Dr. Sidney Smith is a Savannah dermatologist; Stacey Roach is a software developer. When they got together, they came up with what they call the Complete.MD software suite.
It allows patients to use the Complete.MD Connect smartphone application to schedule doctor’s appointments, make referrals, watch recorded video consultations with their doctor and manage their prescriptions.
“Being able to access a portal to schedule an appointment will save the patient time and will save the clinical organization the staff positions spent taking scheduling calls,” Roach said.
This ‘time-saving’ app is just one part of the software that they’ve been working on for the last six years, during which, they’ve been constantly releasing new products.
“We’ve had well over 200 software releases in that timeframe, usually once every week or so,” said Roach.
It all started when Smith went looking for software that would help him educate patients on some of the dangerous side effects of medications they prescribed to treat various diseases. Instead of finding software, he found Roach. And before a month had passed, Roach was trying to develop new tablet-based software for Smith.
The first product came with the application — Consult.MD, a video documentation feature that enabled Smith to record videos and send notifications directly to patients from the tablet he used while working.
Not only could Smith fill out paperwork electronically, he could record his consultations with patients about medical procedures, surgeries and newly prescribed drugs so they wouldn’t have to read flyers or packets of paper.
“We give them paper handouts and who knows if they’re reading them,” said Kerri Cook, a nurse practitioner with the SouthCoast Medical Group. “This allows an additional way to provide patient education.”
The software presented many opportunities for development and, after winning the FastPitch Competition put on by the Creative Coast Initiative, they decided to commercialize the program.
Roach established Anagen Systems and worked as the chief technology officer, turning Smith’s ideas into software. He said they created the entire Complete.MD suite of products for three reasons: to create things that didn’t exist, better those that were already out there and create significant cost savings.
“A lot of times we actually have looked at how competitor products do something as a learning experience of what to avoid,” said Roach. “Many electronic health record (EHR) systems actually slow a practice down so that they’re seeing something to the tune of 30 percent fewer patients because of how much time they’re having to spend on a laptop in the room or after the office closes.”
They also looked to develop new software and ended up using radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to track specimens sent to a lab for testing.
“We actually put an RFID tag, and it tracks your specimens from the office to the lab, and then when the lab gets the result, they actually send you a copy,” said Smith, who’s the president of Complete.MD. “And our patent is different in that not only do you get a copy, but you get the doctor’s recommendation.”
That, too, is a part of the app — patients can check where their specimen is from their smartphone.
They can also use Capture.MD and Clipboard.MD to check in and out of the doctor’s office electronically and Cart.MD for the electronic transfer of prescriptions. Patients can enter their prescriptions on their Connect application, and their doctor will be notified when they change it.
But with these advances comes risks.
“The biggest downside to portals, electronic transmissions and electronic copies of your clinical data being out in the world is the risk that a failure to secure these data and tools creates tremendous risk,” said Carolyn Negley, a clinical consultant and programmer at Negley, Ott & Associates, Inc.
Choosing the software
Complete.MD encompasses numerous products, but health care providers don’t have to get the entire suite —they can pick and choose what they want.
“The software suite is very modular, so if someone just wants a single piece of it or if they want it to work a certain way, most of the time, we’re able to quickly customize it to work that way for their particular need,” said Roach.
About 30 practices and 100 providers have licensed the software this year. Different offices are using different parts of the software — some just for scheduling, some for patient education and others for laboratory specimen tracking, he said.
Smith and Roach plan to release their new home monitoring system, currently in the final stages of testing, in 2015.
To monitor patients at home, they have built a freestanding cube that transmits information collected from patients at home to the patient’s doctors. They hope eventually to use a smartphone to transmit the data.
“We’ll be monitoring blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, maybe other devices as well,” said Cook. “I can actually watch them day to day and see how their blood pressure is doing.”
This and the rest of the Complete.MD suite will be implemented in the Complete.MD Medical Clinics, the first of which will open at 9665 Ford Ave. in Richmond Hill in January.
But Cook is not just going to leave those numbers in a spreadsheet or database; she’s going to post the averages online.
“We’re going to publish the results of Kerri’s average blood pressures of all the patients she cares for and all the glucose levels. So we’re going to be able to compare how good she is to anybody in the country,” said Smith. “Part of the reason for opening Kerri’s clinic is that we got really frustrated that other doctors didn’t want to get better.”
Smith said the hardest thing to accept has been their rejection by the medical community.
“A lot of the big hospital systems have big software programs that cost a lot of money,” he said, ”and they’re not interested in new things to integrate.”
Their new system requires health care providers to replace their current equipment, which can come with a big price tag.
“The additional technology, although more efficient than paper from a patient care coordination and communication perspective, brings additional capital and operating costs for the health care providers in the form of licensure fees, equipment, staff, etc,” said Negley. “EHR implementation is a significant investment in both money and time, which is one reason why providers and hospitals are cautious to adopt new technology or replace their current technology.”
But Smith and Cook say they aren’t focused on the electronics nor even the ease of it all.
“The thing Kerri and I are more concerned about is, are we teaching people, are they compliant? Not how many times we see them. That is a big change,” Smith said.
ABOUT COMPLETE.MD
Complete.MD is a software program designed and developed by a team of physicians to build the future of medical software.
The Complete.MD system is made up of several modules that include patient registration, point of sale, patient informed consent, patient education, appointment scheduling, online referrals and patient management.
The Complete.MD suite of products allow patient check-in and check-out via electronic devices and kiosks, electronic patient education and consent forms, prescription transfers and pre-authorizations, appointment scheduling, referral scheduling and medical office management tools.