A platform for empowered care, 2.0
Whether for the purposes of data interoperability, coordination among care teams – or this week what an emerging company is calling “empowered care" – the healthcare industry is starting to see more and more platforms, replete with a variety of technical capabilities, come to market.
The latest, Virtual Health 2.0, follows the early 2015 release of platforms from par80 and ExamMed – and while each takes a decidedly different tack the upstarts are all touting broad platforms that promise to help customers better manage patient care and cost.
The vendor, which offered Virtual Health 1.0 in mid-2014 and already claims to touch 100,000 lives, announced Virtual Health 2.0 on Tuesday, describing the newest iteration as an "enterprise platform for population health management and care coordination."
"We’re giving you data, the tools to work with that, and extending the analytics so you can slice and dice it," Virtual Health CTO Jack Plotkin told Healthcare IT News.
Plotkin said Virtual Health 2.0 enables the concept of "empowered care" by encompassing a range of medical specialties, population health management features, ways to identify care caps and featuring telehealth capabilities to foster care coordination.
"We provide technology that overlays the different silos and we’re able to take data from any systems, in any semantic or syntactic format," Plotkin said. "Rather than you building keys to fit our lock, we’ll build master keys to fit all of your locks."
Whereas ExamMed’s platform brings a strong telehealth bent and replaces cash with the innovative MedCoins, and par80 aims to extract data from EHRs to ultimately ensure that its users facilitate necessary next steps in care, Virtual Health is aiming its newest offering squarely at payer-provider combinations, be those accountable care organizations or entities such as Kaiser Permanente and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
The target Virtual Health customer, Plotkin said, is "any organization that has a population they’re managing where there is shared risk in costs of care."
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