Bostech and hc1.com CEO Brad Bostic are featured in SmartPlanet's business section, with a Q & A by SmartPlanet and ZDNet writer Andrew Nusca.
An excerpt from the article is below.
A dose of intelligence for lab data
By Andrew Nusca
It’s atypical of serial entrepreneurs to leave the bright lights of consumer technology for the big, bad world of B2B, but that’s exactly what Brad Bostic did.
Founder of the people-powered search engine ChaCha, Bostic is now flexing his cloud-based intelligence muscle in a newer company, Bostech. This time, he promises to bring answers to exacting, overworked lab technicians — not just curious consumers.
We spoke with him about how cloud computing can help the U.S. healthcare system function more accurately, and how his company’s hc1.com CRM product fits into the picture.
SmartPlanet: You say your business is about “healthcare relationship management.” What’s the problem out there? What are you trying to solve?
BB: There’s a lot of talk about the healthcare crisis. If you look at the overall environment we have for providing care, it’s made up of lots of separate professional entities that deliver these services. All of these different proprietors have generally been focused on internal clinical process, like electronic medical records. That’s geared to achieving a level of satisfaction inside your own four walls, but these different professional entities are really not effective at managing relationships with each other.
Five percent of Medicare beneficiaries consume 44 percent of Medicare payments. Those five percent see, on average, 14 doctors per year. Those doctors really aren’t coordinated.
Relationship management is the number one biggest disaster in healthcare that must be remedied. It needs to be fixed for purposes of quality of care, of cost, and fulfilling the mandate of moving from a quantity-based environment to quality-based environment.
Roughly 6.5 billion lab tests are performed every year in the U.S. alone, by about 215,000 labs. Those results drive 80 percent of all diagnostic decisions. Our initial focus is really on facilitating this relationship between the lab and the healthcare provider. We’re allowing all the people in that cycle to have the intelligence they need.
Healthcare providers have historically been able to get paid for every procedure they do. They never really had incentive to scrutinize the data. To use an example: a hospital-acquired infection like pneumonia. Let’s say they do a test and nothing shows up, then three days later you come back with a raging infection. Historically, hospitals would be reimbursed for treating that. With quality-based care, they’ll have to swallow that cost. We now have to absorb $40,000 to treat one of those.
If I can, in real time, see all of the different infections occurring across my health system, I can instantly take action to prevent something. Today, these folks have 90 days in arrears data tabulated manually by somebody.
Access the full article from SmartPlanet here.
About hc1.com
The hc1.com® Healthcare Relationship Management® service (a Bostech® Innovation) combines cloud-based healthcare CRM, real-time dashboards and alerts, and secure messaging to optimize the relationships between healthcare professionals and improve the quality of healthcare. With hc1.com, labs are able to manage the entire client lifecycle from a secure web browser by gaining a 360-degree view of each client relationship. Bostech’s healthcare clients include McKesson RelayHealth, know error, Alere, St. Vincent Health, and South Bend Medical Foundation.
View a 2-minute video overview of hc1.com now at www.hc1.com/video.
