Mitochon Systems took its EMR product one step further and developed mConnect

The recent Department of Health and Human Services’ release of draft regulations for the establishment of accountable care organizations (ACOs) has set the healthcare industry abuzz. Providers, payers, and to a lesser extent patients, are digesting these regulations to see if an ACO will be a suitab

USA (April 04, 2011) –

The recent Department of Health and Human Services’ release of draft regulations for the establishment of accountable care organizations (ACOs) has set the healthcare industry abuzz. Providers, payers, and to a lesser extent patients, are digesting these regulations to see if an ACO will be a suitable fit for their organizations and communities.

Stakeholders and Medicare incentives aside, perhaps the most important aspect of the accountable care model is the seamless sharing of data between all three parties. Freely flowing information, however, between caregivers, patients and insurance companies has the potential to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

A number of healthcare IT vendors believe that lowering the cost of solutions that distribute information – and in some cases even offering these solutions free of charge – will enable this to happen more quickly and effectively, thereby helping to eventually usher in ACOs and the higher-quality care they hope to achieve.

Porter Research profiled two such companies – Mitochon Systems and Practice Fusion – that have built free electronic medical record systems (EMRs) in the recent feature “Free EMRs Meet Physician’s Fiscal Needs.” Both companies’ products were developed in direct response to their founding physicians’ desires to provide a better way to exchange data amongst colleagues and improve clinical outcomes.

From EMR to HIE

Mitochon Systems took its EMR product one step further and developed mConnect, a free health information exchange (HIE) solution that enables providers to share clinical data via nearly any EMR. These technologies combined add up to what Mitochon refers to as its Virtual Medical Community(TM) (VMC). Customers gain entry into this community through deployment of the company’s EMR and HIE products.

Mitochon first proved its EMR and mConnect solutions by connecting local physicians with Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, Calif. “We proved to them that we could take an ambulatory piece of clinical data and move it into their side of the house, and also take their in-house messaging and bring it to the ambulatory environment,” explains Chris Riley, CEO of Mitochon Systems. “That’s developed now where we’re connected to Medicity. The hospital put a Medicity HIE in and then we enable our physicians to connect into it. Instead of each physician’s office having a separate connection into Medicity at Hoag, we connect them first within the Virtual Medical Community, then bring all of them into that wider HIE.”

Mitochon Systems EMR
Graphic Courtesy of Mitochon Systems

Meeting Hospitals’ HIE Needs

Free clinical data-exchange solutions are being developed to meet hospitals’ specific needs as well. Atlanta-based Global Net Access (GNAX), a technology solutions provider that offers data center collocation and cloud services, saw that local healthcare customers like Emory Healthcare and Piedmont were in need of an HIE solution – one that could be developed quickly, effectively and without the red tape often associated with state and regional HIE efforts.

“We were at a meeting with Emory and Piedmont, and some of the other big providers in Atlanta, discussing HIE,” recounts Jeff Hinkle, COO of GNAX. “We’d been kind of watching it, and the big discussion was ‘how do we get this going and how do we coordinate it? Who’s going to fund it? How do we cooperate? Who’s going to lead it?’

“What we were hearing was there is a coordination issue in the healthcare industry,” he explains. “No healthcare provider wants their competition to own and manage the system they’re running their data through. And there was a funding issue – there always is.”

Hinkle saw an opportunity to help his customers and the immediate community, and offered to have GNAX coordinate a free HIE solution between participating hospital systems in the metro Atlanta area. The exchange, which includes EMR functionality, was developed over the course of six months. It goes live this month with the participation of five major healthcare organizations. It was developed in keeping with the open-source standards of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s (ONC’s) Direct Project and CONNECT solution in order to eventually interoperate with other systems.

Jeff Hinkle, COO of Global Net Access (GNAX), which houses the data centers of several Atlanta-area hospital systems

Why Free?

At this point, Hinkle considers the free model added value for GNAX’s current customers – one that will be sustained through the expertise GNAX gains by having relationships with the medical community at large. “There’s an intrinsic marketing value for us to provide this,” Hinkle says. “We do a lot of consulting work for our customers at no cost, because it allows us to see a lot of these hospitals’ best practices. We have a fairly vertically integrated business that allows us to do some of these things for our healthcare customers, who don’t always have the budget to do a lot of this stuff.

“When we look at the overall piece of business, we don’t look at each individual, we look at the whole piece and try to help them out wherever we can. The HIE piece was definitely a segment that we saw we could help out in. We have a huge infrastructure base here, which makes it pretty inexpensive for us to do this, compared to if the state wanted to try and set up a business to run this. They’re going to have duplicate overhead costs. They don’t have the expertise and scale of what we’re running. It’s a whole different cost level for them to do it.”

Moving Beyond Hospitals and Atlanta

Despite development and planning issues that occurred when representatives from the state’s regional extension center (REC) and Georgia Tech were initially involved, GNAX maintains effective working relationships with these organizations in order to market its HIE solution across the state and region, and even to smaller physician groups.

“We’re really looking for those organizations that have direct, ongoing contact with the community,” says Hinkle. “We’re looking at aligning with them because clearly they’re out touching the smaller offices, and those guys need to get telemedicine hooked up. They also need to get HIE. If you really look at adoption efforts, we hear resoundingly through the physician community that they’re not going to pay for it,” says Hinkle.

“That’s the reality,” he emphasizes. “If you look at doctors, especially those that own their own practice, it’s really their money; they’re writing the check. They’re already under tons of pressure. The only way to get it done is free.”

Hinkle believes the state’s healthcare IT funding could be better used to market solutions, rather than create them. “Take that money and direct it for greater adoption efforts; and marketing, advertising and training to get this out to the medical community.”

Open Source is the New Model

Hinkle is confident that the GNAX HIE’s open-source model will enable mass adoption fairly quickly. Additional elements can be added to the solution via the company’s advisory groups, allowing GNAX to maintain control of development, which Hinkle believes will help to ensure its speed and quality – essential to technology that runs in critical healthcare environments. “We’re establishing advisory groups for our HIE in each state so that we keep a national footprint, and everybody gets to take advantage of economies of scale – operating fewer points of presence in a larger format.”

Hinkle also believes that creating an open-source solution will enable the GNAX HIE to significantly contribute to the area of healthcare analytics, which, in his opinion, is being driven by a greater public health need. “We’ve seen all of our major Atlanta institutions come to us and say ‘we would love to be able to have a larger view of de-identified patient data for our researchers.’ The easiest way to do that now is to build a national HIE footprint so that you can start pulling those data records and analyzing them.”

Moving ACOs Forward

According to Hinkle, a HIE is not just a conduit, but rather a giant data warehouse that, when plugged into care models like an ACO, will drive healthcare innovation.

“An ACO is really just a bigger business unit,” says Hinkle. “It’s going towards that fully integrated model – pulling different providers and payers in. There’s no reason that ours doesn’t fit that, because it’s an overlay that can be used. We see the data model as being able to extract a common piece of data in a centralized format that allows the patient to be mobile between different providers.” Patient participation will play a large part in making this information truly effective in coordinating care. “We’re pushing to have the patient really in control of their information,” he says. “The more you can get those records together, the more you can actually provide meaningful healthcare. That’s what we’re driving towards. It’s one of our end goals.”

Source: Mitochon