Healthcare Matters

For those of you with experience caring for an elderly or chronically ill family member, listen up. Kinergy Health brings family members, doctors, and professional caregivers together in a private, secure online community where they can share and respond to up-to-date information, coordinate plans, and collaborate to assure that the patient is always receiving timely and appropriate care.  It simplifies the role of the family caregiver and improves the efficiency and effectiveness of everyone involved in the process.

What a great idea!

The Advisory Board today announced Kinergy as winner of its “Patient Engagement Blue Button Challenge.” David Chao, Chief Technology Officer for Crimson at The Advisory Board Company, made the announcement at the Health 2.0 6th Annual Fall Conference in San Francisco just yesterday.

The winning solution, “MyKinergy,” is a SaaS-based service allowing health care providers to rapidly deploy patient-centered care models. “Blue Button” is a Web-based feature through which patients may easily and securely download their health information from doctors, insurers, pharmacies and other health-related services and share it with health care providers, caregivers, and others they trust. The Blue Button appears on the patient portals of more than one-third of U.S. hospitals. Patients using the MyKinergy service are able to download Blue Button information and share it with their providers and caregivers along with medical history, care plans, medication lists, and other information in their secure MyKinergy account.

Each of the five finalists was paired with an Advisory Board member for a trial of their solution.  Kinergy Health was paired with Lynchburg Internal Medicine, a member of the Centra Medical Group.  All finalists were judged on three criteria: basic functionality and security; the ease of accessing, updating and sharing patient information for both patients and providers; and ease with which that information is integrating into the clinical setting.

Kinergy Health was recognized for identifying a highly-effective driver of real-world patient uptake: enabling the physician to convincingly articulate the value of Blue Button to the patient.  This resulted in an unexpectedly high percentage of Medicare patients returning home, registering, and sharing their Blue Button data with health care providers.  According to Aneesh Chopra, Senior Advisor, The Advisory Board Company, “Kinergy outperformed our other high quality finalists on its ability to engage patients and the medical staff, resulting in a level of trust that led providers to actively encourage patients to enroll.”

“We created Kinergy to enable patients, their family members, and all of the providers and care givers involved in their care to communicate and collaborate,” said Gail Embt, Kinergy Health CEO and Founder.  “By having a single secure place on the web where everyone involved can see and update history, test results, care plans, medication lists, and other information, providers are able to deliver better care more efficiently, and family members gain peace of mind knowing that their loved one is receiving the care they deserve.”

Again, what a great idea –and what a well-conceived form of recognition put together by the Advisory Group.

Source: PRNewswire

—Tom Finn