As part of its quest to build a “Smarter Planet,” IBM is once again sponsoring its annual SmartCamp initiative, which fosters entrepreneurship and innovation through exclusive events around the globe.

CareCloud’s founder and CEO, Albert Santalo, recently participated in this year’s SmartCamp Global Finals in Silicon Valley, California. Albert attended the event to serve as a mentor to early stage entrepreneurs.

Considering that CareCloud is now a major presence in the healthcare IT industry and has a staff of over 120 employees, it’s almost hard to believe that just over a year ago, CareCloud was a start-up mentee in this elite competition, not a mentor.

CareCloud participated in the inaugural round of the SmartCamp program in September of 2010 and made a major impression, being named co-winner of SmartCamp Silicon Valley and earning runner-up honors in the SmartCamp World Finals in Dublin, Ireland.

At the 2010 event, IBM provided invaluable support to CareCloud by introducing the company to a number of influential investment firms, industry experts, executives and advisors.

Albert reflected on CareCloud’s experience as a SmartCamp competitor in an interview with IBM’s Timothy Willeford, which you can watch here or below:

This year, Albert served on a special “Winner’s Journey” panel at the Global Finals with his fellow 2010 SmartCamp winners Zia Yusuf, CEO of Streetline and Ashifi Gogo, CEO of Sproxil. Speaking to an audience of newer start-up founders, Albert offered his advice on getting funding, winning those first customers and embracing change in the marketplace.

“Entrepreneurship is an act of faith, not an act of logic,” Albert said at the event. “You have to see the door and run through it.”

Albert and the rest of CareCloud’s leadership team look forward to continuing to support and foster global entrepreneurship through involvement with IBM SmartCamp in the years to come.

How are you building a Smarter Planet?

If you’re ever been involved with IBM SmartCamp, we’d love to hear about your experience. Tell us about it in the comments below!

Around the office today, there’s one phrase we’re hearing quite a bit: “Vegas, baby!”

On Monday, nine very excited CareCloud representatives will leave Miami and take to the clouds (by plane) to venture west for the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference & Exhibition. The event is taking place at the Venetian Sands Expo Center from February 20-24.

This will be CareCloud’s first time exhibiting at the event, which is the premier healthcare IT conference in the U.S. HIMSS leaders expect over 35,000 physicians, CIOs, technology leaders, journalists and other professionals to attend this year’s convention.

Our nine reps will be encouraging those many HIMSS12 attendees to “Bet on the Cloud – And Win Big!” At our exhibitor booth #13642, we’ll be offering free demos of our revolutionary cloud-based software and services, showing how our products improve medical practice efficiency and increase collections.

We’re especially excited to showcase our CareCloud Charts electronic health record to such a large audience. Also, we can’t wait to announce a very exciting personnel addition on Monday, which is sure to have lots of industry people talking.

If you’re headed to Vegas, you won’t want to miss the presentation from our CEO, Albert Santalo, on “Accelerating Health IT with the Cloud.” It’s happening Thursday, February 23 at 2:45 – get the details here.

Stop by booth #13642 to check out our products, learn about our company or just meet our great team. Here’s the lineup of CareClouders heading to HIMSS:

@AlbertSantalo, Founder, President & CEO
Rich Lopez del Rincon, Executive Vice President
@MikeCuesta, Director of Marketing
Tom Packert, Chief Technology Officer
Juan Reyes, MD, MBA, Director of Clinical Technologies
Michael Gold, Director of Product Development
Ian Bjorsvik, Sales Engineer
Jim McNamara, Director of Enterprise Solutions
Nicole Trueba, Events & Outreach Manager

If you’re not going to be in attendance at HIMSS, don’t fret. What happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas.

Not only will Albert’s presentation be archived online, our CareCloud staffers will be tweeting from the event – read live updates at twitter.com/carecloud – and we’ll debrief you on the HIMSS experience here on the CareCloud blog upon our team’s return.

What are you excited to learn or see at HIMSS12?

Marilyn Tavenner, acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), reportedly told journalists today that the CMS will “re-examine the timeframe” of the planned 2013 conversion to the ICD-10 code standard.

Marilyn Tavenner, acting Administrator of the CMS

Tavenner did not say how long the CMS might be willing to delay the deadline, but her mere acknowledgment that providers may get some more breathing room made major news.

Tavenner made her statement at the American Medical Association (AMA) Advocacy Conference in Washington. A DC-based reporter from Medpage Today, Emily Walker, tweeted that when Tavenner told conference attendees she would “reexamine the pace at which we implement ICD-10,” doctors in her audience applauded – which is not surprising.

The ICD-10 conversion has been a point of contention across the healthcare industry, and the AMA has positioned itself as the new code set’s biggest nemesis. The organization has been urging the CMS and other authorities to stop or delay the changeover – with an emphasis on “stop” – since late 2011.

In November, AMA members voted to “work vigorously” against the federally mandated conversion. AMA President Peter Carmel went so far as to say that “ICD-10 will create significant burdens on the practice of medicine with no direct benefit to individual patients’ care.”

Meanwhile, other influencing bodies in the healthcare industry, such as the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), have argued in favor of moving forward with ICD-10.

AHIMA CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon has stated that “there are countless benefits that will come from the use of a 21st century classification system.” Another leader in her organization stressed how todays ICD-9’s coding system is not specific enough, saying it causes issues in the processing of claims.

But the AMA has remained staunchly opposed to ICD-10, and not been quiet about it. In January, AMA leaders even took their ICD-10 issues federal.

In a letter, Dr. James Madar, executive vice president and CEO of the AMA, told House Speaker John Boehner that “The timing of the ICD-10 transition… could not be worse as many physicians are currently spending significant time and resources implementing electronic health records (EHRs) into their practices.” The AMA sent a similar letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just weeks later.

After months of lobbying, it seems their message got through. Tavenner’s big ICD-10 announcement shows that the CMS has taken the AMA’s concerns seriously.

“There’s concern that folks cannot get their work done around meaningful use, their work around ICD-10 implementation and be ready for exchanges,” she said today. “So we’re trying to listen to that and be responsive.”

If it were to go through as planned, industry experts predict that the ICD-10 conversion would place a heavy administrative and financial burden on healthcare organizations, especially those who are underprepared for the staff training it will require or are currently relying on outdated software that will need heavy upgrades to comply with the new coding standard.

CareCloud users will have little to worry about in the way of software upgrades since the system operates on a flexible cloud-based platform that can easily adapt to the ICD-10 transition.

Healthcare is an industry resistant to change, but it seems unlikely that the CMS will disregard ICD-10 altogether and allow providers to use ICD-9 indefinitely. The real issue is whether the administrative burden of ICD-10 will be substantiated by its potential benefits in better patient care and easier claims processing.

Whether it happens in October of 2013 or on a more extended timeline, ICD-10 isn’t going away.

Do you think the changeover will be worth the hassle? What do you think would constitute a reasonable ICD-10 conversion date?

Share your thoughts on the ICD-10 transition and Marilyn Tavenner’s announcement in the comments below.

Eva Guasp, CareCloud’s receptionist, greets guests at our front desk every day – always with a smile. But on Monday, January 23, employees and regular visitors noticed a major change in Eva’s appearance: her hair was over a foot shorter.

Eva didn’t undertake her drastic haircut out of vanity. Over the weekend, she’d donated her tresses for a local woman with cancer.

A friend of Eva’s, Michelle, had recruited her to participate in a privately organized group hair donation to benefit Jennifer, Eva’s former high school classmate. Jennifer, who has leukemia, had recently shaved her head completely after enduring chemotherapy treatments.

Eva’s thick, curly hair reached well down her back, so she was a prime candidate for Michelle’s donation mission. More importantly, Eva’s an incredibly generous person. She even donated her hair once before, through the Locks of Love program, while attending Miami-Dade College.

But that first time, Eva provided just the minimum eight-inch hair donation. For Jennifer’s wig, Eva offered to be the principal donator and contributed a whopping fourteen inches of her hair to the cause.

The donation wasn’t easy for Eva, who, at 23, has had at least shoulder-length hair for as long as she can remember.

“It was definitely hard to give up my hair,” she said. “I cried a couple of times after it was chopped off! But I really think it was worth it.”

“My hair’s going to grow back, so I can afford to let it go,” Eva continued. “But Jennifer had a tough time losing her hair. I was happy to do this for her.”

The wig is currently under construction, being crafted by a local hairstylist who offered to make it for free so long as the hair was provided. It may be over a month before the finished product is given to Jennifer, but Eva and Michelle are looking forward to finding out how it’s received.

“Jennifer knows we donated the hair for her. We were trying to do it as a surprise, but we were too excited to keep quiet!” Eva said. “We really hope she likes it.”

Eva is just one of the many people at CareCloud giving time and energy – or in this case, hair – to great causes. From time to time, we’ll be highlighting the generous gestures of our employees here on the CareCloud Blog.

If Silicon Valley area companies were high school students, the yearbook superlative for “Most Outgoing” would likely go to Apple. Their devices are intuitive and easy to use, moving the brand from techie and artsy favorite to ‘normal’ people necessity in a little over a decade.

In terms of software, personal computers and consumer electronics, Apple understands user experience is the key to success, propelling the corporation’s value to $324 billion as of May 2011. This kind of usability is owed to smart design, with Apple focusing on effectiveness and efficiency via a combined understanding of human cognition and aesthetics.

This approach works beautifully for professionals with little time to spend reading up on device instructions. Physicians are among the busiest of these, so an Apple device is an automatic option when satisfying technological needs.

While these needs may begin as personal ones, say a dinner date or fitness class reminders, the speed and convenience of Apple’s approach often finds itself spilling into the work lives of healthcare providers.

With medical billing systems and health records going electronic, as noted in this Software Advice piece, would Apple’s user friendliness not be a wise option for medical practices and hospitals?

While MacBooks and iMacs are not specifically designed for healthcare, an increasing number of medical applications are being written for them, including specialty-specific EHRs, imaging and patient monitoring functions.

iMacs and MacBooks are believed to promote better patient interaction and are expected to reduce the latency associated with medical note-taking when in conjunction with audio dictation software. This reduces ‘desk’ hours, freeing up physicians to see more patients daily.

Not only are devices like iPads are cheaper and more mobile than, say, COWs (computer-on-wheel systems), but Apple’s operating systems promote more intelligent user experience design.

It’s more intuitive and elegant, and it does away with useless commands like ‘Apply.’ It’s also far easier to troubleshoot and handles most updates and maintenance automatically. For physicians, being armed with an EHR on a laptop or tablet is like driving a car with auto-navigation.

Another appealing characteristic of Apple products is that they don’t need additional security software, so physicians don’t need to worry about malfunctioning medical software.

The neatly laid out menus, storage features and better built-in apps on Apple devices help physicians stay organized – an oft-cited challenge healthcare providers deal with.

Lastly, Apple products emphasize aesthetics. While seemingly not a deciding factor for physicians to choose an iPad over a Panasonic Toughbook or other similar gadgets, technology evangelists like the New York Times’ Nick Bilton would beg to differ.

In his 2010 book, titled I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works, Bilton cites Stanford University studies analyzing human trust in machines and the Internet, which helped suggest the first deciding factor in the trust relationship between humans and machines is design, followed by content.

Its clear Apple’s success relies on more than just savvy marketing, hardware design and packaging features. And considering the popularity of MacBooks, iMacs and mobile Apple machines among physicians, it seems the tablet will be ubiquitous in medical practices by the end of this year.

First, the two-syllable term is foreign to many outside of the IT field. Big data means that as datasets grow to unfathomable extents, they develop the ability to collect and interpret massive amounts of information – via everything from social media posts to smartphone GPS coordinates.

In the very near future, computers like IBM’s Watson will facilitate the relationships between humans and big data, simplifying pattern recognition within datasets and facilitating collaboration in every field.

However, the very concept of “big data” clashes with traditional health care. As Rooney explains, “health care has been delivered by one doctor looking at one patient with only the information the doctor has at the time.”

Even when larger volumes of data can be acquired, it’s notoriously meddlesome and expensive, and the data collected by health services from labs, hospitals and physicians is often biased, seeing as people who visit doctors frequently are the ill and elderly, plus the occasional hypochondriac.

Now imagine a doctor with access to thousands of patients at his fingertips. Among other things, physicians would be able to foresee precursors to certain medical conditions, particularly when dealing with low-frequency events.

The key is to get run-of-the-mill patients to share their medical information voluntarily. Rooney cites Cambridge Temperature Concepts in the UK, who creates a product to help women with fertility problems. Women wear sensors that record movement and body temperature around the clock, which records valuable medical information.

While the goal for women using the device is to predict ovulation, how can the voluntary disclosure of patient information be incentivized in situations where the benefits aren’t so clear?

Managing director of Replay Digital Chris Edmonds considers this constantly. His company specializes in smartphone apps for asthma patients, who receive advice on controlling their condition as an incentive for disclosing health information and patterns.

So, despite the benefits of democratized technology, health care has remained virtually untouched, which is appalling when considering that 90% of today’s data was created in the last two years.

With the advent of EHRs and mandatory transitions in the US, how much longer will it be until health care and big data are married? CareCloud Executive Vice President Richard Lopez del Rincon has an idea of where to begin the discussion.

“It’s important to examine where data will come from in the future regarding the ‘internet-of-things,’” said Lopez del Rincon. “Future trends will deliver more care in the home for multiple reasons, such as controlling costs, patient satisfaction, etc.”

He continued, “Patients will use devices that will catalyze an ‘explosion’ of data that can be recorded and captured in EHRs, i.e., a scale that sends weight, BMI, and percentage of fat and muscle or glucose monitor that provides blood sugar metrics directly into medical record with potential alerts, or cardiac monitoring providing a variety of cardiac metrics and vitals, on-going and in real-time.”

To learn more about how data can help practices more efficiently and profitably, download our free whitepaper titled Actionable Analytics.

As a testament to how highly we regard intelligent design at CareCloud, we sat down with Dr. Kathleen A. Harder, director of the Center for Design in Health at the University of Minnesota, and picked her brain about the crucial role of design in EHR development.

What role does design play in EHR development? How does it contribute to usability?
Properly utilized it plays an enormous role. In my design work, I look at problems through the lens of how we as humans process information—via the strengths and weaknesses of human perception and cognition.  If the EHR design problem is approached from a human information processing perspective—factoring in, for example, how we humans attend to information and how best to present it in a readily understandable way—then the EHR will function more effectively and efficiently for those who provide patient care, better patient care will result, and human error will be diminished.

In other words, design these systems in such a way that physicians, nurses, and others on the care team won’t need to have their heads in the computer as long.  Less time with the computer results in more bedside time to provide direct patient care. We should be working to remove the hoops and hurdles that EHR companies have put in front of care providers.

Also to create better EHR systems, designers need to consult with physicians and nurses and other players involved in delivering care to make sure they’re designing the EHR well.  Those who provide frontline patient care have keen insights into the care they provide and how technology can enhance their process rather than hinder it.

Do you feel design in EHR development is often overlooked or underappreciated? Why?
Yes, I do. I also think it’s misunderstood. When companies say they’ve done usability testing, we should question what that really means for them. If effective usability testing had been done, we wouldn’t have many of the EHR issues we see today.

And what goes into good usability? Good EHR builds include the user and their needs from the very beginning, from concept development through all stages of the design cycle to the end. It’s an iterative design process in which you involve the user from the very beginning to query them about what they really need to provide great patient care. However, users can’t provide all the direction. You need a designer in the mix to make sure someone is thinking about how the needs are best represented and presented in the EHR.

Developers and designers are both communicators in different veins. How can both kinds of roles collaborate to help spur innovation in the healthcare technology field?
We need to speak with each other in constructive ways. Sometimes, an EHR developer tells me, when I propose an idea to them, that it can’t be done. But I know it can be done, because I know enough about programming to know the programming involved in tackling the problem is not rocket science.  After talking together we make inroads into creatively addressing the issue and solving it.

Platform is also important. If the EHR is built on an archaic platform, it presents some design constraints, or idea constraints. But often times, that isn’t even the root of it. There are often cost issues involved, coupled with an underestimation of how huge the problem is for physicians, nurses, and others on the patient care team to deal with the poorly designed EHR systems out there.

To build a case [as a designer], bring it to the vendor and tell them the issues—this helps to open the developers’ eyes. Sometimes they really don’t know what they don’t know. I don’t want to paint the picture that it’s a conflict-ridden situation. Having meaningful and respectful conversations with them about how to improve their product is essential.

How does intelligent design in EHR development and healthcare technology in general help reduce financial waste and accidents?
Smart design saves healthcare organizations significant money over time because people are able to become more productive while committing fewer errors. I have been in operating rooms (OR) where one nurse is focused on the computer during the entire case, documenting and making sure everything is caught up in the computer, while another OR circulating nurse attends to patient and team needs throughout the case. Circulating nurses are expensive.  If EHRs were designed in such a way that users didn’t have to go through so many different hoops and hurdles to enter and track case-related and patient-related information, then their time would be freed up to provide direct patient care. This is an example of how better EHR design could result in savings to health care organizations.

How do EHRs reduce or increase rate of error?
I know that designing EHRs in a smart way leads to error reduction.  Just as an example from my own experience, some years ago a colleague and I were invited to design a more effective ordering process—with paper—for blood transfusion orders. The hospital had had a high number of adverse events associated with patients’ need for irradiated blood. After the hospital implemented a better-designed blood ordering and administration process, errors were reduced to zero for well over 2 years. When that particular hospital introduced what I knew were poorly designed electronic blood orders, I predicted they’d have errors. Indeed, they had errors in the first week.

When you talk about information design and cognitive performance, people fail to appreciate how changing information, in what appear to be subtle ways, has a significant impact on how well they perform.

We’ve been busy designing and developing an electronic health record (EHR) system that is going to change the way physicians work and live.

CareCloud Charts has arrived.

Doctors are being squeezed like never before by increased workloads and decreased payments, which is making it difficult for them to provide top-notch care to their patients while still running a profitable practice.

We recognize that and created CareCloud Charts to help streamline the process and remove the hurdles providers face when delivering health care.

Health Care Streamlined
Our fully integrated EHR gives physicians a solution that works with every aspect of practice management, from scheduling and patient care all the way through billing and accounts receivable.

And because Charts runs in the cloud, healthcare providers can securely view their EHR, ePrescribe, share information, and order and review tests anywhere they have Internet access – on any browser and on any computer.

Designed for Doctors
Our engineers and designers spent countless hours in the field watching the way doctors work and customizing our system to fit that process. We’ve made sure our EHR will enhance the way physicians work, instead of slowing things down.

Physicians will only achieve Meaningful Use if they can meaningfully use their EHR software. According to MGMA, almost half of doctors using an EMR were unsatisfied with their current EMR system. We think that’s unacceptable.

That’s why we’re so excited to deliver you an EHR that we feel is light years ahead of everything else on the market today in design, integration and usability.

Diagnosing patients can be difficult, but using your EHR shouldn’t be.

Today, the excellent service CareCloud provides to a Miami-area medical practice was the subject of a full-length article in the Miami Herald’s Business Monday section.

Calling CareCloud “Healthcare’s helper,” reporter Joseph A. Mann Jr. highlighted how CareCloud’s web-based platform is efficiently managing the administrative workflow and billing tasks of Nephrology Associates of South Florida P.A.

The article touched on all of CareCloud’s software products for practice management, as well as its soon-to-be-launched electronic health record, but mostly spotlighted Nephrology Associates’ use of CareCloud Concierge, our complete revenue cycle management solution.

The practice administrator at Nephrology Associates, Madelyn Pardinas, was quoted extensively in the piece. She lauded the usability and attractiveness of the comprehensive CareCloud platform.

“The system is beautiful,” she said. “It’s incredibly easy to operate and very user friendly.”

“[CareCloud] does everything for us — office operations, insurance, collections, monthly statements to patients — everything except posting patients’ charges after each visit,” continued Ms. Pardinas. “It allows the practice to be so efficient and makes everything easy. I can see everything on a dashboard — it’s a snapshot of the practice.”

Ms. Pardinas also praised how CareCloud’s “customer service bends over backwards” for her staff members when they need assistance using the system.

The Herald story also reported on CareCloud’s rapid growth and job creation in a down economy. Founded in 2009, the company today has 110 employees and over 200 clients, representing around 1,000 physicians. CareCloud has secured over $20 million in venture capital.

Our CEO, Albert Santalo, founded CareCloud to give the healthcare industry new technological solutions to replace the outdated practice management systems found in most medical offices. As the Miami Herald pointed out, more and more doctors are purchasing CareCloud’s services to modernize their workflow, reduce paperwork and improve overall practice efficiency, as Nephrology Associates has.

“We take care of all the heavy lifting for physicians,” said Santalo, founder, president and CEO of CareCloud. “The idea is that doctors can practice medicine and focus on patients, and not have to worry about all the details related to their practices.”

You can read the Miami Herald’s story in its entirety here. Learn more about how CareCloud is revolutionizing health care through technology at www.carecloud.com.

The ability to adapt and evolve is the single most critical ability needed to become the strongest and longest lasting organism in any given ecosystem. In terms of technology, the more agile and lean your foundation is, the more quickly and efficiently you are able to release the features and enhancements you need to support your customers.

Many of the health IT systems available today have barely made a dent in increasing efficiency and reducing administrative waste in health care – why? I’d argue it’s because legacy vendors have lacked the ability to evolve with the needs and expectations of their users in a cost-effective way. So where do we go from here?

Consider this for a moment: Google’s search engine handles over 1 billion searches in a single given day. Millions of users have come to expect that every day Google will perform as well, if not better, than it did the day before – and rightly so. What a lot of people may not realize is that that Google is a company with more than 30,000 employees, a majority of whom work around the clock to improve its core product: search.

Google goes through constant enhancements, tweaks and modifications to ensure that it remains the king of search. If Google decided to deploy a new feature that would instantly make your search experience better, or if it had to modify its software to comply with the latest mandates from Washington, you wouldn’t worry about making sure you had the latest version of Google installed, or if the version you were using was compatible with the website you wanted to search.

Since Google hosts its applications on its own computing infrastructure, not the user’s, you auto-magically get any and all enhancements right away. No load times, no waiting to install updates, no going around all of the computers in your house or office to make sure that they’re running the latest version.  As we enter the digital age, cloud computing is quickly becoming the platform on which next-generation companies are building their foundations.

Cloud computing, otherwise known as Internet-based computing, enables companies to adopt systems that are continuously improving and able to adapt to market conditions in ways that provide the highest amount of value at the lowest available cost.

The same concept is now being applied to the software that physicians are deploying in their practices. With the Internet as the core platform, physicians will be able to rely on one single vendor to keep up with industry changes such as HIPAA 5010, Meaningful Use and ICD-10 and to improve their clinical, financial and administrative processes.

Unfortunately, many systems were designed to resist and inhibit change, both from a technological standpoint and from a user perspective. Because of this, I feel that companies who are simply trying to repurpose their flagship products and antiquated platforms will continue to struggle, burning through gobs of their clients’ hard-earned cash as they frantically try to evade the meteor showers from above.

 Mike Cuesta is Director of Marketing at CareCloud. Follow him on Twitter: @mikeatcarecloud