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In the national debate over health insurance reform, Republicans and Democrats appear to agree on one thing only: the country needs to reduce the cost of health care.
The effort at cheaper care has seen waves of high-tech ideas, from Internet-based medical exams to autonomous robot care devices in the home. But a handful of Boston-area companies and organizations have gotten more traction by applying a mundane principal of e-commerce: pass on tasks and responsibilities to the customer.
Boston-based Health Dialog Services Corp. and two Cambridge-based companies — Dossia Services Corp. and Vecna Technologies Inc. — aim to help health-care providers use information technology to do as other businesses have done. They let customers — in this case, patients — decide what they want, order it and arrange payment.
Dossia provides a personal health record system for large employers who are members of the non-profit Dossia Consortium. Dossia, which launched its first deployment last fall with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., aims to reduce health-care costs by letting patients help manage their own care.
“The health-care system in the country is structurally, massively inefficient,” said Dossia president and CEO Colin Evans. “There’s nothing in the current bills going through Congress that attempt to create competition, or to actually find ways to deliver health-care in more efficient ways.”
Meanwhile, hospitals that use an online portal developed by Vecna have seen savings by simply transferring administrative tasks to patients, according to the company. “In 2003, it was revolutionary for patients to have the ability to look at their own basic contact information,” said product manager Will Locke.
Now, they can use Vecna’s terminals and portals to verify insurance coverage, determine the cost of a procedure and report drugs they’re taking or procedures they’ve had elsewhere. Kiosks let patients handle their own blood pressure and weight measurements.
The next step is to tweak the portal infrastructure for use in disease management programs, letting patients monitor chronic conditions like diabetes, said Vecna vice president Bill Donnell. The challenge has been to get Vecna’s portals to interact with legacy data systems in a secure way.
“Are they on track? Have they gotten their lab tests? That information is resident in the legacy system,” Donnell said. “But oftentimes it’s a lot of work to go and keystroke it out.”
Health Dialog aims to reduce unnecessary or ill-advised procedures by putting information in patients’ hands and facilitating dialog with physicians. British United Providence Association Ltd. acquired the startup in 2007 and, in last quarter’s financial statement, partially credited its subsidiary’s international business for continued revenue growth in an economic downturn.
Part of Dossia’s approach is to integrate with providers like Health Dialog or Vecna. Its published application programming interface lets third-party providers create health management and patient engagement applications that can pull out data.
Individual users choose what applications can have access to what data, much like Facebook treats third-party developers, Evans said.
Such simple solutions hold promise for reducing health costs, said .406 Ventures managing director Liam Donohue, who invested in Health Dialog at his previous firm, Arcadia Ventures. But building a business based on health-care reform is difficult.
“Health care’s just a really, really bizarre market,” he said. “You have supply and demand created by the same source — which is doctors.”
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Companies at a glance Dossia Services Corp. |
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