Innovation

MedAlert™ was created with a vision to improve the quality of medical care delivery and increase patient safety. The founders realized that achieving this vision could only be possible by combining state-of-the-art medical technology with computerized integration of medical and health records. In addition, to make the solution affordable and sustainable, the MedAlert™ team embedded innovation throughout the product’s life-cycle:

a) Cloud-based solution: MedAlert™ provides a cloud based solution to clinics/hospitals. User downloads the smart client from the website or through app stores. Benefits: 1) No upfront hardware investment. 2) IT personnel not required. 3) No maintenance cost. Clinics/hospitals can implement MedAlert™ with minimal cost and pay as they grow.

b) Unique payment model: “MedAlert’s full features can be assessed for less than a dollar per patient per encounter visit,” George Vijay says. "It makes MedAlert™ affordable to small hospitals or even single physician operated clinics...Prices go even lower as the number of patient visits increase."

c) DrugAlert: DrugAlert is a proprietary drug knowledge database integrated with the MedAlert™ EMR solution. It features more than 2,700 generics and 100,000 brand name drugs. DrugAlert was built to power MedAlert™ with the knowledge base to reduce drug-drug interactions, drug duplications, and adverse reactions and toxicity.

d) Powered with Analytics platform: “MedAlert™ doesn’t only capture and record data but also provides meaningful insights to stakeholders,” says Vijay. The Analytics platform is integrated within the EMR to generate insights, meaningful reports, and reveal trends. Vijay says, “It would serve as a base for our future vision of personalized medicine."

e) One-stop solution: the MedAlert™ solution consists of integrated health care services including EMR (Electronic Medical Record), Practice Management, LIS (Lab Information System), RIS (Radiology Information System), Pharmacy and healthcare data analytics. All-in-one solution makes it easier for the hospitals / clinics to avail all the services required for patient’s continuum of care at one place. Therefore, they can control cost and prevent the hassle involved with exchanging data among different vendors.

Inspiration

Current problems within the healthcare delivery system inspired the founders to come out with the solution: MedAlert™

• Errors in documentation – Allergy details are often missed in repeated charting. Drug dosing and duration may be miscalculated when different providers have access to different drug charts on paper. Follow-up visits and frequent dose adjustments are important for patients taking drugs with a narrow threshold. Discharge summaries without an outpatient EMR backup leave scheduling the visit entirely in the hands of the patient, thereby leading to erratic follow-ups.

• Data handling – Transporting and tracking documents, retrieval of old records, difficulty in processing data for correlation statistical studies. These are all overcome by the ability to bring up the entire patient record with a single file number.

• Facing issues by practices – Storage is cumbersome, the expense of creating paper files, delay in accessing old records, lack of centralized data. Vijay said," One outpatient clinic saved around $2,000 in stationery costs in a year after implementing MedAlert."

Overall impact

MedAlert™ makes a patient's health information available whenever and where ever it is needed. As an example, if a patient is traveling to a different city, state, or even country, he/she doesn’t have to carry all the paper health records. Health records could be made available using the MedAlert™ platform. This is extremely helpful, especially in case of emergency.

MedAlert™ enables safe and secure access to information needed to provide high quality and efficient care.

MedAlert™ can bring a patent's total health information together to support better-coordinated care. This provides uniform access to providers across different specialities obviating the need for the patient to carry the files around. It also reduces the loss of data that occurs when patients are required to present their documents to new providers.

MedAlert™ provides a warning system against multiple prescriptions of the same generic drug. This becomes especially important with patients who receive medications from different practitioners. This is especially true with drugs like paracetamol and with other NSAIDs

MedAlert™ can alert clinicians about follow-up visits necessary for their patients. It integrates data from inpatient records with outpatient developments thereby giving a more complete treatment timeline.

MedAlert™ can improve patient and provider communication by reducing the need for the patient to repeat the same history to all his or her providers.

MedAlert™ allows for more transparency in the documentation process, providing incentive to health care providers to be thorough in their patient care.

MedAlert™ provides reliable backup storage for electronic medical records.

Business benefit

MedAlert™ has two delivery models: On Premises and SaaS.

On-Premises: MedAlert™ is delivered by deploying the server and the smart clients in a local network at the client’s site. Data is synchronized in a cloud hosted by a multi-tenanted database. The cloud hosted data acts as a failsafe option and provides seamless access to the application from outside of the local network. Hospitals/clinics are charged with one-time implementation fees and annual maintenance fees.

SaaS: MedAlert™ is delivered through smart clients hosted in the cloud. The user downloads the smart client from the website or through app stores. The list of the enabled feature depends on the subscription type. Clients pay a periodical subscription and get access to the application and data during the subscription period. No implementation or maintenance fees.

Social and environmental benefit

Environmental benefits:

• avoids paper use
• avoids patient transportation
• avoids chemical and water use
• avoids plastic waste from radiographs

Health and Social benefits:

• Accurate patient record
• Reduces human error and increases patient safety
• Window for future personalized healthcare

Business benefits:

• reduced expenditures on paper use
• reduced expenditures on records transportation
• reduced expenditures on chemical purchase and disposal
• Reduced operational costs such as transcription services and overtime labor expenses

Interview

George Vijay, CEO