Houston Health IT Companies Recharge with Surge in Demand
With new developments in health care every day, health information technology companies have to work at a fast pace to keep up with demand. And in Houston, home of the world’s largest medical center complex, companies in the city’s emerging health IT market produce innovative new solutions and technologies at a relentless pace.
Health IT companies have to keep up with ever-changing regulations, health care policies and technologies to be able to update doctors and patients with the latest information. Because of these great demands, the industry has received considerable government attention, including billions of dollars in stimulus money since 2009.
Still, recent studies show that more health IT workers are needed in Texas, and new solutions from companies are always in demand. Between now and 2013, Texas is estimated to need an additional 10,000 health IT workers, according to a February study by Texas State University–San Marcos. Therefore, Houston companies such as Intellicure Inc., Encore Health Resources and Virtual Intelligence Providers LLC will need to keep expanding and transforming to meet the needs of the health care industry, which they plan to do.
Intellicure, which was ranked as Houston’s No. 25 fastest-growing technology company on the Houston Business Journal’s 2011 Fast Tech 50 list has made major technological advancements in the past two years, said David Walker, the 16-person company’s president and CEO. Intellicure provides hospitals and physicians with technologies to record patient information, track patient data and help doctors chose the correct treatment options at the point of service, or during the patient appointment.
“We have always tried to find ways to automate the process,” Walker said. “In the past two years, we have delivered clinical decision support … to bring information to doctors at their fingertips.”
Intellicure works mainly with wound care clinics, and in the next year, the company has plans to expand its technology in this area. For example, Intellicure is currently working on an iPhone application that allows a physician to take a picture of a wound, and then the picture is compared with other similar wound pictures to verify a doctor’s diagnosis and to suggest dressing options, Walker said.
“We are launching version one (of the application) at the end of this month,” he said. “It is a service that will help people in the third world and in underserved areas of our country get the same advice as in the Texas Medical Center.”
Another Houston health IT company, Encore Health Resources, a consulting firm that works to support health organizations with data collection and analysis that ranked No. 4 on HBJ’s Fast Tech 50 list, is seeing development in a different area — reimbursement. Encore, which was founded in 2009, already has 274 employees and expects to add around 50 more in 2012.
“There is a very fundamental shift taking place in health care, and I think the easiest way to describe it is there is a shift from volume to value in reimbursement,” said Dana Sellers, Encore’s CEO. In the past, health care providers were reimbursed for the number of patients they saw, but recent regulations will switch reimbursements to the value of the service delivered to keep a patient healthy, she explained.
Sellers expects the shift in reimbursement to lead to an emerging business area for Encore. The company is already developing new technology systems to gather cohesive information for accountable care organizations, which are groups of physicians designed to improve the quality of a patient’s care.
“These accountable care organizations need different kinds of information, so we are starting to work to see what the information requirements will be in the new world (of health care),” Sellers said. “It’s a whole new way of thinking — it’s really exciting.”
Since so many aspects of the health information technology field are changing, Virtual Intelligence Providers has designed programs to help train medical staff and caregivers as well as systems to measure organizational change management in medical organizations.
Virtual Intelligence Providers has not always been focused on health care IT in the past, and it started out 11 years ago as an IT provider for the oil and gas industry, but Sonia Clayton, CEO, said in 2010, the 75-person company began “to be more aggressive” in the health care field.
“We have been with Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, Moonat Medical, North Houston Cancer Center and others,” she said. “We have also developed off-the-shelf applications, change and learning management platforms.”
Although Clayton admits that health IT was a hard field to break into, she said she sees “a slow and cautious growth” in the industry, and she plans to continue to produce innovative solutions to best address its changing needs.