An interview with Suresh Bangara, MD, CEO of Hippocrates Gate, LLC.
President Obama’s support for electronic medical records is one of the key efforts of healthcare. “This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests” said Obama. “It just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs — it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system” quoted Obama in reference to computerizing all health records within five years to boost the quality of health care for all Americans.
AccessHSI helps HealthCare Providers (HCP’s) and Managed Care Organizations (MCO’s) to manage the administration of mental healthcare. The application enables clinicians to quickly capture complete case information, verify diagnoses, check level of care guidelines in advance, and generate a full report that demonstrates medical necessity. It has been estimated that 80% of healthcare administrative costs can be eliminated by the adoption of improved and automated technologies for data collection, sharing, and decisioning. AccessHSI is designed to help providers improve operational efficiencies, quickly document cases, support diagnoses and suggest level of care.
The application was built by Team Systech collaborating with Medical domain experts from Hipppocrates Gate, LLC. The team was headed by Ramakrishnan Rangananthan acting as the Lead Architect – while the development was headed by Venkataragavan from Systech India. Dr Suresh Bangara captured the essence of multiple years of treating and administering the treatment of mental healthcare – and provided the subject matter expertise for the application.
Dr. Suresh Bangara has more than 20 years of experience in health care industry especially in mentally health. He has worked with mentally ill patients both in public sector as well as private sector. He has been in charge of partial hospitalization programs across the country. Dr. Bangara has also been involved in the start up of a HMO a director for Pro-health plans and has deep understanding of individual, group and hospital practice. For the past 2 years he has been a professor and currently he is the Senior Medical Director at Cigna.
In this BI Insight, we feature an interview with Suresh Bangara, CEO of Hippocrates Gate, LLC. The interview examines his company’s latest application that could potentially revolutionize the health care industry by providing an efficient and cost-effective solution.
BI Insight: What is AccessHSI and what is its role in Behavioral Healthcare?
Dr. Bangara: AccessHSI is a secure web-based decision support application with a reporting tool for Level of Care. It reduces administrative time and denials for mental health and substance abuse inpatient and outpatient cases. It enables clinicians to quickly capture complete case information, verify diagnoses, check level of care guidelines in advance, and generate a full report that demonstrates medical necessity in less than 10 minutes—compared to the 45 minute norm. This allows MCOs, and other health planners to automate most routine care management processes, thereby allowing care managers and Medical Directors to focus on complex and specialty cases. Also it is easily accessible and user-friendly .
BI Insight: What do you think are the core problems with healthcare today?
Dr. Bangara: Lack of proper and complete documentation is the root cause for an expensive and prolonged health care process. Also, there is a huge administration burden on clinicians as they have to also act as care managers and provide all authorizations.
How does your application help overcome these problems?
Dr. Bangara: The reason for most denials is lack of proper documentation or that document does not support the claims of the doctor. Our software recommends objective and accurate healthcare at the right level and at the right time. This will save hospitals most of the administration cost. In addition to efficiently providing complete clinical documentation, our software demonstrates to MCOs, a hospital’s ability to self-manage. Thus it increases reliability and efficiency of the operation. AccessHSI standardizes the diagnosis and suggested level of care.
BI Insight: How does AccessHSI provide consistent care and accommodate a variety of patient conditions?
Dr. Bangara: AccessHSI software asks specific questions across different domains which can be mapped to 7 diagnostic domains covering a 360° view of patient status. These domains are Symptom Severity, Lethality, Psychosocial Support, Functional Impairment, Medical Conditions, Patient Resources and Provider Resources. These questions are answered by the patient or patient’s care takers. Thus, patient’s clinical status is quickly documented across the 7 diagnostic domains and a diagnosis can be verified by a care provider in less than 10 minutes. We allocate a level of care based on a logic that uses information from all 7 domains.
BI Insight: What role did Systech play as a technology partner?
Dr. Bangara: Systech played a key role in automating the process to increase efficiency and lower cost. This enables providers in completing initial patient clinical record and generates a complete report in less than 10 minutes; updates to a record can be completed in less than 3 minutes. Traditionally, 60-80% of the administration costs went to gate-keeping functions which are eliminated by AccessHSI. This reduces millions of dollars spent on gate keeping and makes healthcare affordable for all.
BI Insight: What reporting services and analysis did Systech enable for the application?
Dr. Bangara: Being well equipped in resources and experience to provide Analytics in healthcare, Systech played a key role in developing reporting services and analysis. The output generated by AccessHSI application generates a comprehensive report containing text, domain graphs, DSM. Graphical Display of Severity Index in Seven Domains and helps care managers and providers focus on the domains with high severity for targeted interventions. These outcomes can be measured. The case tracking provides visibility of the changes and improvements in patients, over time and over sessions or in comparison with others.
BI Insight: And how does Systech play a role in Predictive modeling?
Dr. Bangara: Use of Systech’s analytics capabilities enabled Predictive Modeling for us. Predictive modeling in healthcare has the potential to identify cases with increased risk for re-admission. We can compare output of an individual profile across the 7 domains and to profiles of other patients in the database; we determine the level of care that is required. Systech’s ability to help in improving efficiency is widely accepted and Obama administration has stated that they are looking at IT in helping with reducing the costs for providing health care.
Patient information confidentiality is very important in healthcare, how does your application ensure patient confidentiality?
Systech played a very critical part in ensuring that the software is in full compliance with HIPAA guidelines. This is very crucial to keep the data confidential and secure. We chose Systech as our technology partner because we needed an IT partner who understood the importance and criticality of data we gather. Systech is an expert in arranging database administration, design, development and maintenance. Patient module in our software has very sophisticated security privileges. Systech has done a great job in designing and coding this application.
BI Insight: How and why did you choose the name “Hippocrates Gate” for your company?
Dr. Bangara: One of my co-workers brought that up. Hippocrates is the father of modern medicine. AccessHSI is a health status indicator. Health and illness are in continuum; we are able to watch and measure these domains. One of the domains is AccessHSI. Whether you are healthy or ill or severely ill, we constantly measure it. It maps to whatever level of care you need. It is therefore a gateway to different aspects of health. If you are looking at integrated health, you get an insight into diagnostics, predictive modeling, and levels of care. AccessHSI is a bridge- and a gateway to various outcomes of health. That is why we thought it would be apt to call it Hippocrates Gate.
