NEWS

Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA)’s IL Chapter publishes article recognizing AlertMD's own Badri Narasimhan.

The article discusses the future of healthcare and technology with also stating Badri as an "innovator shaping the future of healthcare." The interview with Badri covers a wide range of topics including where mobile technology is headed in healthcare and how it can help hospitals. The full publication can be found here. An excerpt of the interview is shown below:

Innovator Shaping the Future of healthcare

Interview with Badri Narasimhan, President & CEO, AlertMD, LLC

By: Dan Yunker, VP & CFO, Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council

DAN: All of us have experienced mobile technology change in our daily lives - everything from buying movie tickets to depositing checks in a bank by taking a picture. How has it impacted the physician?

BADRI: The impact on the routine tasks of a physician is yet to come. Most of the applications that are available for a physician today are reference applications. Instead of carrying a book or a "cheat sheet," a physician may access apps to evaluate the scores for various risk assessments or look up codes for billing. Some use mobile apps to access their office network and then turn around and launch a full-fledged desktop software via a mobile device or tablet. All of these are in the infancy of mobile apps to come.

There are products with the ability to take a picture of the barcode on the bracelet of a patient and from that gather the necessary demographics of the patient (through an interface with the hospital) and digitally send the facesheet to the practice, register the patient and enter professional fees in seconds. Whereas this sounds futuristic, when done well, it is the simplicity of the process that drives adoption. Instead of taking a picture of the check to deposit, the physician takes a picture of the barcode and enters charges -- it can literally be that simple.

DAN: Why would a hospital want to provide an interface to enable this kind of billing?

BADRI: The are several reasons. For one, an easy billing process for physicians makes it incredibly easy to do business at the hospital. If I as a physician practice at a few different hospitals, I am going to gravitate my patients towards the one where it is the easiest to do business. Technology is certainly not the make or break factor in such a decision, but a lot of little things add up to a decision and such technology becomes yet another factor in making a good hospital great.

DAN: We have seen many hospitals focus on their physician relationships. How inclined are hospitals to implement technology to increase ease of doing business?

BADRI: Great question. Products that only improve the lives of physicians are likely to meet with resistance. If a product can both cater to the physician group and be beneficial to the hospital, there is a good opportunity to provide value to all. For example, a highly efficient process for the hospital to make the ICD9/ICD10 diagnosis codes in the employed and independent physician's professional fee process consistent with the hospital's DRG-based billing process may be delivered by a technology that also makes it easy to do business at the hospital. This is a win-win. Today, the hospital employes several documentation specialist nurses who either round with the physician or round separately to identify opportunities for improving documentation, identify DRG changes, review it with the physician and complete the review. This process is ripe for innovation. As we move from fee for service to fee for value, documentation becomes king and any inconsistency between physician offices and hospitals become the enemy.

DAN: Now that you mentioned ICD10, what, if any, are ramifications of ICD10 on software at the hands of physicians today?

BADRI: The changes are dependent on how the software vendor chooses to tackle ICD10. The physician should be spared the effort of training in billing. Physicians should search for the codes in plain English (e.g., hip pain) and the complexities of which code it maps to behind the scenes are dealt with by our product. For example, pain in the left and right hip are one and the same in ICD9 but the physician should not need to know or care about it. The same should hold in ICD10. Where there are additional questions or clarifications, technology should walk the physician through them in English and keep the complexity away from them.

DAN: When will mobile technology start impacting other staff members around the hospital such as nurses, pharmacists, etc.?

BADRI: Pioneering work is being done by many players there as well. Nursing labor is one of the top three expense items for a hospital P & L and yet the budgeting for that follows a crude algorithm of counting the number of patients in the bed at midnight on a day. The activity during the day when there were 50 admissions and 50 discharges compared to one where there were five and five are not even comparable... but based on today's industry metrics, the expectation would be that the costs for both days are the same! This metric (nursing labor per patient day) is ripe for innovation as well.

Some day in the future, each nurse may carry an app that will be like a weather forecast. Instead of showing how likely it is to rain in the next four days, it will show how likely it is that this particular nurse with be called in over the next few shifts.

DAN: Any closing comments?

BADRI: We are in the new age of shared hospital and physician interests. What is good for the hospital is now good for the physician and vice versa. There are several technology solutions that cate to extracting maximum value from this reality. Hospital administrators should seek to find the best solution for this needs. The time is now for leaders. The followers may lose market share and may be forced to adapt trends instead of gaining competitivity advantage by moving early.

AlertMD today announces Family Christian Health Center, a practice with over 24,000 patients and 85,000 visits a year, as a new customer.

Also, in the app store, you will find AlertMD 8.0. Complete with 14 enhancements, the app now enables many additional capabilities including the following:

• The ability to set up billing protocols when a global period is in effect.
• The ability to set up care protocols by payor – e.g., one payor may want a certain kind of protocol implemented and you can now dynamically enable AlertMD to propagate it to all providers instantaneously and aggregate providers into care groups (all commercial payors, Medicare, etc.)
• The ability for physicians to declare "primary" locations so they can see their data in a multi-location setting, making the process faster.

Current users, please upgrade to AlertMD 8.0. We are about to announce more new clients and a new module that plugs into AlertMD specific to accountable-care organizations, risk-based reimbursement, and care management.

We are delighted to have come thus far and look forward to further developing our mobile platform for risk-based reimbursement models.

Catholic Health Initiatives, Iowa Heart, signed on to pilot AlertMD at its Iowa locations.

The 55-physician cardiology group serves multiple hospitals in Iowa, and we will enable mobile charge capture at all of its facilities.

If you are using paper fee tickets at hospitals, if you need to look for facesheets, track down missing charges, or worry about ICD10, etc., it is time your hospital made it easier for you to do business there. Talk to your hospital about AlertMD today. We look forward to serving more clients. Thank you for your continued support.

Alaska Heart, a leading cardiology care provider with 8 locations across Alaska announced a definitive agreement to use AlertMD.

Our footprint across the United States is as follows:

• IL
• IN
• FL
• AZ
• OR
• WA
• NY
• WI
• and now AK!

We are not only geographically expanding. AlertMD is used by many specialties and counting:

• Hospital Medicine
• Family Medicine
• Internal Medicine
• General Surgery
• Bariatric Surgery
• Gastroenterology
• Mental Health
• Orthopedics
• Pediatrics
• Cardiology
• Neurology
• Neurosurgery
• And more to come!

We are about to announce more customers in the coming weeks. Thank you for your support all along!

Trinity Hospital entered into an agreement to make their hospital easy to do business at via AlertMD.

This hospital, which has been around for over 115 years, now stands to gain from DRG benefits, nursing labor improvements, a simpler path from ICD9 to ICD10, and much more.

As we increase our geographical footprint around the country, hospitals like Trinity that aim to differentiate themselves from competition, prepare for the DRG changes coming in the next few years, and increase profitability through better organization of nursing overtime wages, are who will lead the pack.

We are poised to announce more clients – hospitals and practices nationwide. From large IDNs to single hospitals, the challenges today are the same, and we are proud to help hospitals meet them.

With your support of our products, we have now hit major milestones. New features, record-breaking revisions, and a new app version!

• 7 million revisions to facesheets with a monthly rate of 1.5M and rising
• 57,000 patients in 2012 alone... and growing fast
• 250,000 page views of the web administration portal each month

AlertMD 7.0 is now in the app store! There are several incremental features in this version. Some of the key ones are as follows:

Practice Feature

• You can add hospital encounters for clinic patients without a hospital data feed – a major time saver.
• Surgery coding has some quirks about repeating diagnoses for PQRI charges – these now are a touch of a button.
• Split keyboard – We now support the split keyboard – so if you have the "blackberry" thumb down and type with your thumb from both sides of the iPad, you can do it on AlertMD as well.

Hospital Features (If your hospital subscribes to AlertMD on your behalf.)

• The DRG explorer at your hospital will now enable hospital revenue management to monitor special cases where you enter codes that help them improve DRG – e.g., pneumonia vs. aspirational pneumonia.
• We now have the data structures in place in AlertMD 7.0 to predict the census at the hospital for the next 96 hours, thus providing the opportunity to reduce incremental labor expenses

If you are a current user of AlertMD, download 7.0 now! If you are a hospital administrator, contact us about DRG and census analytics. If you are not a customer yet... what is stopping you?

Today, AlertMD announces market entry into New York, among several other major highlights.

Hospital News

The following value-adds to hospitals will incent them to work with us. If you do not get a direct patient extract from your hospital, kindly have the administrators at the hospitals read the below and get in touch with us.

• DRG Assist - Our new module to improve hospital DRGs is being built at a handful of hospitals to improve performance. The hospital receives an alert to the CDMP nurse. The alert will specify exactly which chart to audit for potential improvement in DRG - e.g., look in Chart 23232 for aspirational pneumonia vs. pneumonia.

• Hospital Occupancy predictor — We are embarking on a hospital occupancy predictor module to project near-term occupancy at the hospital to assist with flex staff labor planning. The system is built on the existing AlertMD data feeds from the hospital.

Practice News

• New Customer in Hudson Valley, NY - Today, the Greater Hudson Valley Family Health Center (GHVFHC) entered into a definitive agreement to implement AlertMD for its physicians. Founded 44 years ago and serving over 17,000 patients (totaling to over 125,000 patient visits a year!), GHVFHC employs 250 people, including physicians practicing pediatric & adolescent medicine, internal medicine, women’s health, behavioral health and dental care.

• Analytics Module headed your way — In the next few days, AlertMD will release Charge Analytics – a module that will help practices measure the impact of cash flow improvements via AlertMD in real-time so that they can find and fix problems. We will walk practices through unearthing the value as well. Hospital-facing analytics are soon to follow.

Talk to us if you are interested in getting started with AlertMD today!

AlertMD released a new Specialist-Edition with a hospital focus. Available now – download and install AlertMD 6.0 from the Apple App Store.

AlertMD released a new Specialist-Edition with a hospital focus. If you are a specialist or would like your hospital’s facesheet to show up automatically at your practice, you will find AlertMD 6.0 to be particularly useful.

We now have 3400 rules for specialists to help with coding that have been created in collaboration with physician practices. Our multi-level coding guidance unit now will enable a narrative to capture the information the physician needs to provide to the billing office. Likewise, global periods will now light up automatically and guide a physician through when charges are billable and when they are not. Our new CPT search module enables free text searches of the entire CPT module. The ICD10 implications are enormous. We are also embarking on a note-assist module to help documentation improve at the hospital.

At dozens of practices around the country, the facesheet now shows up inside the practice system seconds after the physician stands bedside to enter charges, but we don't stop there. If an element in the facesheet changes, we will highlight it and refresh the practice copy – no more searching for the latest versions.

And did I say, in the time since the last new update, we doubled again! Recent use of AlertMD has begun at about a dozen practices, including GI Associates in Wisconsin – one of the largest groups in that specialty in the country.

Download AlertMD 6.0 and enjoy. Consider “liking” us on Facebook here.

AlertMD today processes 25,000 or more patient encounters each month. That is over 300,000 a year.

We have a pipeline of dozens of hospitals in various stages of evaluation and are in discussions with practices accounting for 1000+ physicians, a good portion of who we hope we will have the honor to serve.

We were the major sponsor at the Centricity Healthcare User Group – a pictorial commentary is on our Facebook page. Our popular giveaway at the show was a football rocket in our colors; a picture of which is also on our page.

May I humbly invite you to like us on Facebook as we start increasing the pace of our growth? Check out our page here.

Dr. Arif Ali, a sports medicine orthopedic surgeon, completes billing seconds after he was done with his surgeries.

"AlertMD has far exceeded my expectations. Today, I finished coding 3 surgeries on my iPhone in 26 seconds – I am very impressed."

- Dr. Arif Ali, Orthopedic Surgery Specialists, Park Ridge, IL

What he left out was that the hospital where he has privileges provides his rounding list and his patients' facesheets digitally to us. Patients on his census are automatically matched in the Progressive Management System (PMS), the facesheet is automatically entered, new patients are automatically registered, and his charges are submitted instantaneously.

AlertMD is now rolling out specialty specific modules - the comprehensive ortho module, neuro module, and several others to make it possible for all physicians to bill in seconds.

Hospitals offering AlertMD stand out in the crowd. Is your hospital one of them? Talk to us.

GI Associates LLC announced today that they have selected AlertMD to enter charges and have charges show up automatically in their EMR.

GI Associates is the third largest GI group in the country, a national & international referral center for pancreatic-biliary cancer and the largest single-specialty group in its state, and we are thrilled to be working with them to be even more efficient.

In other news, the following groups went live with AlertMD automated answering services in March:

• Dr. James Romano – cosmetic surgery
• Dr. Michael Bain – cosmetic surgery
• Dr. Cheryl Yokoyama – cosmetic surgery

But it doesn't stop there: Dr. Moynihan (orthopedics) and Dr. Boynton (cosmetic surgery) are new customers who are set to go live in April.

AlertMD just keeps growing!

Aurora Healthcare chose AlertMD to demonstrate that the system is serious about making it easy for physicians to do business with them.

At Aurora, AlertMD has signed on nationally renown groups of physicians with privileges at the hospital system, and we will be making the announcements in that regard soon.

If you are carrying bits of paper around to record charges at your hospital, let us know and we will work with them to make it easy to do business there. Physician practices that work at hospitals offering AlertMD will benefit from real-time mobile access to their census, incremental revenue from plugging hospital charge leakage, tremendous workflow advantages in the area of readmission triage, scheduling for group rounding of calls, and finally a clear transition path to ICD10.

As constraints on healthcare providers and hospitals increase, your hospital and you will both benefit from AlertMD. We are currently in discussions with over 100 hospitals around the country and look forward to more hospitals making it easy to do business at their facilities and creating competitive advantage.

It is with great pleasure that we announce significant growth in the surgical market for AlertMD.

Surgeons can now spend 7 seconds billing as their census shows up automatically on their mobile device. Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) patients and inpatients - all kept in sync while billing becomes faster than paper processes. Missing charges are triaged using our auto-detection tool further adding to practice revenue.

As hospitals seek to differentiate themselves from competitors in the market, AlertMD becomes a key competitive tool to make it easy for the physician to practice medicine at the hospital and to increase physician satisfaction. Talk to your hospitals if they do not provide you their census electronically today.

M & M Orthopedics went live with Drs. Gokhale and Tulipan earlier today. In just a few minutes, they completed their surgery billing in a unique integration back into eClinicalWorks. This 30 surgeon group is one of the largest orthopedic practices in Chicagoland.

Dr. Jonathan Wallace, general surgeon practicing at Alexian Brothers, St. Alexius, and a couple of ASCs, went live with AlertMD earlier today. He is part of a four physician group, Suburban Surgical Care Associates.

Advanced Gastroenterology in Vancouver WA, Orthopedic Surgery Specialists in Park Ridge IL, MK Orthopedics in Joliet IL, and Tallahassee Neurological Center in Tallahassee FL round out some of the other existing surgery practices for AlertMD.

If you are a Centricity practice, we are about to rollout real-time sync back into the practice management and electric medical records (EMR) so your facesheet at the hospital shows up inside your EMR seconds after the physician stands next to the patient bedside. The innovations keep coming!

We just reached 100,000 charges captured with AlertMD. We are increasing charge capture adoption at roughly 25% a month!

Earlier today, released AlertMD 5.0 - which now has video-based coding instructions embedded into it along side the entire CPT book. The entire CMS guidelines for coding will now walk a physician through entering additional diagnoses when needed and has embedded YouTube video-based help so you can see how to do something if you have a question.

Here is what one of our happy customers have had to say about AlertMD:

"AlertMD has been of terrific value to us. It has streamlined our charge capture with a direct impact of huge time savings for our physicians. We have fewer missing charges and the charges we do receive are more timely and accurate. Most importantly, the product is very intuitive and customer service is terrific. We whole-heartedly recommend AlertMD.”

- Brian Ecker, Director of Operations, Family Care Network, Whatcom Health Information Network

We are delighted to have you as a customer, and if you are not one, what is stopping you?

When Legacy Health Systems provided their census electronically, little did they know that Kartini Clinic would use AlertMD to drive missing charges down to $0.

This is a clear indication of physician satisfaction at the hospital, a well-run practice, and the value ChargeMD has been able to add.

"ChargeMD adds real value to our business office processes and allows our providers to spend less time pushing paper. By virtually eliminating missing charges and speeding up time to payment, we are confident that it will result in a lasting contribution to our bottom line. We were also very pleasantly surprised at the ease of set up and the extremely dedicated and responsive customer support. We highly recommend a trial of this product."

- Morgan O'Toole, CEO of Kartini Clinic

As we continue to innovate and grow with our clients, we look forward creating more opportunities for saving your practice time and money.

We are proud to say that our stunning adoption rate continues on as we archive strong growth in just 7 days.

In the last 7 days, we have announced the following new customers:

1. Tallahassee Neurological Clinic in Tallahassee, FL - exclusive neurology and neurosurgery provider to the 772-bed Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare location, has signed on to both AlertMD and ChargeMD.
2. Oak Park Pediatrics in IL has signed on to AlertMD.
3. Family Care Network in Whatcom County, WA went live with ChargeMD.
4. And most importantly, we now receive a live census from Legacy Health Systems, a chain of 7 hospitals in the state of Washington for our customers that practice in 2 of the 7 hospitals. All they had to do was to ask the hospital to make it easy for them to do business there. If you do not get a census from your hospital onto your iPad/ iPhone directly, you may be only an email away. Ask and you may be able to make this happen for you!

Thanks a lot for your support, and we are delighted by our continued growth.

Family Care Network, a 60-physician practice with 11 clinics, and a patient base of over 90,000, selects AlertMD.

They are a Centricity client and aim to also integrate charge capture into their workflow further - such as sourcing appointments, placing the charges back right into the EMR, etc.

Advocate Lutheran General Hospital has made it easy for its physicians to do business there by publishing its census via AlertMD.

Advocate Lutheran General is a teaching hospital, research center, and Level I trauma center with 645 beds. One of AlertMD's largest hospital partnerships yet.

With 1500+ physicians on staff, this brings convenience on an unparalleled basis to the facility. Within seconds of using the physician’s mobile device to scan a barcode at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, the facesheet is brought back to the practice’s billing system along with charges for the hospital visit. AlertMD’s automatic missing charge module helps physician practices ensure that every single consult ever seen by the physician is billed for. Our intelligent coding module would make it easy for physicians to learn coding principles. We currently have licenses for ICD9 and are transitioning into ICD10 to guarantee that our billing options remain up-to-date for your physicians.

For some of our customers who do not have interfaces with the hospitals where you practice, this is a great indicator that innovative, physician-friendly hospitals will indeed move to serve you. Let us know if you want to work with your hospital administration to receive your census on your mobile device, and we will gladly enable such interfaces where you practice.

We are talking to hospital systems representing 120 hospitals around the country and look forward to bringing you more innovation to you.

AlertMD has now been adapted to enter clinic charges on a mobile device in 7 seconds. Plus, AlertMD's footprint continues to grow.

Eugene Pediatrics became our first practice to integrate with their Centricity practice management system. Now they are able to get clinic appointments on their mobile device, enter all clinic and hospital charges through the system, and bill on the very same day. Here's what they have to say:

"In one word, AlertMD can be summarized as FANTASTIC. It is easy to use, saves me time and works well both at the clinic and at the hospital."

- Dr. Pilar Bradshaw, Eugene Pediatrics, Eugene, OR

"I practice medicine at two different hospitals and bill both individually and as part of a group. Managing a paper process for this was extremely complicated. AlertMD has vastly simplified my life. I bill the same day, and two different billing companies picked up the system in a matter of hours. This is a great product."

- Dr. Nathaniel Ross, Ross Family Medicine & Tatum Family Healthcare, Gary, IN

By specialty, here is our footprint on AlertMD (across 8 States now!)

1. Hospital Medicine
2. Internal Medicine
3. Gastroenterology
4. Cardiology
5. Family Practice
6. Pediatrics
7. Surgery
8. Mental Health

We are almost ready to announce more new customers in the coming weeks. Stay tuned and thank you for your support.