Cloud Care I February 2010 Enterprise Minnesota Magazine

Enterprise Minnesota Magazine - February 2010

HELPING MANUFACTURERS GROW PROFITABLY

Cloud Care

A Minnetonka software company is helping pave the way for better quality health care through cloud computing.

As national efforts to increase the transparency and quality of health care continue to unfold, local software company BoundaryMedical Inc. is leveraging the Internet to help individual doctors channel manufacturing's continuous improvement method in their own practices.

Outcome Enterpriseâ„¢, the company's software, was designed by a surgeon to make clinical outcome measurement easier and faster. Instead of tracking the effectiveness of different treatments on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet, Outcome Enterpriseâ„¢ is a documentation system that allows doctors and other researchers to enter and update patient information from any location with an Internet connection.

BoundaryMedical CEO Mark Walinske compares the software to a medical version of TurboTax®. "To do taxes on a piece of paper if you had a change, or to do them on a spreadsheet that doesn't have the understanding of the rules or the algorithms, if you had to do that routinely without error, you would find that would be a problem," he says. "[Outcome Enterpriseâ„¢] is convenience met by simplicity--a highly intuitive, Web 2.0 cloud computing environment that takes less than 30 minutes to configure and [conducts] the equivalent to what would be considered a clinical trial for a single physician in an everyday practice."

A key component of the software is its focus on Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs). A PRO is a followup survey that asks a patient about the effectiveness of his course of treatment. Once this information is collected from multiple patients, a physician can gauge the comparative effectiveness of different treatment options for a particular ailment. Then the physician can discern which treatment options are best.

"When a physician sees you, if you go in and they don't see you after the fact, the presumption is you're better because you didn't come back--but nobody knows that you're dead," Walinske says. "I say that kind of tongue-in-cheek, but the point is, [PROs] drive additional facts so health care will be fact-driven. Once you have facts, then you can start to compare and drive an understanding or knowledge, and that's the idea behind comparative effectiveness."

Outcome Enterpriseâ„¢ is the only cloud-computing platform for clinical outcome measurement on the market. To ensure security and simplicity, it features different logins for different people, giving each contributor a certain level of access to a project. Because it's a monthly subscription service, the software doesn't come with a hefty price tag, either. In its first 11 months on the market, 25 customers signed up to use it.

In the long run, Walinske hopes the software's affordability and ease of use will encourage physicians to rely on facts and improve quality of care for patients. "We are a player to help drive facts into health care that allow--for maybe the first time ever at a physician-specific level--comparative effectiveness to exist in an affordable way," he says. "I think the affordability of information has got to come down, and we are going to enable that."