Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Lauren Patrick, CEO of Healthmonix (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take the example that you started with – hip surgery in the case of an orthopedic provider. There are specific gold standard quality metrics that the central organizations provide related to a hip surgery.

When you are pulling data from an EHR system, are those records against every metric you are trying to pull data from?

Lauren Patrick: A lot of times, it’s not. We have to go look elsewhere. We may have to pull data from a different system that that practice is using. We may have to go pull data from outside records.

You’ve hit one of the snags. We spend a lot of time integrating data from a lot of sources and pulling it back together. That’s a common problem across healthcare. 

Sramana Mitra: My next question is, does that data exist anywhere?

Lauren Patrick: What the powers-that-be have tried to do is come up with metrics that can be captured. In some cases, there are metrics that we don’t capture because they’re just too difficult. In the case of hip surgery, for example, we look at functional outcomes.

There are standard, verified assessments that we use that patients can fill out. We capture that data in a patient-reported outcome system. Then we’ll pull that in. If the data doesn’t exist, that’s a different problem. Assuming that data is somewhere, we’ll capture it.

There’s a lot of different metrics that organizations can be measured against. They may choose to not get measured on that, but choose a different quality metric. 

Sramana Mitra: How many orthopedic providers are there in the US?

Lauren Patrick: Thousands.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have in that segment?

Lauren Patrick: We provide services for 50,000 providers across the US. Maybe 5% of those are orthopedics.

Sramana Mitra: What I’m assessing from talking to you is that for each category of providers, you have different kinds of assessment data and different kinds of quality metrics, and you need to have all of that categorization within your system for each category.

When you bring on board a particular category, does it pay off for you to have a lot of customers within that category?

Lauren Patrick: Medicare has designated about 300 quality metrics across the board. We have implemented all of those. In addition, we work on developing new quality metrics if we have a certain segment of practices.

For example, we work a lot with audiologists. There weren’t any quality metrics in the current set of metrics for them. We spent a year developing metrics that are a valid way to assess audiologists.

In terms of our biggest population, most probably primary care, we work with ophthalmologists, physical therapists, and behavioral health specialists. We run the gamut.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Lauren Patrick, CEO of Healthmonix
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