Health systems gather so much data that could be used to provide real-time information that is helpful to their patients and physicians, but easily accessing the information in a meaningful way can be elusive.
Enter Medcurio, a company that AMA subsidiary Health2047 Inc. spun out in 2020. The company— founded by IT and data professionals who ran into the roadblocks of trying to access electronic health records data in real time while working for large health systems—offers a flexible data-access platform that is highly secure, codeless, self-serve and scalable.
The company’s work is earning more recognition this year from the expert at KLAS Research, a firm that does research and provides insights to improve health care. KLAS Research has named Medcurio one of its Emerging Health Care Information Technology Companies of 2024.
The designation comes after KLAS conducted interviews with hospitals, health systems and payers to better understand their experience with their health care IT vendors. As part of the process, the research organization asked respondents to share the most innovative vendors they have seen or heard about recently.
“We created a completely out-of-the-box technology that gives health systems access to all of their electronic health care data for real-time use. There’s nothing like it for real-time access to EHR data,” said Walter “Buzz” Stewart, PhD, MPH, Medcurio’s CEO and co-founder.
“Health systems need to automate and simplify work,” Stewart said. “You can’t do that on scale with the existing methods, but with our technology, it’s pretty straightforward.”
From AI implementation to EHR adoption and usability, the AMA is making technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors—not a burden.
A new way of thinking
When Stewart was at a major health system in Northern California, he and his other Medcurio co-founders tried to put data into action with apps for providers and patients. Seemingly every project they worked on was affected by a time delay or a cost overrun because of the difficulty in getting and maintaining access to data in real time. Stewart and his Medcurio partners decided to leave the health system to stop working on the front end and instead reinvent the back end of how data could be used.
“One of the things I like about our technology,” he said, is being “able to build applications without coding skills. … We offer health systems this unique capability to be able to control how they use their data without the need for a programmer, without asking Epic for support, without asking Epic for permission. Any of that friction goes away with our technology.”
Medcurio allows permission-based access to all approved data for a health system’s internal customers and technology partners. The self-serve solution lets approved health system requesters manage the process of selecting the data fields they need to create a codeless application program interface (API), eliminating the need for most of the technical full-time employee support traditionally required for this work. The data owner has full control in approving data requests.
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Offload doctors’ busywork
“The magic of using electronic health records data in real time by applications will be to offload administrative stuff that physicians really shouldn’t be doing and liberating time that allows them to have a better work-life balance,” Stewart said.
On its website, Medcurio outlines some examples of how its technology can help health systems harness real-time data to:
- Automatically notifying patients with a scheduled visit of a cancellation to avoid unnecessary travel and to efficiently reschedule.
- Manage inpatient shift handoffs with a dashboard and improve between-shift communication, enhance patient safety, promote continuity of care, improve efficiency and increase staff accountability.
- Manage inpatient safety with a dashboard on bed unit and patient safety status to facilitate communication, targeted interventions and continuous monitoring.
- Automate assessment of potential treatment gaps and information providers in advance of a patient visit to efficiently ensure completeness and precision of patient care.
- Simplify emergency department registration with SMS—text messaging—to improve efficiency, accuracy, convenience, privacy and timely access to care.
- Reconcile duplicate claims by automatically identifying them, reconciling differences and generating a single final claim to improve timeliness and efficiency of payment.
- Automating in-basket triaging with real-time AI that can help offload 95% of in-basket work for physicians while improving timeliness and precision of responses to patients.
- Simplify patient scheduling by facilitating appointment scheduling with full history of visits to improve efficiency, timeliness and personalization for central scheduling, outreach and concierge services.
Stewart also expects in the next five years to see real advances in clinical decision support, ones that far outpace the slow changes in this area in the past 20 years. Such advances, he said, will allow physicians to practice at a higher level with more precise decision-making tuned to individual patients.
“I see the sequence happening in a way where apps use EHR data in real-time to offload busywork and other apps advance what a physician can do in practice in a way that makes it easy to learn and to translate what they learn into practice,” Stewart said.
Medcurio is one of eight companies in the Health2047 portfolio. The AMA found Health2047 to help change health care for the better at the system level by partnering with entrepreneurs to address systemic transformation in the areas of data liquidity, chronic care prevention, radical productivity enhancement, value-based payment and more.
