Dayton startup pilots app for physicians

A Dayton startup is piloting new medical record software at local doctors offices with plans to fully launch in 2019.

Pomiet’s software, called Healthii, is an app intended to be a better way for primary care physicians to gather health record data when caring for patients with chronic conditions.

Challenges with electronic health care record keeping are often cited by providers as a top reason for feeling burnt out.

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Healthii is intended to make interactions more personable so record keeping doesn’t take away time with the patient. The software gives questions that guide a face-to-face conversation between the provider and patient.

“Many times you are looking at a health care provider that may even have their back to you as they are typing in their data in their input and it turns into more of an interview or an interrogation than a meaningful conversation,” said Stacy Sheldon, president and co-founder of Pomiet and Healthii.

Pomiet started in 2011 and moved toward health care in 2014. The company is switching from doing custom work to being a product company, with Healthii as its inaugural product.

Pomiet, now with three employees, was also just named a Top 10 Healthcare Start-up for 2018 by Healthcare Tech Outlook, a trade magazine.

The startup signed a deal with Athenahealth, an electronic health record, to sell the Healthii app on the company’s marketplace when the app launches in 2019.

Pomiet is working on a pilot program with Providence Medical Group, an independent physician network in the Dayton region.

Patty Staiger, clinical care manager with Providence, said the program will help with patient engagement and it lowers the burden of all the documentation that the providers have to do.

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Most provider groups have at least some of their pay tied to performance. Government and commercial insurers have been building models that give bonuses for quality or penalize for bad outcomes, but these payment models require more data keeping than models where straight fees are paid for services.

But surveys have found physicians are increasingly tethered to computers, with some studies finding physicians spending over half of their day logging data.

Providence is part of a value-based primary care model Comprehensive Primary Care Plus, which rewards better patient outcomes, but to meet those benchmarks, data is needed to identify health risks, coordinate care and track outcomes. Staiger said Healthii will help the practice track data in an easier manner.

“There’s certain criteria we have to meet in doing care management and some of the things we are required to do have been difficult to try to figure out how to implement,” she said. “The product they are developing is really going to help us do what we need to do with less burden on us.”

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