Better Day Health
Better Day^TMHealth: Innovations that Improve the Practice of Medicine

The introduction of the electronic health record (EHR) was supposed to make things easier for healthcare providers by centralizing the collection and sharing of a patient’s medical data. However, when Peter Ragusa returned to medical school after a policy fellowship in Washington, D.C., he realized it would take a physician an hour to document a 15-minute encounter.

The computer was becoming a physical and emotional barrier between the patient and provider. Dr. Ragusa says, “having wanted to be a physician since I was three years old, that wasn’t the type of medicine I wanted to practice. I just didn’t see anything positive about focusing on the computer and the bill more than the patient. I felt the patient should be the focus in the exam room.”

In response, Dr. Ragusa founded Better Day™ Health, a clinical documentation and healthcare software company that promises to significantly reduce the documentation, billing, and regulatory burden on doctors and other healthcare providers. This accomplishes two goals. “One is to improve the patient-doctor experience and relationship. The second is to increase the revenue of the healthcare organization through improved reporting and the avoidance of reimbursement penalties,” informs Dr. Ragusa. The system also acts as a clinical data exchange because it can be added onto multiple existing or legacy health record systems, allowing them to communicate with each other.

Ragusa explains how the system works, “Better Day™ Health can come in and solve the most urgent issue of physicians becoming overpriced clerical workers by reducing the 300-click encounter to a 10-click encounter.” This has reduced the diagnosis, documentation, coding and billing time from ten to fifteen minutes per encounter to two to three minutes per encounter.

We can use technology to improve care, lower costs, and improve quality and longevity of life through context-aware intelligent systems, like Better Day™ Health

Case in point is a clinic that Better Day™ Health works with. The doctors there were clicking over 150 times per encounter, and over 40 of those clicks occurred before they walked into the patient room. With the Better Day™ Health system, the doctors now only have to click twice before walking into the room and a common encounter can be completed in as few as ten to twelve clicks. “BDH has reduced, in a very quantifiable and meaningful way, the amount of time a doctor spends in front of a screen,” Ragusa explains.

Better Day™ Health has removed from healthcare organizations the burden of being “health IT experts”. Better Day™ has gone out, found the best technology and software, and brought it together into one clinical operating system into which all partners are integrated natively. Clients do not have to manage interfaces and integrations with various software vendors and all software components speak to each other natively because they are all on the same system.

According to Dr. Ragusa, there is a disconnect between where systems are now and where they need to be. Healthcare tech overall is 10-15 years behind consumer-based technology. Better Day™ Health is intended to be a great stride toward catching up and ultimately exceeding currently available technology. For this reason, 2017 is all about getting the Better Day™ technology into the hands of doctors and patients. Dr. Ragusa says, “We are excited to get this technology into the hands of the users so we can change lives for the better.”