy and security framework, technology infrastructure design, branding and communication strategies, engagement of stakeholders, etc. RIQI then received grant funding from the HITECH Act in the 2009 federal stimulus bill that allowed us to stand up the HIE technology infrastructure and get data flowing within nine months of the grant award. We now have more than 200 unique data flows into CurrentCare.
All RI acute care hospitals are connected, with the exception of the VA (coming soon). Approximately 90 percent of all lab results and medication histories flow into CurrentCare, and data flows in from ambulatory care practices across the state. We also include such clinical information as data from CCDs, EKG reports, radiology reports, telemedicine alerts, etc. We are the only statewide HIE in the nation that has integrated substance abuse and alcohol treatment information from 42-CFR Part 2 providers. We have bi-directional data flow with the Epic platforms of our two largest IDNs/ACOs in the state; Athena, Cerner, and Meditech platforms will soon follow. This bi-directional flow means that providers do not have to leave their EHR to access and download/consume data from CurrentCare. The bi-directional achievement prompted the CEO of our largest IDN to report that one of his most seasoned ED physicians declared CurrentCare “indispensible” to providing emergency care now that it was accessible within his Epic system.
Our community is highly interested in leveraging the statewide HIE’s Provider Directory that we’re building. They support creating a statewide Provider Directory function in the center using multiple data feeds, creating a “single source of truth” for the provider information now critical to succeeding under new payment models. Healthcare stakeholders can purchase the data flow, allowing them to stop expending precious resources on duplicative provider directories that are expensive and very difficult to maintain. This is a very significant waste reduction opportunity for the RI healthcare community.
Since CurrentCare is the one place with the most comprehensive, longitudinal data from across many sites, irrespective of payment, we are committed to patient/consumer use of the database to manage their own health and that of their families. We are beta testing a consumer portal that will permit them to upload their own data from wearable technologies, and documents like Advance Directives/Powers of Attorney, etc. We are also building apps, such as the “My Meds” app, which allows a consumer to access their medication history data in CurrentCare from anywhere in the world. The portal also enables users to “view, download and transmit” their entire clinical record.
I haven’t even touched on the value to public health, quality reporting, shared analytics capability, etc., but you get the idea.
Why has the HIE faced such low numbers when it comes to physician adoption?
You may be referencing data quoted in a recent article in GoLocalProv, a RI publication. We were disappointed that neither RIQI nor any of our Board members were contacted for input into the article, as the usage representation was out of date and inaccurate. The survey referenced in the article is at least 15 months old, and it was conducted before we went live with bi-directional exchange with the Epic platforms of our two largest health systems in the state. Steve DeToy from the RI Medical Society — quoted in the GoLocalProv story — has been writing rebuttals/clarifications in several blogs and publications that picked up the story.
The measure of usage as reflected in the referenced survey from the State of RI is not only outdated, it includes a denominator of all licensed physicians in RI. RIQI focused the CurrentCare rollout effort on primary care and hasn’t even begun intensive roll out efforts beyond these providers. Therefore, the use of all licensed physicians as the denominator wasn’t accurate.
In addition, we don’t measure CurrentCare’s worth by just one measure of value. That would be as faulty as finding that a patient’s heart rate is in the normal range and concluding that they’re completely healthy on the basis of one metric. Health is more complicated than that and so is HIE. For example, the metric referenced doesn’t include use by other members of the care team, including PAs, NCM, quality improvement professionals, etc. It also doesn’t include our Hospital Alerts service usage. An analysis of the effect of CurrentCare Hospital Alerts over more than a year shows that they correlate with a 13-percent reduction in costly hospital readmissions within 30 days, and a 20-percent reduction in return visits to the emergency department within 30 days.
This metric also doesn’t regard the benefit to the research community. We are included in a number of research grant proposals because of the highly unique database of clinical information, including that from private practices. The research value to the RI community will grow exponentially over time.
The metric referenced doesn’t reflect the value of such services and tools as the NCM dashboard, which prompted the CEO of a very well respected and high-profile community health center to suggest that this was “a game-changer.” He quoted his staff’s reaction to it as, “The best data ever!”
So, in short, it is a disservice to the hundreds of people who are working hard on the community asset that is CurrentCare to characterize it as the article did. With all of the additional value cited above, we’ve just begun to leverage our community investment in CurrentCare. To disparage it now is like disparaging a nine-month old baby, expressing disappointment because this baby was expected to be able to run, jump, and play Little League, and all it’s doing at the moment is crawling around on all fours.
How is CurrentCare working to help physicians better leverage the HIE?
We are aware that physician adoption of health IT hasn’t been easy by anyone’s estimation. Despite their obvious value, CMS had to create a very robust incentive for physician adoption and use of EHRs. More than $100 million has been invested by CMS and RI Medicaid to incent RI physicians to adopt and meaningfully use EHRs. There have been virtually no incentives available to RI physicians to adopt and use CurrentCare. We also know that the value of an HIE is directly correlated with the evolution of the payment model. We knew when we began building CurrentCare that gaining adoption and use would be significantly hampered by RI’s nearly 100-percent fee-for-service model for many years into the future. The toxicity of the fee-for-service payment model meant that reducing duplication and better coordinating care resulted in financial penalties for providers. Now that we are finally seeing very encouraging movement of the prevailing payment model in RI toward payment for value, the benefit to ACOs/IDNs/hospitals/physician providers increases exponentially.
But we’re not relying exclusively on the payment system to increase adoption and use. We are executing a multi-pronged strategy to make CurrentCare indispensable. That strategy includes:
As I mentioned before, we’re really just getting started in putting this asset to work. There is much more to come.
How do physician adoption numbers reflect overall physician adoption of EHRs in Rhode Island?
Physician adoption of HIE services is not necessarily related to overall adoption of EHRs. In fact, EHR adoption in Rhode Island has been very robust. Of the approximate 1,200 primary care providers who have worked with RIQI, most have adopted an EHR, 1,159 are able to produce e-prescribing and quality reports, and 876 (over 70 percent) have met Stage 1 Meaningful Use. And this accomplishment did not happen overnight but took more than five years of education, training, and direct technical assistance – not to mention nearly $100 million in federal incentives, as well!
The usability of EHRs has been the subject of much Congressional debate in recent weeks. What feedback have you heard regarding usability from the state’s physicians?
The feedback from our physicians does not differ substantially from that reported to Congress in the recent testimony in front of the Senate HELP committee. This includes the need for:
How does CurrentCare plan to evolve over the next several years? Are there plans for self-sustainability?
CurrentCare does not now depend upon public funding for the majority of its revenue, but it is significant and could become the major source if anticipated grants/contracts come through in 2015. The plan is for CurrentCare to continue to expand its ability to serve as a “public utility” type of asset used by state government, consumers, researchers, providers, payers, policy makers, etc., as well as a provider of customized fee-for-service products and services to hospitals/ACOs/providers, payers, entrepreneurs/investors and other stakeholders. While RIQI doesn’t anticipate dependency on grants, it is definitely a center of innovation capable of attracting and effectively using grant funding to develop valuable and creative new products and services based on the needs of its stakeholders. With very broad stakeholder engagement, it can attract entrepreneurs with a need to test and evaluate innovative ideas that involve some type of assistance from health information technology.
Do you have any final thoughts?
I’ve always felt that my time at RIQI was the best work of my life and worth every life-moment that I invested in it. But its true worth hit me hard when I was diagnosed with breast cancer and began to see the need for initiatives like CurrentCare through the eyes of someone whose life literally depended upon the healthcare system. From the morning after my diagnosis, when I found that I’d cried myself awake yet had to scramble to assemble and transport my own health records, through the surgery when my last panicked thought before anesthesia was that my doctors and nurses didn’t have access to my advance directive, to the gaps in follow-up care that left me feeling frightened and alone … I knew I was being given the rare gift of understanding the true value of my own work. One can perhaps then understand why I’m a staunch defender of HIEs, regardless of where they are on their developmental trajectory.
Contacts
Jennifer, Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan
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The article about Pediatric Associates in CA has a nugget with a potentially outsized impact: the implication that VFC vaccines…