Here’s the transcript from interview with John Capobianco from Medecision talking mostly about the “payer-based health records” they’re developing with several big health plan customers, and distributing to providers. The audio podcast is here.
Matthew Holt: Matthew Holt with The Health Care Blog, still at HIMSS. Now I’m meeting with John Capobianco, who is the President of MEDecision, and also with Tracey Costello, who is the VP of marketing. So welcome to you both, hi John.
John Capobianco: Hi.
Matthew: Hi, Tracey.
Tracey Costello: Hello.
Matthew: John, tell us a bit about MEDecision. As some of the readers of the blog know, I’ve had folks from ActiveHealth Management and Click4Care do podcasts. I was thinking about the whole space around payers and data, and analyzing what’s going on in that world is something that probably most of our readers don’t know that much about. So give me a brief overview of what you guys do, where you fit in the space generally, and how you compare yourself to those guys, or other competitors.
John: Hi, Matt. I’d be happy to do that, Matt. MEDecision started about 18 years ago creating a solution to a mission statement that was put forth. That was: how to improve the relationship amongst payers, patients, and providers. We started out going after the payer community because it was not only where the money is, but where the data is, to create clinical records for patients. If you want to improve the outcome, you want to improve the health of patients, what you have to do is to get health information exchange to actually work.By spending the first 18 years going after providing the right information for care managers, for utilization in case and disease management, we figured out how to analyze and gather the data together that was inherent within the only currently available digital systems in the industry that have a lot of data. That’s from the payer’s claims data. We also then created the workflow applications for the case disease utilization mangers. We’ve now recently added the clinical overlays for both utilization as well as case and disease conditions, and what the best practices and processes are around that. Then just a few years ago we started to create the communication vehicles from those inside the walls of the payer to the outside, to the provider communities.About a year ago now, we entered into what we think is probably the most important phase of that. That is, above and beyond the great work we’ve now been able to do with authorizations and referrals and extensions as communication vehicles, we’re actually now starting to take what we call the patient clinical summary. That summarized view of this patient and all their conditions and move it out to the point of care.With several of our clients now, we are not only populating the personal health records, or personal health management systems that they choose, but we’re also providing that data out to either their provider portals or through the standard vehicles we put in place to do authorizations and referrals. Delivering that patient clinical summary right to the provider at the point of care.
