For most practitioners, it takes a village to stay ahead of the latest in meaningful use criteria and electronic health records (EHR) management. But one Franklin-based company has stepped up to bridge the increasingly glaring communication gap between patients and providers.
Filling a Growing NeedIngagePatient was launched in 2007 with the idea to eliminate the clipboard from patient care. The brainchild of Florida-based registered nurse David Williams, IngagePatient was founded as RegisterPatient and soon caught the interest of venture capitalists and business executive Justin Neece, who joined the company as president and CEO in 2012.
In explaining IngagePatient’s role in the patient-provider paradigm, Neece is quick to point out the company is not an EHR or EMR provider, but a cloud-based method to share medical information across all systems and provider encounters – from primary to specialty, acute and hospital care.
“We build an agnostic architecture that’s cloud based, HIPPA compliant and meaningful use certified in all patient engagement criteria,” Neece said. “We develop pipes that connect EHR and patient experience to go outside where patients and consumers live, work and play.”
Through IngagePatient’s mobile platform (available on IOS and Android), patients can schedule their own appointments and request medication refills without making a single phone call. With one login, patients also access prescription information and dosage levels, pay bills online, and receive reminders and alerts for medications, appointments and chronic disease management. And since security is always a concern for providers, IngagePatient utilizes the nation’s largest secure hosting cloud-based infrastructure, which undergoes rigorous HIPPA certification.Addressing Meaningful Use Standards Neece said the need for such technology was created in great part by the establishment of meaningful use criteria and the latest MU2 standards. Meaningful use requires providers to demonstrate to CMS use of EHRs in ways that could positively impact the care of patients. To receive incentive payments, providers must meet all of the objectives established by CMS for these programs. Each stage has its own set of requirements. MU2 is focused on advanced clinical procedures, including measures concentrated on more rigorous health information exchange; additional requirements for e-prescribing and incorporating lab results; electronic transmission of patient care summaries across multiple settings; and increased patient and family engagement.
“The Affordable Care Act’s meaningful use doctrine revolves around a set of criteria trying to get all patient information digitized and accessible to the patient,” Neece explained. “Specific criteria were passed around patient engagement, which spells out that after every encounter with a doctor a patient should receive a clinical summary of all things that happened in that encounter. That summary has been standardized in healthcare, but the only way different systems can share data is to talk to each other on one sharing system.”
The ACA’s initial response to this need was the continuity of care record, but the structure didn’t allow for multiple EHRs to share data with other practitioners or the patient seamlessly and discretely, Neece said.“MU2 says we’re going to take pieces of the CCR and standardize it into a consolidated clinical document, which is the architecture that healthcare has agreed to on how that gets formatted,” Neece said. “The first hurdle for providers is ensuring that the required 50 percent of patients can access electronic records through that portal in a ‘human readable format.’ The second big hurdle in patient engagement is proving that 5 percent of those 50 percent who can access it are actually viewing it.”Linking Providers & Patients Still, most EHRs are used solely within the four walls of a particular practice or hospital. Communication challenges arise when hospitals partner with specialists or physician practices utilizing another of the 100-plus EHR systems on the market.
“Hospitals are learning that the patient is tired of signing on to one portal, and then when that primary care physician refers them to a specialist, they’re not likely to sign on to another portal,” Neece said. “This can be the one skin that links all self service tools together.”
The software is increasing in popularity among retail clinics, EHRs and population health management vendors. In April, IngagePatient entered into a partnership with DigiChart, a provider of specialty-specific technology solutions for OB/GYN practices, to expand DigiChart’s mobile patient interaction and communication and enhance relationships and support care plan compliance. They’re among the more than 15 clients nationwide to adopt the cloud-based technology.
“Providers are learning that if we don’t get patients involved in self-management of healthcare, we’ll never bend the cost curve both from the perspective of producing better clinical outcomes and reducing cost of healthcare,” Neece said. “Applying more retail-like solutions into a marketplace enables the care team to do more so doctors can focus on interacting with the patient. We’re very focused on patient experience and can help physicians provide a rich engagement experience to improve patient satisfaction.”
