Up and Comers: Healthcare IT Vendor Companies On the Move

CPM Resource Center: evidence-based care in allied health

The Grand Rapids, Mich.-based CPM Resource Center (CPMRC), an Elsevier company, has been quietly making waves in the industry by helping hospital organizations drill down to the level of allied health professional clinical documentation and care plans. Indeed, says Michelle Troseth, R.N., CPMRC's executive vice president and chief professional practice officer, the firm has grown 400 percent in the past few years, with nearly 300 hospitals in its collaborative consortium (essentially the company's nationwide user group). CPMRC customer organizations have busily been drilling down several levels, using clinical IT tools to support non-physician care. For example, clinician leaders at Abington (Pa.) Memorial Hospital, last year implemented CPMRC's core software program, which has brought evidence-based guidelines and clinical decision support to nursing and to the respiratory care, physical therapy, and dietary areas of that hospital.

Bringing clinical IT support to non-physician pieces of the hospital care puzzle is something that comes naturally to CPMRC executives, most of whom have R.N. or other allied health backgrounds. But there's more to the story, of course. Asked what makes CPMRC different, Troseth says, “I know it sounds cliché, but we're mission-driven. Our mission is to co-create the best places to give and receive acute care, and everything we do is with intention. And that's what makes us different, and it's why our clients value what we do with them.”

What's going to happen for CPMRC (a division of the Amsterdam, Netherlands-based Elsevier, which acquired CPMRC from Eclipsys in December 2007 for $25 million) in the next few years? “I think we're going to be discovered,” she says, “Because we can't waste money or time anymore in healthcare; and I think we'll be looked at as a national model to learn from, because our professional practice framework is embedded in the electronic health record.”

A-Life Medical: Prepared for ICD-10

For A-Life Medical, a provider of computer-assisted coding products and services for the healthcare industry, the transition to ICD-10 could turn out to be quite a game-changer.

Things are already busy; the San Diego-based company processes more than five million transactions monthly and provides coding services to more than 40,000 physicians nationwide. “If you think about it, there are 1.2 billion patient visits per year, and each visit requires medical codes for reimbursement,” says president and CEO Jaye Connolly, who has been with the company since 2005. The reimbursement process, she says, is manual, time-consuming and error-prone. “And to add more insult to injury, we've got ICD-10 coming, which is going to expand the coding from 20,000 codes to 155,000 codes.” As a result, A-Life is going to become “a need to have. We were a nice to have,” she says.

The company's ultimate goal, Connolly says, is to improve the accuracy, efficiency and speed of the medical coding process. Using its patented Natural Language Processing technology, LifeCode, A-Life interprets electronic transcribed patient encounters through its online data center, which are then coded for reimbursement purposes. “That's our core technology,” she notes. “We take medical transcription and other types of documentation and push it through our LifeCode engine, and it can go through and decipher what is written and apply it to coding.”

And while the company is currently focused on coding and ICD-10, another area on its radar is data mining, what Connolly believes is “the next big thing.” A-Life acts as a data repository, using its tools to transform all of the data within a health organization into knowledge for meaningful use, such as core measures and clinical pathways. This can improve efficiency and productivity, reduce overtime and cut down on use of external auditors, she adds. “When I talk to CFOs and others in the health information management department, they say, ‘we have to start working smarter, not harder.’ And that's what our technology does. Right now, they have all these queries and reports, and what they really want is for someone to give them their core measures.”

And while A-Life has been in existence since 1996, the company seems to have a renewed vigor when it comes to the health IT market. A-Life Hospital, its subsidiary, recently inked a deal to provide facility outpatient-based, computer-assisted coding services at five of OhioHealth's facilities, with a possibility for future expansion.

“We're very excited,” says Connolly. “We're finally getting the interest we always knew needed to be there.”

PatientKeeper : Workflow first

For PatientKeeper, improving workflow has always been a top priority. The Boston-based company's suite of applications works to bring together data from systems across the hospital and community to provide a single, actionable view of the patient. “Our focus as a company is to help physicians in terms of improving workflow and saving them time by providing applications that work for them,” says CEO Paul Brient.