I am always amazed to see how diverse SaaS applications can be.
Yesterday I got to talk with some folks from ICA, a spin-off and partner with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who have built a clinical application of informatics.
The original research was done at Vanderbilt, ICA did the commercialization, and Vanderbilt does continuing R&D.
The technology sits in a layer on top of a hospital or community medical system's existing medical record systems, allowing them to preserve their investment. Each entity (hospital, physician, clinic, health center) puts its information in a "vault" and a web portal presents the aggregated information about any patient to a practicing clinician in one place in a single common format. It's magic.
Currently ICA has 5 clients in various stages of development inclulding:
- An enterprise installation at Basset Healthcare in Coooperstown, NY including 4 hospitals and over 30 clinics spread over an area as large as Delaware. They use the ICA application as their primary application for seeing patients (instead of a chart) while continuing to post through their source systems, often via dictation. 95% of the physicians were up and running within 6 weeks. ICA says the system requires minimal training.
- Lourdes Hospital in Kentucky is a pilot where physician training took only 45 minutes!
- Health Information Exchange in Montana (Calispell and four feeder hospitals and 40 feeder clinics) is in an area where collaboration and collegial discussion would otherwise be very difficult.
- Mid South EHealth Alliance in Memphis, TN – Includes all their emergency rooms and their primary care sites to make sure emergency rooms are used properly. The idea is to facilitate patients to primary care where appropriate and the focus is on Medicaid, uninsured, and underinsured populations.
The ICA system can take in and aggregate literally any kind of data -- Word, pdf, data file, images.
ICA is hoping that the $20 billion in the Economic Recovery Act that is intended to improve medical records can be focused not just on administrative record keeping and insurance, but also on the kind of patient care that they have been working on, especially since they can use their informatics systems to sort the data in any way, providing physicians with information by disease, by drug, or by any other useful pattern. In this way, they could see how other patients with COPD, for example, had been treated, and what the outcomes had been.
Only about 20% of physicians have electronic medical records today and most of them exist in silos, unable to be accessed or aggregated with other records on the same patient -- as you no doubt have guessed when you have to provide the same information to a physician in the same medical center.
ICA is hoping that the idea of secure access from any PC, secure messaging to the staff, and workflow tools with disease dashboards will be a powerful incentive to move forward.
The ICA application can be hosted by any single user in a medical partnership for the other members or it can be hosted by ICA.
I remain fascinated at the number of SaaS applications we are seeing that are not for broad horizontal markets, but rather for specific vertical applications. I suspect we are only at the very beginning.
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