Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category

Medical practices are conservative with their technology investments, so it’s no wonder that Sage Software meets the needs of many thousands of them. The company is financially stable, boasts a healthcare legacy spanning over 25 years, and provides products and services that practices need to succeed. Its parent organization has 2.8 million customers in North America alone. We talked to Paul Stinson, senior vice president of product management for Sage Software Healthcare, Inc., about the company and the state of the physician systems industry.

Consulting companies are polarized around two extremes. On one end are the tiny companies made up of a few colleagues who’ve left their corporate jobs and hung out a shingle, making everything up as they go. On the other end of the spectrum are the huge, industry-agnostic firms that send out rookies willing to work under difficult conditions for a couple of years until something better comes along, following cookie cutter methods and relying on home office backup for anything not covered in the standard boilerplate.

The weakest link in financial and clinical communications involves voice and telephone conversations. They aren’t documented or retrievable, leaving insurance companies free to claim payment misunderstandings or Joint Commission to deem information hand-offs as insufficient. The White Stone Group of Knoxville, Tennessee focuses on capturing and managing those “communications events” that drive reimbursement and patient care. We spoke to CEO and CTO Guille Cruze about the company’s TRACE and OptiVox products and the benefits customers are seeing from their use.

Give me some background on The White Stone Group.

There’s little doubt that system availability is more important now than ever. Hospitals are rolling out a host of mission-critical clinical applications. That means downtime directly impacts patient care and caregivers. Those systems usually run on Windows or Linux servers. What can an IT professional do to make sure that technical glitches don’t increase patient risk or clinician dissatisfaction? Alan Gilbert is the healthcare practice leader for Stratus Technologies, which specializes in high-availability architecture for healthcare and other technology-dependent industries.

The most critical step a company can take is recruiting talented senior managers who fit the company’s culture. Troy Frank and Michael Delisle, co-founders of PringPierce Executive Search, have been successfully bringing high-performing executives into healthcare information technology companies since 1994. Leadership talent of that caliber cannot be recruited through online job ads or resume searches. PringPierce’s industry focus and personal attention ensure that the right candidates are identified and recruited, ranging from sales and marketing VPs, product and strategy executives, and high-level leaders in enterprise software, clinical workflow, and mobile technologies.