By Joy Rios, Managing Partner at Practice Transformation
Twitter: @askjoyrios
More than 5,000 healthcare industry professionals gathered for the 89th annual Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) conference in Las Vegas, October 26 – 29, 2014.
Going along with this year’s theme of Always Forward, it came as no surprise that many companies made a point to demonstrate the ways they are working toward proactive healthcare. Be it through predictive analytics, care coordination, quality measurement, or patient engagement, the overarching goals to help practices better meet the needs of their patients, to address the issues that impact healthcare, and to drive excellence shined through.
I had the opportunity to sit down with several vendors to better understand their approach to supporting practices in delivering the best possible patient care. You can listen to our full conversation at HealthcareNowradio.com, but here’s a brief summary of what went down.
The Ingenious Med team shows their mobile app
Krina Patel, VP of Solution Engineering for Ingenious Med, explained how her company dares mighty things. Their patient encounter platform is complementary to the EHR and makes it easy to serve up critical pieces of patient data to support care coordination. Through a mobile and web platform, they help bring care teams together to insightfully manage each encounter and to provide ways to improve communication about the patient.
Brian Dunbar & Nate Davis man the ZirMed booth
Ric Sinclair, VP of Product for ZirMed, talked to me about their end-to-end revenue cycle management platform that can surround, supplement, and modernize in-patient and ambulatory EHRs. In our conversation, we talked about how ZirMed is proactively and pragmatically providing next-level analytics of quality measures – allowing for system-level, provider-level, and patient-level findings. Additionally, we spoke about how they address the challenge providers face in managing two very different aspects of their business — maximizing revenue in a fee-for service world while concurrently coming up with a strategy for entering into fee-for-value contracts.
Lead engagement Patient Prompt team member, Amy Hamilton
Colin Hung, SVP of Marketing for Patient Prompt spoke with me about how to bridge the gap of patient engagement. Turns out that the very fundamentals of engagement boil down to effective communication and adding the human element to every day interactions within a practice. To truly engage patients, providers must make an effort to not just talk to them, but also to listen to them. Following a patient portal build and implementation, Patient Prompt offers support with creating compelling reasons for patients to take the most important next step – logging in.