Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category

The May 2008 acquisition of eScription by Nuance Communications brought two formidable companies together, both with a strong healthcare presence. The eScription platform, named Best in KLAS in December 2008 for the fifth year in a row, provides computer aided medical transcription using background speech recognition. Nuance is the world’s leading speech solution vendor. The eScription solution turns clinician dictations into formatted draft documents, requiring only a quick transcriptionist review and edit. The product has been proven to work in large enterprise deployments, reducing transcription costs, turning dictation into EMR-ready data, and improving report turnaround time to ensure efficient patient management. We spoke with John Shagoury, co-president of Nuance’s healthcare division.

MED3OOO’s June 2007 acquisition of InteGreat brought together the Pittsburgh-based performance-oriented management and technology company and Scottsdale, AZ-based InteGreat, which offers what it calls healthcare’s easiest to use EHR. The acquisition gives MED3OOO the advantage of being able to offer a state-of-the-art EHR package managed under its own development and implementation agenda. That’s another way the company can help its customers gain competitive advantage and improve their performance. We spoke to Steve Ura, chief technology officer and senior vice president of MED3OOO.

Many factors determine whether physicians willingly use information systems: usability, functionality, and workflow integration are often the most important. Hospitals are buying systems whose benefits depend on active physician usage, but results have been unimpressive, with utilization barely reaching into double-digit percentages of doctors. PatientKeeper’s applications help physicians work more efficiently and practice better medicine, but they also unlock the value of existing hospital systems whose physician usage is less than optimal. We spoke to Paul Brient, president and CEO of PatientKeeper.

Frantic activity with clinical and patient safety systems has kept a quiet revolution out of the limelight: financial systems are rapidly evolving as well. Billing itself has grown in complexity, but a higher level of patient payment responsibility has made it imperative for hospitals to develop a plan for getting paid even as initial care is being delivered. RelayHealth’s May 2008 acquisition of privately held HTP Inc. of Columbus, OH gives RelayHealth more connectivity services between patients, payors, and financial institutions that will help providers manage the growing burden of uncompensated care. With the acquisition, RelayHealth provides the most comprehensive set of services to automate and simplify financial management activities with patients and payors. We spoke to Ray Shealy, former president and CEO of HTP and newly named VP/GM of Financial Clearance Services at RelayHealth.

It’s safe to say that Sentillion’s applications are the security tools that even users love. The company is unusual in that its technically polished infrastructure applications were designed exclusively with healthcare in mind, meaning all that sophistication is hidden from the end user. All they know is that Sentillion’s products make it easier to log on to multiple applications, to work efficiently across best-of-breed applications, and flawlessly run feature-rich applications remotely just like they were within the four walls. We spoke to CEO and Co-Founder Robert Seliger about the benefits healthcare organizations are seeing from their use of Sentillion’s tools.