Visonex
Redesign Document Care in Dialysis Health Sector

Dialysis is a very large expenditure for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The dialysis healthcare sector has undergone continued structural changes as CMS strives to contain costs yet ensure that quality care is delivered. This result in major obstacles as increasing regulatory burdens is placed on dialysis clinics with declining real reimbursement. “The clinical information systems must be able to provide documentation of treatment parameters, medications, and the care plan within optimized clinical workflows and not merely function as a log of standalone events and billing data,” delineates John Hartman, Co-founder and CEO, Visonex. Bridging this gap is a Green Bay, WI based company Visonex that provides a cloud-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. “So, rather than focusing on tracking information for billing or legal reasons, Visonex focuses on providing accurate and precise information within clinical workflows that would positively impact dialysis practices,” confides Hartman.

Hartman envisioned a health care system capable of increasing communication, disseminating patient information, as well as streamlining workflow and hence co-founded Visonex. “We were interested in the way technology could facilitate communications while minimizing the negative impact of introducing technology into the clinic. We feel that we are not merely an EHR, rather; we have focused on truly assisting the clinic manage their information. Our EHR was built using agile software development methodologies to address workflows within the dialysis clinic,” states Hartman. The firm’s focus is to ensure that data is viewed on the individual user based on their clinic role, building work flow co-ordination to bring actionable insights to patient’s health at point of care.

In addition, Visonex’s Clarity is an EHR specifically designed to work with the individual providers’ workflow found in dialysis clinics. “All billing events start with a clinical event,” states Hartman. Clarity provides specific screens to enable the physicians, care providers, nurses and the support staff (dietitians and social workers) to view requisite information for their patient interactions.

These screens are configurable by role and by organization to assure the right information is delivered to the right person at the right time. Additionally, Visonex’s Clarity allows the care providers to address specific clinic workflows and the associated data quickly and make adjustments on the clinic’s patient population. For example, it is possible to perform adjustments of dialysis administered medications across the patient population rather than going into each individual patient record. Through the firm’s product the care providers can view typically relevant information, pull up reports to retrieve additional information and review relevant clinical information. “We bring all information to a single screen to review without having to navigate through the multiple areas of the application,” adds Hartman.

Visonex aggregates all information related to the entire patient population rightly from the operational databases into an analytical data warehouse. This allows the care providers to access their current quality metrics, which is vital for the administrator, nurse manager and the medical director. Visonex also performs outsourced billing functions, interfaces to third party billing software packages and is currently bringing up its own billing software package for clinics that wish to continue to perform their own billing.

Visonex focuses on providing the accurate and precise information within clinical workflow at point of care to positively impact dialysis clinical decision making

Forging forward, Visonex is planning to broaden its market foothold into transitions of care. “While patient care overlaps in dialysis, hospitals and nephrology clinics, Visonex is planning to build additional workflows in Clarity to handle the unique aspects of coordinating care,” concludes Hartman.