Printer-friendly format

Mark Tumblin

If your physician practice is so busy that it’s tough to keep up with scheduling, billing, insurance, laboratory management, electronic patient records and more, perhaps what you need is T.I.M.E.

An acronym for Totally Integrated Medical Enterprise, T.I.M.E. is the product of Franklin-based ASCENT Integrated Medical Solutions. “T.I.M.E. is a comprehensive physician information system. When I say comprehensive, we cover everything from scheduling to billing and insurance, practice management, electronic medical records, pharmacy and laboratory information both inside the practice as well as outside the practice,” explained Mark Tumblin, ASCENT’s CEO.

“Being a Microsoft-based product, we’re scalable from a single-physician practice to a large physician practice,” he added.

While there are numerous companies that compete in the same space as ASCENT, Tumblin said the laboratory module of his product sets it apart. While some practices, particularly smaller ones, use remote labs like Quest or LabCorp, others operate their own labs. For them, T.I.M.E. offers the ability to manage and integrate the laboratory operations, from the collection and management of specimens to quality control. “We can actually run an internal physician laboratory,” Tumblin said. “This is especially critical in oncology.”

In fact, ASCENT has carved a niche in the oncology sector. “The laboratory piece is critical in oncology because when you administer chemotherapy, chemistry is critical from a day-to-day standpoint,” he said. “The physician administers drugs and chemotherapy, and then analyzes how the patient will react to that. Once the patient reacts, then the therapy might change. To have instantaneous laboratory results is critical to a cancer patient.”

ASCENT is one of six companies owned by the Southeast Cancer Network, a regional network of cancer-care centers based in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Founded in Birmingham 12 years ago, ASCENT moved its headquarters to Franklin in September 2007.

While oncology is obviously an ASCENT focus, the T.I.M.E. product was born in a family-practice setting — and that’s a tough environment from a coding perspective. “In family practice and internal medicine, you have the broadest spectrum of physician delivery. In those practices, when a patient walks through the door, the physician has to be able to determine anything. That’s the most difficult situation from an IT (information technology) standpoint,” Tumblin said. Once ASCENT programmers successfully tackled that, specialties offered fewer challenges because the number of possible code sets was drastically reduced. Thus T.I.M.E. can be tailored to fit any practice or specialty.

Practices may opt to incorporate T.I.M.E. in one of three ways: buy an office license, buy a monthly subscription or receive the software in exchange for a percentage of billing. Both a Web-based model and a client-server model are available. The server model is particularly attractive to practices is rural areas without broadband access, especially since the price of computer servers is dropping.

“The primary product is a piece of software, but we also provide consultative services. We do what we call a physician office assessment. We assess every aspect of that physician practice and tailor our software solution to the practice,” Tumblin said. “We not only identify issues, we provide solutions with onsite implementation, training and support. We have full-time employees who do nothing but focus on customer service. When you call the 800 line, you reach a real person, not a recording.” While ASCENT isn’t in the hardware business, Tumblin said the company will recommend a “footprint” of hardware need to run T.I.M.E. effectively.

About 45 clinics across the country and about 1,000 clinicians are using T.I.M.E. “The majority of our clients are in the Southeast, but we have a client as far away as Alaska. Our oncologists come to us from everywhere,” Tumblin said, adding that the company today is “in such huge growth mode.”

Tumblin said ASCENT “held on by our fingernails” in its first few years because the medical industry hasn’t kept pace with IT advances. “We have 21st-century healing technology and 19th-century business technology. Maybe that’s a little extreme, but it is almost the case. … We have more technology at Wal-Mart than at the physician office,” he said.

However, that’s changing fast. “Now we’re in the right place at the right time,” Tumblin said. “In my opinion, healthcare is going through the perfect storm right now, because the patient demands better technology, the physician demands better payment and the government is demanding reform. All these different impacts on the industry are forcing it to change, and technology can reform healthcare a tremendous amount.”

T.I.M.E. has been certified by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), an independent, nonprofit organization recognized by the federal government.



June 2008

Tags:

None

Login and voice your opinion!