Federal health reform is providing an added benefit to mid-size businesses that provide information technology services to physicians facing a 2014 deadline to implement electronic health records.
In the past year, IVANS Inc. has tripled the size of its Stamford headquarters staff to 30 employees, in the process moving from downtown to larger quarters at 225 High Ridge Road that can accommodate another 20 people.
It was originally founded in 1994 as a nonprofit affiliate of mid-size property and casualty insurance carriers to help agents install computerized policy processing systems. About five years ago, IVANS”™ health IT systems became its dominant product offering.
CEO Clare DeNicola said the headcount increases in the past year have been driven squarely by its health business as physician clinics are forced under federal reform to move to electronic health records.
Even as they do so, providers of health IT services are experiencing their own climatic shift as cloud-based computing services drift into the scene, allowing physicians to access software applications over a network rather than from desktops or servers in their own offices.
DeNicola said her company is assimilating cloud services even as it tracks changes under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the latter of which makes $44,000 available for physicians that accept Medicare if they meet a “meaningful use” guideline for using electronic medical records.
“Health care ”¦ reform is such a tremendous opportunity for this company,” DeNicola said. “We (had been) very much in a slow growth mode, and driven by a culture that had frankly not (taken on) risk.”
Others are not standing pat, obviously. In Massachusetts, athenahealth Inc. set up a program that guarantees its clients will receive an immediate payment in full under the “meaningful use” federal guidelines for electronic health records, able to do so with confidence due to its use of a cloud-based architecture that gives it an accurate view of clients”™ use of its systems. Norwalk-based IMS Health acquired San Francisco-based Med-Vantage, whose software helps insurance carriers track claims and other information originated at physician clinics. IMS Health did not disclose what it paid for Med-Vantage.
Even as private-sector providers are scrambling to reposition themselves under federal health reform, some 60 regional extension centers are also laying the groundwork for coordinating health IT service for doctors, including eHealth Connecticut, which as of June was more than halfway toward its goal of helping some 1,300 physicians statewide adopt electronic health records. In early July, the nonprofit issued a request for proposals for third-party providers to help it modernize physician IT systems, including telemarketers and those who can conduct face-to-face meetings to sell physicians on such systems.
For their part, Connecticut physicians are not standing pat either; entering July the Connecticut State Medical Society said it would team with Amagine Inc., a subsidiary of the American Medical Association, to provide access to a portal that showcases options for physicians considering how to adopt electronic health records. Amagine said it was only the second such agreement it had reached with a state medical society and the first since it made a physician portal available in April.
“Small and solo physician practices, which represent more than 80 percent of Connecticut physicians, are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the kind of investment necessary to integrate health IT,” Matthew Katz, executive vice president of the Connecticut State Medical Society, said in a statement. “Providing our members with this kind of support at a considerable discount will help them transition to new technologies.”
