Simplicity Health Systems: A New Dimension for Ancillary Care

Chad Zerangue, CEO

“Traditional health information systems are generally proficient with clinical documentation, but fall down when it comes to transactional workflows associated with quality patient care. They are static repositories of patient data,” says Chad Zerangue, CEO, Simplicity Health Systems. The traditional health information systems Zerangue refers to have an additional shortcoming tied to them. They fail terribly when it comes to collecting and cataloguing all the bits of information that don’t live inside traditional systems, such as EMRs, yet are vital for quality patient care and value-based treatment decision making. In these instances, ancillary care providers currently rely on multiple small stand-alone systems, manual protocols, and file sharing technology that are inefficient and error prone (all the while risking non-compliance with HIPAA requirements). Simplicity Health bridges this very gap with its solution docflock, which not only serves as a harbor for an ancillary care provider’s data but also as a point of interaction between other health information systems. “That’s the solution we provide. We are the health technology platform for ancillary care.”

A crucial observation Zerangue says his company made while developing the docflock platform, was that a lack of interoperability between existing systems was but one issue. Not only did mission critical systems fail to communicate, but data that was captured was often inaccessible and/or without context. Docflock was developed to address workflow, data capture, interoperability, and usability issues. These attributes are only increasing in importance as there is a sizeable and rapidly expanding patient population undergoing treatment comprised of multiple modalities and care settings. Under such circumstances, two or more different healthcare professionals, say an oncologist and a cardiologist, would need two separate genres of information from a single patient. While this data originates from many different ancillary care providers, transfer of information routinely requires that the patient act as the information bridge – a system wrought with risk. Further aggravating the situation is the overwhelming volume of data that providers and practitioners deal with today from numerous inlet points comprised of a wide range of formats to satisfy increasingly diverse requirements.

The solution serves as a harbor for an ancillary care provider’s data but also as a point of interaction between other health information systems

Simplicity Health Systems’ dockflock platform enters at this point as a solution that aggregates different channels of data flows into a single access mode, parsing through volumes of data to unearth actionable information and present the same in a human readable format.

The SaaS platform is buttressed by capabilities gained through the firm’s collaboration with AWS and CenturyLink Cloud and leverages the FIHR data model and other forward looking technologies. “Docflock is the world’s first ‘Health Communication Platform’ because it synchronizes and assimilates different formats of incoming data, such as HL7, transforming it into a single data format. Once in a single format, the data can be made actionable via rendering it in human readable formats, charts and graphs, or used to pre-populate forms and documents.”

Illustrating the capabilities of dockflock, Zerangue relates a success story with a privately held Neuro monitoring company. The client approached Simplicity Health Systems with the issue of denial code management for their hard to adjudicate claims. The firm was growing exponentially and was struggling with capturing denied claims, reworking them, and resubmitting them for further approval. Simplicity Health created a stratified denial code analysis tool that analyzed the data within this customer’s docflock repository. docflock revealed to the client that their adopted coding didn’t match certain RVU requirements for these cases. Although the client already possessed the data that could have unmasked this cause, the data was simply not present in a way that made sense. Simplicity Health proffered a blend of clinical and financial data in a single dashboard. Once the client modified the way they coded these claims, approval rates improved dramatically, matching the value of care provided. Docflock then showed claims resubmittal statuses and helped the customer manage the resubmittal and collections process. Within 16 short months of dockflock implementation, the client recorded an incremental +$10 million return on investment.

While clients’ profit figures corroborate the capabilities docflock brings to the table, innovation at Simplicity Health is not stagnant. Early in the next year the firm plans to unveil its next-generation platform, which Zerangue informs will be predicated on NoSQL and will have a ground-breaking security model. The platform, as reported, will primarily aim to accommodate applications and ancillary services, as well as third party applications that track personal health and wellness information. “There is a torrent of new ‘APP’ development by brilliant minds that track personal health and wellness information, but don’t currently map to the clinical data-set. The next generation docflock platform will accommodate this data and allow for integration of this data into the clinical data set.”