Dear Friends & Colleagues,

The promise of real-time health information connectivity and coordination of care has been elusive. That is, until now. Jay Desai, co-founder and CEO of a company called ‘Patient Ping’, has created a platform that allows for real-time notification of a patient encounter in any healthcare facility or home care. Even more revolutionary, the platform delivers bi-directional information automatically.

The need for this type of connectivity is obvious to healthcare professionals and organizations that are accountable for the quality, safety, appropriate utilization and cost effectiveness of care delivered. Part of the challenge for providers is that approximately 30 to 50% of healthcare costs incurred by most integrated delivery systems is actually from clinical care delivered outside of the home system. This percentage is higher for independent provider groups and systems in highly competitive markets. That means that even in the best of integrated delivery networks, there is already a 30 to 50% ‘accountability handicap’.

Prior to co-founding PatientPing in 2013, Jay Desai worked at the CMS Innovation Center (CMMI) where he helped develop Accountable Care Organizations (ACO’s), bundled payments and other value-based initiatives. He has an MBA in Healthcare Management from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA from the University of Michigan.

Jay’s professional passion lies at the intersection of technology, policy and community. He first discovered the need for real-time, cross-institutional connectivity when he was at CMS. Provider groups were asking CMS for some way to ‘know’, in real-time, when and where their patients were receiving clinical care. These systems needed to know so they could intervene and prevent unnecessary, as well as potentially, harmful tests and procedures. They needed to know so they could follow-up when their patients were discharged from another institution. It’s a critically important issue for patients and providers – and this is where Jay Desai and PatientPing come in…

In this interview we’ll discuss:

PatientPing is designed to not only respond to the needs of accountable providers and organizations. It’s also designed to create healthier ‘communities of care’ – to enhance the complex inter-dependencies of the clinical ecosystem. The data PatientPing is collecting is beginning to demonstrate that avoidable healthcare utilization across communities is decreasing: lower avoidable emergency room visits, hospital admissions and nursing home days – all of which leads to better care at lower costs.

There is more than one value proposition PatientPing offers. The embedded analytics will also reveal care patterns – allowing systems and communities to better understand where patients are going, and allow for more proactive preventive care. Another easily overlooked value proposition is the user experience. The information PatientPing relies on was already there beforehand. They’ve simply made it more accessible to providers of care. As Jay points out, it’s analogous to the situation with Google Maps. The GPS data was already present when companies like Google and Waze made it easily accessible and usable for the consuming public. PatientPing has done something very similar with the data in the Health Information Exchange network and the health information locked up in proprietary electronic medical records. They’ve made this information accessible and consumer-friendly for providers of care – across and between institutions and practices. It may be a simple concept but the impact and value proposition is profound. It’s going to assist providers and patients with better communication, better integration and better coordination of care. It’s going to make healthcare delivery more seamless and safe. And, who wouldn’t want that?

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