First came last year’s HITECH Act, followed this year by the massive healthcare reform legislation. Both laws scream for electronic fixes to healthcare inefficiencies and rising costs. Offering solutions to meet those federal challenges is Nashville-based Informatics Corporation of America, which specializes in electronic sharing of clinical information.

 

“The more information that we can share, the most efficient we can make the healthcare system, and the better quality of care that we’re going to provide. We can care for more patients with less resources, and therefore, we can care for even more patients,” said John Tempesco, ICA vice president of client services and marketing.

 

Tempesco described ICA’s product, dubbed CareAlign™, as “an interoperability engine,” which allows for a health information exchange. The National Alliance for Health Information Technology defines a health information exchange as “the electronic movement of health-related information among organizations according to nationally recognized standards.” That’s just what CareAlign does for hospitals, integrated delivery networks, communities and now, in partnership with other companies, states.

 

Created by physicians for physicians, CareAlign allows providers to:

 

It’s also very patient friendly. “If you are a patient and you happen to show up in an emergency room, the ER physician would already know what you’re allergic to, know what your current medical conditions are and know what your current medications are,” Tempesco said. There’s also relief for writer’s cramp – patients moving from one physician to another within the system wouldn’t have to touch the dreaded clipboard and a pen.

 

With CareAlign, patients also have access to their records. They may log securely onto a website, message their physicians and link to their personal health records on services like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault.

 

“The basic component that we offer within the engine is the ability to take information from various clinical systems, save all that information and put it in a database or databases, therefore allowing what we call the multipurposing of that data,” Tempesco said. Physicians access a portal to view “in a longitudinal way” all the information from the various clinical systems, he explained.

 

ICA was founded in 2005 as a classical spinoff of groundbreaking informatics research at Vanderbilt University. Getting the company off the ground was its CEO, Gary Zegiestowsky, and Jeffrey Cunningham, ICA’s chief technology officer, who worked closely with Harry Jacobson, MD, then Vanderbilt’s vice chancellor of Health Affairs, and William Stead, MD, director of Vanderbilt’s Informatics Center. Both Jacobson and Stead are ICA senior advisers today.

 

The Informatics Center was founded in 1991 with Stead in the boss’s chair. By 1995, the center was knee-deep in research examining novel ways to make an electronic patient record a reality across all Vanderbilt healthcare entities. By 2003, there were no more patient paper charts in the Vanderbilt hospitals and clinics.

 

Through the years, the Informatics Center has become one of the field’s top resources, working on a national scale to help advance healthcare communication and documentation processes to improve patient care. ICA’s connection with Vanderbilt means the company is “constantly and continually making innovations available to the commercial market,” Tempesco said. CareAlign is a web-based product, and clients have a choice whether to host CareAlign themselves or ask ICA to do it.

 

At this point, CareAlign has fewer than 10 clients, and Tempesco acknowledged that this may not sound like very many. But consider who some of those clients are:

 

Integration is “the strength of our system,” Tempesco said, and he pointed to the Memphis coalition as an example. The Midsouth eHealth Alliance chose ICA to link its Memphis providers together electronically – and that means providers who are traditionally competitors in the market. “We work with those customers to make them understand that sharing patient data helps the patient in the end and doesn’t detract from their competitive advantage within the community,” Tempesco said.
Another success story is Lourdes Hospital in Paducah, Ky., which owns about 20 percent of the physician practices that admit to the hospital “The other 80 percent either have information systems of their own, or they don’t have information systems at all,” Tempesco explained. Thanks to CareAlign, a lion’s share of the city’s practices are electronically linked to Lourdes today.

 

“Our CareAlign system is actually an engine that can allow that to happen. We were ahead of the curve, and we’ve been busy lately responding to requests for proposals and requests for information for either integrated delivery networks or regions or municipalities,” Tempesco said. The latest foray by ICA is a statewide system, a project in its early stages.