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Daniel: Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to the Tuesday webinar series, Chiropractic Economics webinar for doctors of chiropractic. I’m Daniel Sosnoki, editor-in-chief of Chiropractic Economics. Today’s webinar, improving your business via managing your data is sponsored by Infinedi and as always, our program is being recorded and will be archived at Chiropractic Economics website www.chiroeco.com/webinar for one year. Our expert is on board here today to speak with you and when this presentation is complete, we will follow with a question-and-answer period. You can submit questions throughout the presentation by clicking on the appropriate icon on the right side of your screen. We’ll do our very best to get to all your questions but if we run out of time, we’ll forward the remaining questions to our expert and then notify you via email when the answers are posted on our website, chiroeco.com/webinar.
Our presenter today is Brad Cost, the president and CEO of Infinedi who is here to help you understand the ways in which you can improve your practice by way of managing your business intelligence and healthcare analytics. Brad, thank you for taking the time to participate in our webinar and for sharing your expertise with data management and helping our audience understand how they can leverage information to their benefit. Before we get started, Brad, please give us a brief background on yourself and your work with small business marketing.
Brad: Thank you Daniel and Chiro Economics. My name is Brad Cost. I’m president and CEO of Infinedi. We are a national claims clearinghouse revenue cycle and business analytics company based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the last five years, we’ve been making quite a bit of progress moving into the chiropractic industry and helping that advance that profession with the business analytics as a pro advocacy for the profession. Myself, I am involved in many different companies as a business person. I am not a chiropractor but there to share my business experience with you and hopefully today, we’ll talk a little bit about business analytics, both from healthcare practice position, from the business side of it, explain to you a little bit about that or what it means, why you need to be involved in it and the future of it in healthcare.
Daniel: Very good. And we certainly have more data in front of us than we’ve ever had before. So Brad, would you like to go ahead and begin our presentation?
Brad: Sure we will. Thanks Daniel. I’ve called my presentation today living in a data driven world, improving your practice via managing your data. Many of us today are involved with cell phones. We get involved in data in a world that we just don’t realize. As I travel around the United States teaching classes, I find that doctors are often puzzled that and make the comment that they just don’t want to be involved in data. They don’t want to get their world out on the cyber space plane and have people share and understand their information. Well, unfortunately in today’s world, that information is always already there. So, it’s very important for us to understand this big giant network of information that exists, to understand how that we can manipulate it, how that we can understand it and most importantly, how we can use it to our benefit.
Well, we are talking about this giant network of information that globally moves around the United States. A little bit later on in the presentation, you’re going to see some of the specifics about information but in summary, it is a data world and I want you to understand that we are more than the sum of the parts. The collective is basically greater and more powerful than the sums of just ourselves as individuals. Data today moves at a light speed kind of effort and is collective, aggressive, and collects information not just from you but surrounding pieces of information around you that makes sense to join it in. Today, almost everybody has unlimited access to data. Whether it’s from our offices, our homes, our television, from our telephones, from the public library or school systems. Almost everyone has unlimited access to that data.
Business intelligence data separates itself a little bit from healthcare data and the fact that it is more financial information, it is more market studies, gender studies, educational college studies, and some population studies. We are going to separate data in today between that and healthcare data. Healthcare data is data that’s driven by knowledge. It’s patient history. It’s patient collective information that’s collected from other providers, from payers, from networks. It really is the future of healthcare and the reason for our conversation today is how to get you involved in that. What types of data are available today? Like I mentioned a while ago, business information is basically that financial information, the market studies that are out. The healthcare information is really the future and the performance driven by our patient information.
Where does this data come from? Let’s start looking at the sources of data to start out with. Practice Management Software. The vast majority of healthcare providers in the United States today have Practice Management Software. It is sort of the foundation, their interactive tool and their beginning cycle of that healthcare information once they collect it from the patient. There is also Electronic Health Records. Electronic Health Records, many years ago when the stimulus first came out to be the performance-based driver, it has really turned in not to be quite that level of a performance for analytics. If we look across Medicare and CMS about how they are collecting information for the future, including MIPS and some of the performance-based metrics that are going on, many, many of those databases are going to contain claims information date cycle, dates of service, information off of the client, and join it in with the electronic health record system to give us that overall view of patients and their data.
Part of the problem with EHRs was the fact that they simply don’t talk to each other. There has been a lot of problems of how they were built, how they communicate, how they interact with each other. Clearing houses such as Infinedi, many clearing houses across the United States, we are a great collection funnel for data, for information, for revenue cycle management, for patient information, all of the information that’s placed on the claim. We are a great funnel for doing that because we are handling the vast majority of claims that transact the United States. Insurance payers, many, many payers have sort of flipped in mentality today and taken on the role of trying to interact with the providers in a much more positive way, a much better way, understanding that there are organizations and networks out there trying to do the right thing, to help providers do the right thing, to take that data. So they are turning over their data banks, their data extracts to organizations to help understand what is happening in that revenue cycle and in that performance cycle.
The third-party networks and intermediaries. Third-party networks, some of those can be really good, some of them can be really bad. There are some pro advocacy organizations that are out there today, although there are very few of them. Many of them are organizations that are owned by chiropractors that are doing in true pro advocacy trying to help chiropractic as an industry step up to the table, step up to the plate across the United States, enjoying the data-driven world that’s really going to take us into the future. Data content in healthcare. Let’s talk a little bit more about business side of it, the business and intelligence of it. Without getting real deep into business intelligence, there are some just basic things that I’ve learned from my speaking engagements across the United States. There are many different types of business intelligence that providers can call upon. Again, your practice management system, your clearing house, your insurance payers in your third-party networks and financial institutions. Call upon those for business information that helps you understand how to do business.
Simply working with your bank statements, your financial statements, learning how to use Microsoft Word, simple programs, email programs that make living in the business world a very simple thing to do. I was really shocked at the number of providers that could not use or had not used Microsoft Word, had not used an Excel spreadsheet. These are basic functionality, basic business softwares that each practitioner needs to have at least a working knowledge of to help understand and look at their data information. I think it’s also really important that you look at information and find information by the numbers trying to find that reliable source of numbers. Again, it seems to be the same players that can provide that reliable source of information.
One of the first ones in the business side of it that I’d like to point out to is accounting software. There are many, many practices today that are literally still doing their accounting for their practice on a piece of paper, paper ledgers, when today we have great practice management, I mean, accounting softwares such as Peachtree, Quick, and some of those softwares that make it so easy to input information into to generate monthly reports, weekly reports, quarterly reports and most important, to improve and increase the reliability and the accuracy of those banking financial kind of transactions. So you really understand where you are at at any one time in the business and that’s really the key to being successful in using that business intelligence.
From the financial side, I’d like to tell doctors that they need to apply this just business logic. Use information that’s out there on the Internet coming from their state chiropractic associations, coming from the American Chiropractic Association, to understand the environment around them, around their state, around their region, around the United States. What other doctors are charging? What are the services doctors are providing? How are they doing it? Trying to understand that information financially of what’s going on. Look at basic financial information. When I asked this question in my class, how many doctors actually even know what their overhead of their business is, you’ll be shocked when I have a class of 100, some only three of four people raised their information and truly understand what their overhead of running a business is all about. Many don’t understand that.
When you are using accounting software, it’s very easy to take the financials where you truly look at net loss or you look at your cost of expenses, your revenue, you adjusted EBITDA, information that is right at your fingertips. Don’t be a practitioner that judges whether they are making a living or making a profit just because they have money in their bank account at the end of the month. That’s one of the first ways to jump into a business that will ultimately come to an end. Look at data to prepare for audits. If you are getting ready to go through a pair or an OIG audit, look, being able to have that information, both financial and claim information is very, very important to prepare for that audit. Understanding your reimbursements are actual data and not banking account information.
Let’s now talk about groups and organization or performance-based data, data containing methodologies and outcomes. Again, we are going to go back to EHR, insurance payers, third-party networks, and administrators, people that are going to be looking at information coming to us from trying to make decisions on performance-based, how are we performing? We start talking about data containing that methodology and outcome if you’ve heard anything recently about PQRS and Medicare CMS’s attempt to move in 2017 against the myths based under the macro law where we are really going to start looking at no longer fees for services but we are going to look at how you treat patients, how patients outcomes are being judged and measured. That’s really the key of why we’ve got to start looking at our patients, looking at the data associated with our patients and finding out those outcomes. So we understand them as practitioners not only before they get to the payers but within our own practice, so we can help make those outcomes the very best because again without outcome studies and performances, it’s really going to depend on how much we are going to get paid.
Practice management in the EHR systems. The provider generated data, this is data that’s within our own fingertips that we can work on a hour by hour day by day basis. Clearing houses, again if we look at the clearing house, we are looking in for information. These are companies such as Infinedi that connect directly to insurance company. Unfortunately, many of them are owned by the insurance payers especially some of the larger ones. So they may not always have that pro advocacy stamps and reliability that one that is in independently on clearing house. So what’s important to know what clearing house is, who you are doing business with, what side of the aisle that they stand on. Are they pro physician? Are they really looking out for their own and really the bottom line dollar wise.
Providers need to pay attention to that looking at those clearing houses. How do they connect to them? A lot of times, Practice Management Software or the guidelines of the people that choose to help you look up what clearing houses you are going to connect to. It’s not a bad way. There is a lot of experience from the practice management side of it to do it but you as a provider need to look into it to make sure you are making that decision that they need the goals and the needs that you have. It is one of the most important things that you do as far as your revenue stream and Infinedi will look at it and about 95% of the claims that come in are making up that financial income stream for you. So it is really your salary, it is your income, it is your paycheck. You need to choose wisely when you choose claims clearing house.
You’ve got to look at third parties that you might connect to networks. Make sure that you are connecting directly to those if at all possible making sure you are paying the least amount that you need to pay but yet you have a reliable source and a reliable avenue to get to those third parties. Those third parties can be Accountable Care Organizations. We’ve heard a little bit about Accountable Care Organizations. Currently, there are about 400 across the United States that are in existence and working. Medicare is trying to ramp that up and next year, there should be a sizable income in ACO’s, sorry, sizable stance in the number of ACO’s across the United States. What’s unique about ACO’s is they bring many different specialties together to make the transaction in the performance-based to be measured around the patient. Not the providers anymore but to see the outcomes of those patients seeing how the providers direct those outcomes but measuring that on the patient based and not based on the provider.
It’s actually a very good structure and there is opportunity there for providers to step up, to be treated more equally across the table from other specialties that maybe they are not currently done today. Provider networks that exist across the United States, these provider networks independent physician associations, again, are great ways that are people that are advocating for you if you find the correct ones. They are out there working hard to provide that pro advocacy stance for providers as they get through the system to make sure that they are going to get paid in ways that are consistent with the services that they provide. As we know, chiropractic is one of those that’s misunderstood at many, many different levels and really all offer many competitive ways to do it that are the most efficient ways both in time, money, and resources and get some of the best results for patients out there in the United States.
Let’s look at insurance companies. The audits, the financial-based audits that they talk about. It’s important that you understand and have forces so that you understand the audits and the effects that an audit can have on you. The payments of those are those benefits, how that they are directed towards you, towards the patient and as your sole source of income. About the government as oversight, that’s an important stream of data that we need to understand, is the government. As we changed back when President Obama came into existence and we created the account of Obama care, we looked and saw a rapid change in the structure of how doctors were paid with the exchanges coming in. Whether that has a positive or a negative outcome on, that’s for you to decide but the fact is, the government can play an extremely important role in and how you are paid, how you are reimbursed.
CMS is really one of the leading guidelines in how commercial payers structure their payments are to you. It seems like it’s not long after CMS sets their guidelines, commercial payers then follow that whether they are 100%, even sometimes lower than 100% of CMS. So, it’s very important how the government and the roles that they play in healthcare. They also play a role in oversight for providers, providing the scope of practice and their ruling to control an entity. Whether it be at the state level or a federal level, they are the controlling entity that determines your scope of practice, what you are allowed to practice, what you are not allowed to practice. It’s a very important role that you stay connected with the organizations such as state associations, the national organizations that fight hard for you to help you expand the scope of practice, to help you stay within the scope of practice, to make sure that you are treated fairly among that.
They also decide on your license requirements, what you have to do for your license. It’s very important that as we move forward into the future, that way we can demonstrate this data that’s being collected for you as a practitioner when it is shared with these other organizations that it’s understood that you are doing with…that you are practicing within your license and those requirements and that maybe possibly in the near future that we can expand on those licenses. We also need to look at patient safety. Federal government does that. They are going to look at most insurance commissioners and in states, they are really there to look at patient safety to make sure that we weed out practitioners that are doing harm to patients. Most good practitioners want to stand behind patient safeties in great ways. Unfortunately, we have problems in the area.
Although there are very small percentage of providers, we still have issues with patient safety, fraud and abuse kind of scenarios. We want to set a standard to those practitioners that we live by, standards that take us into the world so that the rest of the world and the patients know that we live by these standards. It’s one of the things that healthcare providers do and one of the reasons they are organized. Those standards carry across the United States. That’s something that I see chiropractic doing today and making the movement towards and partly because this is driven by the federal government. Third-party utilization management. I mentioned earlier to you a little bit about the independent physician associations. Most of them work with what’s called utilization management. What actually is utilization management?
Well today, utilization management is being based a lot on analytical analysis of you practicing your claims and the role that Infinedi plays with IPAs across the United States, we are actually taking information off of your claims or the claim by claim basis and putting that in an analytical engine so that we can understand your usage of services and visits on above but daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and annual basis to help understand what you are doing, not only you as a practice, what you are doing within the practice positions within your ZIP code, within your state and, again, across the United States not only to show that when there is fraud and abuse but also to show when you are doing really positive things. So, the question gets asked to me is UM a positive or a negative function? I think there is as much more, if not more, from a positive reinforcement to show you. That’s one thing that’s not happened in the chiropractic industry that’s happened in the MD world is they have a lot of studies across to show their outcomes. Very little of that has occurred in the chiropractic state.
So some of these studies that we are taking from utilization can show just how effective chiropractic can be and is one of the reasons that chiropractic is such a grassroots movement and patients love chiropractic. Has UM define the industry? I believe that it has. What little UM has been done has been mostly been done by the payers and done and holding a stance against practitioners, part of the reason why they’ve been constrained, been squashed down into that lower realm of reimbursements and understanding this because so little UM has been done about the chiropractic industry. It’s one of the reasons today joining the pro advocacy, clearing house of pro advocacy Practice Management Software system is very, very important. Don’t make those kind of decisions just off the cuff. Don’t make the decision because your practitioner down the street made that decision. Make it because it’s a good choice for you, that it’s a good choice for the industry, that it is a group and an organization that is doing that pro advocacy stance to help the industry move forward, not against you.
I believe that it has limited the scope. I believe as I mentioned a while ago because little is done. There is very little understanding of what chiropractic can do for a patient. Has it limited patient access? I’m not quite sure about that but again, it has had a negative connotation because of the people that have been doing UM. Thank goodness today that we’ve got organizations that are doing positive utilization management. They are helping find those doctors that are providing fraud and abuse and weeding them out of the system so that the foot that’s been put forward is a very, very positive one. Can it change the reimbursement structures? It’s already proven to do that. The independent physician associations that are in existence today, that are pro advocacy groups, have already shown that they can represent chiropractic in ways with payers they have never been represented before, that they can show, that they can weed out the fraud and abuse, that they can have the best impact as possible, not only for patients but for the providers and for the budgetary constraints that sometimes occur with the payers.
We see chiropractors that are under these scenarios getting the increases every year that we are starting to begin to build back the reimbursement levels and equalize those reimbursement levels far greater than ever before. But it takes a lot of hard work and it takes a lot of dedication from groups. How about data used for research basis? Currently, there is very little performance-based research that is on hand. Data that can be collected especially from electronic health records and from the claim can help show that there are positive performance-based metrics that are being used. Again, CMS is moving towards that constraints rapidly. At Infinedi, we are involved in some of those metrics that are being determined and it can show a very positive light but doctors have to adopt those methodologies. They have to start getting involved in it.
We probably have three years before doctors really have to take that big step into it but being involved in it now will help you understand, it will help you derive the tool sets that you need to get involved into it. It will help contribute towards this research, to understand how chiropractic can have a positive role. Does the financial data show chiropractic to be cost-effective? What we are seeing today absolutely shows that chiropractic is a cost-effective way to do that. It’s now trying to take that information and presented things like work conference conventions to show PI, to look with individual payers to show that chiropractic is going to be a much positive effect over some of the pharmaceutical studies that are going on right now. I know in certain states, there are some trial pilot programs that are going on that are going to help chiropractic that really understand can they have a big effect in roles trying to prevent patients to go on outwards type studies to prevent that over usage that is occurring today. They sure point out that there are much, much more conservative care models than what exists in the MD world.
What about patients? What is it from patients that we can learn and apply data to? How about mass personalization principles where we are trying to identify care patterns that occur. Right now, we are looking at patients as sort of a whole but we can take data and drill down on individual patients to where we can create care patterns for individual patients that wrap up those care of patients. Now, chiropractors probably know that better than most but whenever you are looking at data, that represents and goes across both your state and national, we find that there may be actually even better ways and better techniques to do that. We’ve recently taken on studies looking at episodic care of patients where we look at diagnosis and how other chiropractors are looking in and handling those in the kinds of services and visits that they are providing for those patients of those same diagnoses, so that very quickly we can start looking and representing that data to you to show maybe there are other practitioners that are doing it just a little bit better so that we create those individual care patterns and things that you might not know today.
What about risk factor prediction? In a risk factor, analysis is going to be a very important part of MIPS raspberry. To look at risk factoring what kind of risk does this patient have? Does this patient have a high risk so that they need more care? It looks like the federal government under MIPS is going to allow practitioners that can define risk factor, they are going to allow them a much higher level of reimbursement for chronic care kind of management where you can see that patient more often, that you can do almost concierge kind of services for that patient and get that higher reimbursement. Look at outcomes. Like I mentioned before under care pattern identification, let’s start truly looking at outcomes across the United States. From the outcome studies that we’ve done over the last year, it looks extremely positive that chiropractic outcomes are going to keep pointing to being much more positive, it’s going to show that there is definitely a place in the industry, in healthcare as a whole, to show that outcomes are very, very positive.
What about data that’s collected for educational purposes? Simple things like gender-based, what else? Looking at studies on a regular basis to look comparisons across genders. Maybe there are educational things that we need to do for females that we are not doing for them that we could look onto that. I’ve had the pleasure of sitting on a panel for the Florida Chiropractic Association for the last year with a provider that talks very, very specifically about the role of chiropractic with just females. I’ve learned so much for sitting in on her talks and presentations. So looking at the outcome studies based on maybe many, many things, many different types of services that we need to look at just based on educating across genders. Of course, education comes in many different ways. What we are talking about is low back, sprains, manipulation. Educating the patients today in the world is very, very important.
Data will not only tell us what we need to educate, it’ll tell us where we need to educate and how often that we need to educate the patient on chiropractic. Having access to the records is something that’s known and becoming very, very important is giving our patients access to the records. Our patients have sort of been the left out component of healthcare over the last few decades. The mentality today is to drive those patients into the world of understanding their records, giving them access, giving them web portals to go to, not only to tell them what the diagnoses are today but to drive them to the internet. If they had specific things like sprains, whether they have diabetes, whether they have high blood pressure, that we couldn’t quickly leak information to them and tie them into this huge world of information that they sort of have been left out of. So I think it’s very important that we start driving patients to that and giving them access to the records.
Data analysis is all about populations. The more information that we have, the more data that we have, the more accurate those data sets are, the better conclusions that we can come to. Traditional hierarchies of information that we looked at when the internet first hit have really changed. We have today very highly responsive information. I know I’m sort of running out of time. There is a lot of information here about how the internet is changing from traditional ways to responsive ways. Let me try to get that relatively quickly and then answer questions, if you have, about the end of it. Traditional data moves slowly. Even though we have great accesses to information, it moves relatively slowly. It has a tendency to funnel information directly to who we are as users. Responsive information travels much, much faster. It’s intuitive, in another words, in the system. When we are looking at something, it simply knows that there are 100 other things associated with that part of information. It is responsive for what we are talking about.
Have you ever noticed today that if you use twitter or if you use Facebook and you Google something all of a sudden on your twitter account or your Facebook account, you start getting ads about that information. It’s because the internet has become smart. It knows that you are googling information and that it wants you to know these hundred other things around it and it must travel much, much faster in a much more collective way to give the information to you. It’s essentially responsive. It’s adapting and learning to the keywords that you put out there. There are three basic components about population. We call them the three Vs, volume, refers to the rapid rate data is growing. In 2020, it’s estimated that there will be 44 times more data than was collected in all of 2009. 35 zettabytes compared to 800 terabytes today. It’s just amazing at the way that information is being collected and that’s because data techniques, large data techniques, and software to manage that are coming into play today.
The other one is velocity. Velocity, the frequency at which data is being delivered and collected, and finally, the variety of data. Such a larger variety of data and it comes in many, many forms today. Healthcare is only one of those but we are finding healthcare has to do populations, has to do with surrounding regional information, environmental information, and it’s taking that responsive information and tying all that information together. We talked about there is going to be 39 petabytes of information…I mean zettabytes. Let’s start looking at the number. It’s hard to fathom that. You talk about a petabyte today, we are collecting information in petabytes. To give you some idea, that is a thousand zeros at the end of the numbers, almost hard to imagine. Today in today’s world, we are collecting information at the rate of 6 gigabytes per human for every human on the face of the globe, of the world. Think about it. That’s even including people that live in Third World, uncivilized collection.
That’s essentially a hard drive on a computer. That amount of information is being collected every day today across the United States…it is across the world, excuse me. It is a huge amount of information and in 2020, that number is going to jump from 1000 zeros to a billion zeros of information collected. It’s almost hard to fathom that kind of information. One of the big components, and in the last couple of minutes I’m going to talk about, is privacy and security. It’s fundamental to that. Who is the responsible party of the information? That responsible party, by all means, the government says that is you as a healthcare provider. You are responsible when the patient signs that trust information over to you in your office. They are essentially signing the trust of that information as a chain of trust to you saying you are responsible to hold my information in a safe and secure way.
We have systems that you need to look at. Are your systems cloud-based or are they server-based? Both of them have unique issues. If it’s a cloud-based system, do you know where that clout exists? I’ve only had one person in all the classes I’ve taught actually knew where the data was being held in the cloud on their behalf. That little word HIPAA comes back to play a very, very important card. Under HIPAA, you are responsible and if you get charged for disclosure of information under HIPAA, one of the first things the health and human secretaries are going to ask you is where was that information stored? And if you don’t know that, chances are you are going to absorb a fine. So, if you are in a cloud driven world, you need to know where that’s at. One of the problem that occurs is now we have a global connection for data firms and many of those firms exist overseas.
If your firm is overseas, chances are HIPAA does not apply there and you have a much greater chance of that healthcare information under HIPAA being stolen and utilized in an incorrect way. HIPAA requirements still exist today under the basic rules, it’s your responsibility to protect that information. We also have fair credit reporting acts that fall under privacy and security that are your responsibility to report. Again, the Federal Trade Commission information practice principles exist are called flips. Those fall under your responsibility also. What big data can do for my office and the industry? It’s really changing and again, I’m running out of time so I might zip to these. Does the chiropractic industry need to make a change? Absolutely. You’ve got about three years to get onto the train. The train has actually already left the station. So it’s very important that you ask questions, go to your state chiropractic association conferences, sit in on classes within your mind or other people. There are a lot of great specialists out there trying to talk about this, trying to get you on the wagon. It is the number one most important thing that you could do for the future of chiropractic.
Can you simply say I’m satisfied with the direction that the chiropractic industry is headed? Very, very few people want to say that today. If so, they’ve taken the cash road, they’ve gotten out of the insurance world and they’ve just said, “Nah, I’ve given up. I’m staying what is where I’m at and I’m not moving anymore.” But that’s a sad stance because the industry has been good to you, it needs to be good for you, it needs to be good for the generation of practitioners that come after you. There are many changes I have mentioned throughout this presentation that need to be had. Healthcare providers have massive amounts of unstructured data that we’ve got to get hold of, that we need to get hold of. Help us do that. Images, standoff documents, and cash progression that’s…I’ve talked a lot about independent physician associations.
Be sure that you get involved with those that are owned and controlled by state associations, ones that are trying to change the norms, ones that are pro-advocacy. They are there to make a difference in the profession. Choose to make that difference. It’s up to you. No one else is going to take you by the hand and drag you into that. You have to choose to make that difference and if you do, you can make a difference in the world. You can change the world by taking hold, doing some of the simple things, looking at data, and understanding that changes part of life. Be a part of the future, not a part of the past. Make a difference to the profession. Choose to make that difference. Only you can do that. Thank you for the time today. I’m going to turn it back over to Daniel to see if there is any questions but I do appreciate you spending the hour with me and Daniel, I’m turning it back over to you.
Daniel: Well, very good. Thank you Brad. This has been a very informative talk and I certainly learned a great deal. I’m sure our audience has as well. We have got a couple of questions from the audience but I think I’ve got time to ask you one. If I have a cloud-based Practice Management System, how would I know whether it’s HIPPA compliant or not?
Brad: Well, then your HIPPA says that it’s your responsibility as a practitioner to do that. So one of the questions when you are looking at purchasing that Practice Management System or something that you should ask the company, ask the rep because they need to know that for sure, where is your data being held at. There was a study commissioned a year ago looking at server firms that were overseas that were held in insecure ways. It is not truly their server firms responsibility, it is your responsibility to make sure that your data is held at that. I do ask the questions. In the very least, I would know the city, I’d have a phone number of where that cloud is based. Many, many Practice Management Softwares, EHRs, don’t own their own data center like we do here at Infinedi. They actually rent out space at data centers. So it’s a serious of asking the questions of your practice management or your software system.
Daniel: Another doctor would like to know, he says, “I thought that EHR systems were meant to be the systems that were going to be used in data collection. Is that the correct or not?”
Brad: Well, it originally started out that way. We got stimulus money to buy those systems, to buy computers, to buy the software. We know that EHR systems are going to play an important role in MIPS but we’ve also learned that claim information is going to play as big as not a bigger role in MIPS because that we need to know that transactional information. We know that EHR systems are not communicating well with each other today. Under a rule that’s going to be voted on, I believe this November, there may be some efforts by the federal government to try to make some standards where EHR systems must talk to each other but it’s that lack of communication. These systems have to learn to talk together.
Daniel: Absolutely. That’s a story that we’ve been covering at Chiropractic Economics as well. I thought that, so a certified software, a government certified software system would have to be compatible and it came as a shock to everybody including members of Congress when it turned out that was not the case. So that’s something that they will be looking at really carefully. Well, I think that brings us to the close of our webinar today and Brad, I understand that you have a special offer for the people attending today’s webinar.
Brad: Yeah, we are. You know we are sponsoring this. We do this with our claims clearing house Infinedi. Infinedi, again, is moving into chiropractic space in a while far kind of way. You are going to be hearing about us in many, many states to come. We have relationships with 28 state chiropractic associations, many state associations that have IPAs under the brand name of Secure Care. So if you are needing to join Infinedi, if you want to start being a part of a data-driven world, we are going to offer you a special deal. If you call Infinedi today at l-800-688-8087 and mention that you were a part of the webinar today, mention code 5000, we are actually going to take a knock down your setup fees from $199 to $99. You have to be part of the participant list on this webinar today. We are to get that from Daniel’s group and you have to mention that it’s code 5000. We are going to offer this for 30 days so if you’d like to save half on your setup fees, use that code number and give us a call.
Daniel: All right. Well, thank you Brad and at this time, we would like to thank our sponsor, Infinedi, and you, Brad Cost, for today’s webinar and everybody in the audience, thank you for attending. Remember this webinar including our speakers PowerPoint presentation has been recorded and if we did not get to your question during the webinar, the questions would be posted to our expert and the answers posted shortly at chiroeco.com/webinar. We’ll alert you when the webinar is available. Thank you again for attending everybody and we look forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.
About the speaker
Brad Cost became the chief executive officer, president and owner of Infinedi, LLC in 1999. He is a highly knowledgeable and credible source within the healthcare and data analytics industry. Cost has an impressive work history proving his success and owns various companies including: an electronic data interchange consultant firm, an interactive software development firm, an innovative software system and many more. His primary focus is in the development of cutting edge electronic data technology as it relates to the big data analysis of medical and health data.
