5 Questions with John Shufeldt, MD CEO, MeMD

John Shufeldt, MD is CEO of MeMD, a Scottsdale, AZ-based telemedicine company that serves patients in all 50 states via a board-certified network of 304 providers. With a background in urgent and emergency care, Shufeldt founded the company to offer patients timely and affordable access to quality healthcare for minor ailments.

How do you see telemedicine fitting into the greater ecosystem of urgent and primary care?
Primary care practices can benefit in the same ways urgent care practices can. Telemedicine offers both the chance to widen their reach (to patients) and their available hours (potentially up to 24/7 coverage). It can also be more cost efficient, especially in the modern age of ever increasing healthcare insurance deductibles. Finally, telemedicine allows a practice to fully embrace the latest, widely available technology in the delivery of patient care including computers, the Internet, and mobile devices (both smartphones and tablets).

In addition, a primary care provider can offer a more cost-effective solution for chronic-disease monitoring and care by utilizing telemedicine. When three out of every four US healthcare dollars are spent on the care and management of chronic disease (e.g., diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, lung disease, stroke, etc.), the opportunity to bend the cost curve with telemedicine in these settings (e.g., avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations), is enormous.

How do you hope to differentiate the company from larger players such as Teladoc and American Well?
MeMD’s differentiators include efficient customer service delivered through care coordination; comprehensive policies and procedures and evidence-based pathways for improved patient outcomes; claims processing and group level reporting; and the ability to maximize patient access through single sign-on technology.

How did the Indiegogo campaign go to help the company develop a mental health platform? 
While Indiegogo is a great platform for launching a number of tech products and goods, it didn’t seem to lend itself to a more conceptual service offering. Despite this, we are moving ahead with the development of our own behavioral health platform.

Why did MeMD want to get involved with the Indiana Health pilot program? What are the program’s goals, and how will the outcome affect MeMD’s future?
This telemedicine pilot allows MeMD to participate in providing high-quality, cost-effective, and well-liked patient care (i.e. patient satisfaction) in the state of Indiana without the need for a prior, live patient evaluation. Many states already allow this practice and it has been proven to be very successful. Being on the cutting edge of this practice in Indiana will allow MeMD to participate in the positive changing of Indiana’s healthcare future, while giving us a head-start building a reputation for high-quality and affordable care in the state.

How do you see the company evolving within the next five years?
We will continue to evolve by adding services and expertise to our suite of offerings in direct response to consumer demands. To that end, we plan on partnering with other forward-leaning providers so that, together, we can change the care-on-demand landscape both nationally and internationally.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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News 7/6/15

Top News

CMS and the AMA announce efforts to help providers prepare for and weather the switch to ICD-10 on October 1, including the appointment of an ICD-10 Ombudsman to answer questions about claims submissions. The organizations will partner to provide on-site training, webinars, educational articles, and national calls to help physicians learn about the updated codes and prepare for the switch. CMS also made clear that it will, as appropriate, drop physician penalties, authorize advance physician payments, and hold back on issuing claims denials.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

The latest HIStalk poll – “Have you as a patient used a provider’s portal within the past 90 days?” – brings to mind my labor-intensive attempts to collect my medical records for a new PCP, which is making the transition from independent practice to hospital-owned medical group. Despite the fact that I signed up for their portal a few years ago via a former in-network PCP, I’ve been asked to set up a new PHR account from the same vendor, making me wonder if they plan to merge my past and future medical records or if that will fall into my lap. I’ve met the CIO of the health system, and she’s definitely made a name for herself and the organization when it comes to rolling out EHRs and portals. I have to wonder, though, how often she’s confronted with patients suffering from “poly-portalitis,” not to mention a lack of experience with this type of technology. 

Webinars

July 14 (Tuesday) noon ET. “What Health Care Can Learn from Silicon Valley.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenter: Ed Park, EVP/COO, Athenahealth. Ed will discuss how an open business structure and strong customer focus have helped fuel success among the most prominent tech companies and what health care can learn from their 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. Stay tuned for discussion topics.

Announcements and Implementations

Office Ally expands its OA-Rx e-prescribing tool to include controlled substances.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Garden City, NY-based Millenium Healthcare signs a Letter of Intent to acquire HealthPath, a vendor of cloud-based software that helps streamline annual wellness visits. The deal is expected to close by the end of the month.

Government and Politics

Former Johnson & Johnson executive LaVerne Council is sworn in as assistant secretary for information and technology and CIO of the VA. She takes over from Stephen Warren, who will return to his role as principle deputy assistant secretary for IT. David Shulkin, MD (Morristown Medical Center) is also sworn in as under secretary for health.

Telemedicine

Telehealth startup eVisit wins the Spring 2015 Arizona Innovation Challenge, beating out 137 applicants to win $250,000. The Gilbert, AZ-based company, which just released its first mobile app, has raised over $1 million to date.

Researchers find no difference in ulcer-related amputations and ulcer healing between diabetic foot ulcer patients monitored via telemedicine versus outpatient clinic visits. The Danish study of 736 patients did find that those in the telemedicine group had a higher mortality rate, no doubt fueling the need for further study.

Iowa becomes the 10th state to enact the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, which will establish a voluntary process to streamline the licensing process for physicians looking to practice medicine in multiple states. 

Other

And I thought Mr. H was critical: A British business magazine gives Nuance low marks for its marketing material, grammatically picking apart hazy claims that the company’s product can ‘realise the potential of your EHR system with voice solutions to alleviate clinician workload & improve patient care while migrating to a paperless process.’ The author provides no link to the offending material, so I can’t be sure if problems arise from a lack of HIT understanding or failure to explain in clear English (British or American) what service the product delivers.

Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush takes to TechCrunch to coin catchy phrases like “DIY Disruption” and the extremely tweetable “digital healthcare is sexy hot.” Bon mots aside, Bush points to startups like Clockwise.MD and Health Gorilla as businesses poised to save physicians time and money.

New Mexico resident Kenneth Adams, MD takes to his local op/ed column to explain the plight of physicians in light of ICD-10, turning a flowery phrase when he describes the impending transition as a “quintessential example of tilting with windmills as the vested corporate interests of the insurance industry and hospitals have greased our Congress to ensure this bill does not pass. However, I do not want to ‘go gently into that good night.’” Something tells me the CMS/AMA resources announced today will do little to soothe his angst.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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News 7/1/15

Top News

Teladoc goes public today with shares priced this morning at $19, ending at $28.50 and generating estimated gross proceeds of $180 million. The company, rumored to have recently enlisted the services of a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm, also announced its services are now available in Idaho, which passed the Idaho Telehealth Access Act back in April.

Webinars

July 14 (Tuesday) noon ET. “What Health Care Can Learn from Silicon Valley.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenter: Ed Park, EVP/COO, Athenahealth. Ed will discuss how an open business structure and strong customer focus have helped fuel success among the most prominent tech companies and what health care can learn from their strategies.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by July 31.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Genesis Healthcare becomes a value-added reseller of Azalea Health, and will offer its RCM and billing services through Azalea’s EHR and PM software.

Startup Health issues its mid-year report on digital health funding for startups, reporting 226 deals and $2.8 billion in funding thus far. Total funding is about $600 million less than the same period in 2014. Subsectors that raked in the most money include wellness/benefits, patient/consumer experience, and big data/analytics.

Announcements and Implementations

ADP AdvancedMD launches a patient relationship management suite that includes check-in kiosk, automated patient forms, and patient portal.

The Immune Deficiency Foundation releases a mobile app for its ePHR, a personal health record that enables primary immunodeficiency patients and caregivers to electronically track health data such as medications, diagnoses, and symptoms.

Government and Politics

CMS releases the latest round of Open Payments data, the first full year of reporting since the database launched in 2013. The agency received 11.4 million disclosures from 1,444 companies for payments made last year, which adds up to $6.49 billion paid to over 600,000 physicians and 1,121 teaching hospitals.

Telemedicine

The Center for Rural Health Innovation will launch its Health-e-Schools telehealth program at six public schools in Burke County, N.C. at the start of the 2015-2016 school year. The program, made possible by a two-year grant from the Duke Endowment Grant Project, will provide a physician, nurse practitioner, and telemedicine equipment to serve the elementary and middle-school students.

Research and Innovation

The Canadian Partnership Against Cancer launches a research portal that includes health and biological data from 300,000 Canadians. Researchers will have access to health and lifestyle surveys, outcomes data, and biological samples from citizens who will be observed for between 20 and 30 years. CPAC anticipates the data will be used to conduct long-term population health studies in Canada and beyond.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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News 6/30/15

Top News

HealthTap partners with Quest Diagnostics to offer patient diagnostic testing services through HealthTap’s virtual care platform. This type of partnership makes me wonder if and when low-cost lab testing company Theranos will jump into the telemedicine market.

Webinars

July 14 (Tuesday) noon ET. “What Health Care Can Learn from Silicon Valley.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenter: Ed Park, EVP/COO, Athenahealth. Ed will discuss how an open business structure and strong customer focus have helped fuel success among the most prominent tech companies and what health care can learn from their strategies.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by July 31.

Announcements and Implementations

Isabel Healthcare donates its diagnosis decision support tool to The Neighborhood Free Health Clinic (OH). The Web-based tool helps enables physicians to broaden their differential diagnosis and recognize a disease faster in order to treat it more effectively.

Greenway Health launches the Interoperability University to recruit and train employees to become interoperability experts in HL7, APIs, and emerging standards like FHIR. The six-week program offers mentorship shadowing, classroom and hands-on learning, and assessments.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

MRO, a protected health information disclosure services firm based in King of Prussia, PA, acquires medical record services companies AKCopy and AMRAS for an undisclosed sum.

Shashi Kusuma, MD launches Symplast in Fort Lauderdale, FL to offer mobile PM and EHR software to plastic surgeons and med spa physicians.

Medical software firm Body1 enlists the services of market research and consulting company Health Connexions to help scale its digital Physician Finder System.

Research and Innovation

A survey of online retail pharmacy users finds that 57 percent of the 2,252 respondents would like to communicate with physicians via Facebook and email. A surprising 18 percent noted they already chat with their physician via the social network, while over a third already communicate via email. The findings may be skewed given the inherent Web savvy of the respondents, but they nevertheless illustrate the fact that social networks potentially have a huge part to play in Meaningful Use patient engagement criteria once vendors figure out privacy issues.

Telemedicine

The American Academy of Pediatrics releases a 16-page report on telemedicine outlining use cases, benefits, and challenges, which include physician acceptance, usability, adequate training, and patient privacy concerns.

Medical marijuana delivery company Eaze launches the EazeMD app to offer medical marijuana assessments via virtual consults. Consumers also have the option to order prescribed amounts for home delivery. The San Francisco-based startup launched in and has raised $12.5 million in funding from DCM Ventures, Fresh VC, and, of course, Snoop Dogg (or is it Snoop Zion?).

Government and Politics

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) releases a report on rural healthcare in Minnesota. Franken calls for increased use of healthcare technology like EHRs and telemedicine, but also points out the adoption barriers many physicians face, such as lack of interoperability, poor broadband access, and reimbursement issues.

Xerox’s Health Enterprise Medicaid Management Information Systems receives full federal certification in New Hampshire.

Other

Just in time for the Fourth of July, Amazing Charts creates an EHR for President George Washington based on historical accounts from physicians, family members, and eyewitnesses. The snapshot of the 57 year-old’s health documents his bouts with diphtheria, smallpox, dysentery, and tuberculosis, to name just a few of the ailments that ultimately contributed to his demise 10 years later.

Harvard Professor John Quelch calls out patient engagement for what it truly is –  “consumer enslavement.” The hoops many consumers now have to jump through in order to acquire their own health data “is not consumer empowerment,” he explains. “The consumer’s time is being eaten up unnecessarily doing bureaucratic work. When there is cost pressure — and there’s a lot of criticism about health care costs — the natural tendency is to shift work to the consumer.” And here I was feeling “engaged” after spending 20 minutes this morning searching for and downloading my medical record from my former PCP to print out and hand deliver to my new PCP.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 6/29/15

Top News

CMS announces modifications to its ACO investment model announced last fall, which aims to help rural areas and small group practices gain more access to ACO benefits. Changes include allowing ACOs formed in 2015 to apply in the July 1 application round, and the removal of the 10,000 or less assigned beneficiary eligibility criteria. The program will make up to $114 million in upfront payments available to new ACOs struggling to purchase technologies and upgrades.

Webinars

June 30 (Tuesday) 11:00 ET. “Value Based Reimbursement – Leveraging Data to Build a Successful Risk-based Strategy.” Sponsored by McKesson. Presenters: Michael Udwin, MD, executive director of physician engagement, McKesson; Jeb Dunkelberger, executive director of corporate partnerships, McKesson. Healthcare organizations are using empowered physician leadership and credible performance analysis to identify populations, stratify risk, drive physician engagement, and expose opportunities for optimized care. Attendees will learn best practices in laying a foundation for developing a successful risk-based strategy.

July 14 (Tuesday) noon ET. “What Health Care Can Learn from Silicon Valley.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenter: Ed Park, EVP/COO, Athenahealth. Ed will discuss how an open business structure and strong customer focus have helped fuel success among the most prominent tech companies and what health care can learn from their strategies.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by July 31.

Announcements and Implementations

POI Technologies integrates the MyRxX video exercise demonstration platform into its PM system for physical therapists and chiropractors. The combined system also includes activity tracking and patient lead generation.

Behavioral health agency Hamilton Center implements the Essentia EHR from Lavender & Wyatt Systems to improve care coordination across the 11 counties it serves in Indiana.

Alberta Health Services and the Alberta Medical Association launch CalgaryAreaDocs.com to help residents in the Canadian city and surrounding areas find family physicians accepting new patients. The new directory lists over 1,200 physicians, and is updated once a month and verified weekly.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Indianapolis-based Activate Healthcare raises a new growth equity funding round from Spring Mountain Capital. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company will use the investment to expand its chain of workplace primary care clinics.

Health eFilings raises $935,000 of a proposed $1.5 million funding round with assistance from 10 investors. The nearly four-month-old company has developed software to assist practices with electronically submitting PQRS data to comply with Medicare regulations.

People

Deric Frost joins eVisit (Shelvspace) as COO.

Government and Politics

The Health IT Standards Committee meets to discuss the 59 public comments received on the 2015 Interoperability Standards Advisory, which ONC hopes will ultimately provide the industry with a list of the standards and implementation specifications that can best be used to achieve a “specific clinical health information interoperability purpose.” It seems like the committee didn’t have a lot to work with in terms of stakeholder feedback, noting a lot of interest in expanding ISA’s scope but a lack of consistency in any one area with the exception of security standards.

Telemedicine

Eli Health raises $1.2 million, bringing total financing raised within the last year to $2.1 million. Launched in 2013, the Wisconsin-based company is looking to scale its Intellivisit  platform, which offers patients digital diagnosis and treatment, and physician messaging and scheduling.

My Client Notes adds Nuance voice-recognition technology to its telemedicine platform for behavioral healthcare professionals.

Research and Innovation

An Australian study of 490 adults suffering from chronic pain finds that Web-based pain management tutorials helped reduce their levels of disability, anxiety, and average pain levels no matter how much face-to-face contact they had with their providers. The reductions were seen at the end of the eight-week study and again three months later.

Other

Editor Paul Smalera recounts in well-organized detail the value Google Docs and data brought to his five-year, successful battle against obesity. “The scale/spreadsheet combination helped me correct for what I came to believe is the biggest problem with trying to lose weight: getting relevant data,” he explains. “When I weighed myself without recording the number, during those months before January, all I got was feedback on the past day or so. Maybe if I remembered my number from the day before, I could guess whether my weight was going up or down. But a 10-day moving average is a computation beyond the mental capabilities of the average human — yet it was crucial to my understanding of how my diet was working.”

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
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