A Coeur dAlene-based technology startup plans to launch next week a communications software package it has developed to help doctors while they make patient rounds at hospitals and other health-care facilities.


The company, InstiComm LLC, has just three full-time employees now, but expects within a year to employ 35 to 40 people and to have 500 to 600 doctors using its product, says Jim Doty, its president and CEO and a longtime health-care industry consultant. Also a part owner in the company is serial entrepreneur John Shovic, who helped start such Inland Northwest companies as Advanced Hardware Architecture Inc., TriGeo Network Security Inc., and Blue Water Technologies Inc.


InstiComms software, called OfficeConnect MD, runs on a smartphone, a mobile phone with PDA-like functions, and allows doctors to document the patient rounds they make and instantly transmit information gleaned on those rounds to a server that can be accessed from their offices. It also allows the doctor to communicate electronically about those patients with office staff and other health-care professionals and get patient records from the office, among other tasks.


The software isnt intended to compete with the electronic medical records (EMR) systems now increasingly being installed in hospitals and used primarily to share patient charts with physicians and with other hospitals, says Doty. Rather than connecting a doctor to a hospital system, InstiComms product connects a doctor to his or her office system, he says. Because of the expense and complexity of EMR systems, such networks typically arent used to connect hospitals with independent doctors offices, Doty says.


One of the biggest benefits of the software, he says, is that doctors can post, or document for billing, their patient visits while making rounds. That, he says, greatly reduces the chance that a physician will forget to do a posting and lose billing revenue because of it. Traditionally, such postings are done using 3-by-5-inch cards that doctors carry around and take back to their offices, Doty says.


He says statistics suggest that mobile doctors lose 5 percent of their possible billings due to lost or forgotten postings. For some specialty practices, that can amount to $25,000 to $50,000 a year in lost revenue, he asserts.


The doctors say this is huge in terms of, I like that our billings are taken care of, Doty says.


Doty has been developing the concept for about three years. Shovic and his longtime associate, Barbara Ueckert, joined the effort last year. The other owners of the new company are Dr. T.K. Desai, medical director for Blue Shield of Southern California, in Los Angeles; his brother, Gaurang Desai, a computer expert in Akron, Ohio; and W.B. Bert Newman, a retired health-care industry consultant now living in Coeur dAlene.


The software went through about six months of testing last year with two health-care practices located outside the region, and now is ready for launch, Doty says. He says InstiComm will market OfficeConnect mostly through direct-mail advertising, trade shows, and word-of-mouth referral.


How it works


The mobile part of the OfficeConnect software is loaded onto a Palm Treo-brand smartphone, and the rest of the application is Web-based and is hosted on an InstiComm server. Doctors offices, therefore, dont need to install any software; rather they access OfficeConnect using a Web browser and the Internet.


Using the smartphone-based software, a physician can search for patients by name or get a list of patients who are at a specific facility, then download to the phone any recent activity that has been posted about those patients. Then, as the doctor does rounds, he or she can post the visits; make notes about each visit detailing what was done and what the current diagnosis is, all by billing codes; schedule follow-up visits; write prescriptions; and refer a patient to another doctor.


Once those details are entered into the phone, the device can send the information to the secure Web server, which immediately alerts the doctors office staff for further action. If a follow-up visit is requested, the office staff makes the appointment, and that new information flows back to the phone as an item on the doctors schedule. When a referral or consultation is requested, the physician to whom the patient is being referred automatically gets an e-mail with a link to the secure server, where he or she can get information about the patient and accept or deny the referral.


The software can be configured so that any number of providers can be notified of actions taken with a specific patient, Doty says. All e-mails and transmissions are done securely and comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy requirements, he says.


Using the Web-based interface, office staff also can track what patient visits are being made outside the office, and spot when a patient either has been missed during rounds or a visit hasnt been posted.


The big value is, say, youre a cardiologist and you wake up Monday morning to do rounds, says Doty. You dont know what happened with your patients over the weekend or even where they still are. You turn on your phone and click a few buttons and you know where all your patients are and whats happening with them.


Doty says the product isnt intended for physicians who see patients only in an office, or for internists or hospitalists who work for a hospital and have access to EMR systems. Its targeted mostly at specialists such as cardiologists, orthopedists, surgeons, and others, who must do rounds on patients away from their offices, usually at hospitals and skilled-nursing facilities.


InstiComm plans to charge for its software $3,000 per doctor plus $3,000 per physician group, which includes the cost of each Palm Treo as well as the first year of data hosting and support. After that, groups pay 15 percent of the total original cost per year. So, a three-physician medical practice would pay $12,000 for the first year and then $1,800 a year after that, Doty says. Users also would pay for their own wireless data service through such providers as Cingular or Sprint, he says.


The product doesnt take the place of computerized billing systems, but rather provides office staff with better information to key into such systems, Doty says. Doctors have a fear of messing with their billing systemwere not going to do that, he says.


InstiComm, however, does plan to market OfficeConnect to big makers of medical-office billing systems as a potential add-on, Doty says. A billing-software company could integrate OfficeConnect with its own software and sell it as a component, he says.


It also plans to market the product to big hospital systems, which might decide to offer it as a perk to specialists who see patients in their facilities, but dont have office access to an EMR service.


Mostly, though, InstiComm sees a big market with small practices that have just a handful of physicians. Doty says its estimated that only about 17 percent of such groups have access to an EMR-type system. That means 83 percent of the market has nothing, he says. Thats a pretty big potential market for us.


Shovic says that he and Ueckert had been looking nationally for a medical-related invention to help commercialize, and had investigated a device that would zap tumors and another that would identify types of bacteria by DNA sequence, but opted out of both. He says he and Doty both serve on the bankcda board of directors, and he heard Doty talking to someone about a potential communications device.


My ears perked up, he says.


Doty founded a California-based health-care consulting firm called The Camden Group, and later sold it to HealthCare Partners Ltd., based in the United Kingdom. He then served for a while at that company as president of its management consulting division. He retired to Coeur dAlene in 1993, but has continued to do health-care consulting.


Hes a domain expert, says Shovic. He understands the business. Thats what we look for when we are helping launch a company.


Contact Paul Read at (509) 344-1262 or via e-mail at [email protected].