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Healthcare

Austin Software Foundry has spent the last ten years focused exclusively on the application of information technology to the business of healthcare. We have defined a process and system architecture for our healthcare clients that combines and transforms financial and clinical healthcare data into actionable information.

The core of this architecture is a standardized and highly structured database of healthcare information based on the HIPAA and HL7 standards, and the associated processes to extract and transform data from any operational system. Austin Software Foundry then supplies analytical tools to access, analyze and act upon the information in this database. To date, systems designed by Austin Software Foundry have been used to produce results for approximately 100 medical practices representing more than 500 physicians, with total annual collections that exceed $500 million.

Austin Software Foundry's healthcare solutions currently are focused on solving three significant problems faced by the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries:

The detrimental combination of falling healthcare reimbursement rates (paid by insurance companies to healthcare providers) and rising costs of delivering healthcare to patients. 

Healthcare providers are being compensated at their lowest levels in years; insurance premiums are increasing at exponential rates. Patients are receiving less benefit coverage and paying more healthcare expenses out of their own pockets.

Austin Software Foundry's clients have been able to significantly improve their financial performances in the face of these alarming trends. The average three-physican medical practice -- with total annual collections of $2.25 million per year -- has been able to find between $300,000 and $700,000 in lost (uncollected) revenue using ASF's solutions to identify problems with insurance reimbursements, late-paid or underpaid claims.

The exploding cost and time required to identify patients for participation in clinical trials. 

Currently, 90 percent of all clinical trials, conducted as part of the pharmaceutical research and development process, are estimated to be behind schedule. This is largely due to patient recruitment and retention problems.

The use of ASF's healthcare business-intelligence platform alters the process of patient screening and identification. The availability of detailed, standardized information from financial and clinical data sources allows researchers to quickly and accurately identify patients as potential subjects for clinical trials. The result is a 50 percent to 75 percent reduction in both the time and direct cost of patient identification. This is in addition to the more significant impact of getting drugs to market faster.

The need to securely exchange medical information between healthcare providers, healthcare insurers and patients.

The benefits of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs), Community Health Information Networks (CHINs) often are claimed to include:

• reduction of medical errors caused by lack of complete medical histories;
• reduced healthcare costs by eliminating paper-based records costs, duplicated tests, etc.;
• improved medical care in emergency situations;
• improved coordination of healthcare information for public health issues;
• wider delivery of healthcare via tele-health mechanisms; and
• improved efficiency of healthcare providers.

The obstacles to achieving these and other benefits are significant. Possibly one of the most challenging obstacles is that almost 60 percent of the 800,000 physicians in the Unites States practice in small groups. These small group practices are where the majority of a patient's medical history originates. Until a large proportion of these small group practices can collect and store medical information in a standard electronic format, and have the ability to transmit and receive medical data in standard electronic formats, HIEs cannot hope to deliver even a fraction of their claimed benefits.

ASF's healthcare business intelligence platform can provide small group practices with the equivalent of a multi-million dollar healthcare information system. Austin Software Foundry has designed and built its platform using widely available and mature open-source technology to eliminate the prohibitive licensing costs associated with traditional, proprietary healthcare information system solutions. Additionally, ASF has built its platform to be minimally invasive; it causes little or no disruption to existing billing systems, practice management systems or electronic health record systems.