An Inside Look at Net Health Systems Inc.

An interview with Christopher Hayes, chief technology officer.   Today’s Wound Clinic (TWC): How long have you been in wound care, and how did you enter this area of healthcare?   Christopher Hayes (CH): I started with Net Health as an intern in the late 1990s and joined the company full time as the lead software developer on the WoundExpert software shortly thereafter.   I’ve spent my entire professional career focused on making WoundExpert the most effective electronic medical record in the wound care space.   I was the lead developer for nearly 10 years, giving me a very clear understanding of how we’ve grown to meet the needs of this industry and of the clinicians who make such a difference in their patients’ lives.   TWC: What’s your day-to-day role?   CH: As the chief technology officer, I am responsible for ensuring that what we are developing will meet the evolving needs of the marketplace.   I spend my time meeting with current clients to understand how WoundExpert ties into their daily workflow; I meet with prospective customers to learn what issues they’re facing and to better understand how our product can grow; and I meet with leaders in the industry to hear their opinions about regulations, workflows, and best practices for wound clinics.   These conversations with clinicians, nurses, physicians, and program directors help ensure that every release of our product and every new feature is developed with the goals of improving clinical documentation, creating more efficient data entry, and empowering our hospital partners with better reporting capabilities.   TWC: What do you find most rewarding about providing for your industry?   CH: Our industry is filled with compassionate people who are serving patients whose lives have been completely interrupted.   It is incredibly rewarding to help find ways to make their jobs easier – to ease their concerns about joint commission and reimbursement, to empower them to be able to track their own success, and to support their existing workflow - all with the express goal of allowing them to focus on patients.   TWC: How would you describe the overall mission of your company?   CH: Our mission is to provide operating excellence and innovation with a proven ability to meet and exceed client expectations.   We have a very strong culture at Net Health, and as we grow we are careful to maintain our core values. We encourage innovation in the way we think, compete, collaborate and act; we believe in a healthy mixture of home, community, and profession; we push for experiences that offer growth and reward intelligent risk-taking; and we strive for accountability, responsiveness, and dedication.   We spend a great deal of time finding the right people for the right jobs. We work with all new employees (at every level) to help them understand their own strengths and to provide outlets to ensure that they are maximizing those strengths in their current positions – each employee develops a personal mission, vision, and values statement and has “accountability partners” to help encourage them throughout the year.   We have also designed all of the company’s artwork, which makes for a unique experience when visiting our Pittsburgh headquarters.   For example, we have a Lichtenstein-style piece that depicts a nurse saying, “WoundExpert is better than Hot Fudge!”   TWC: What’s new with your company in 2012?   CH: On the developmental front, we’re really excited about our new physician console.   This user interface is specifically designed for physicians to help reduce their documentation time while effectively supporting billing and medical documentation needs.   We worked with a wide range of physicians to fully understand the scope of their needs and determined that we needed to allow our physicians to have a personally configured workflow to ensure that WoundExpert is efficient for each of them.   We’re in beta testing now, and the feedback has been phenomenal.   We’re also very focused on further expanding our Wound Product Supplier Module this year. We just announced seven new vendors in WoundExpert, and we continue to work with other durable medical equipment (DME) providers with the goal of all Wound Product Supply orders flowing from WoundExpert to effectively end the faxing inefficiencies. The mutual benefit to both our clinics and to the DME providers makes us very proud and excited to expand this connection.   TWC: How is your company unique?   CH: Our culture certainly sets us apart. By focusing on our employees’ growth, we create an environment where team members can provide our clients with an exceptional experience. Each individual knows he/she has strengths that can magnify the whole, and that is unique as well.   WoundExpert is highly configured for each wound clinic to meet the way that they work best – we don’t define how they should provide care, and we don’t re-create the paper-chart environment. Instead, we ensure that our product seamlessly integrates with a hospital’s existing workflow – and each hospital is unique, much like our employees. In both cases, with our employees and with the clinics, we’re empowering people to do what they know best – we’re just providing the tools to make that easier.   TWC: Why are you passionate about the work of your company?   CH: I love knowing that we’re allowing wound clinics to harness otherwise unavailable information to help make better decisions.   With paper records it would be nearly impossible to closely analyze each wound to determine if it is an outlier and a new intervention is needed, or to discover that your healing rate is above others in your peer group.   It sounds trite, but in this case it is completely true that information is power. Our clinics have done a great job of embracing all this information that is at their fingertips and making a positive difference in patients’ lives every day.   TWC: How is your company approaching challenges in wound care?   CH: Changes in reimbursement are a big concern for wound clinics right now. Through our robust reporting we’re helping them to see that they’re performing well, and to turn that high performance into accurate, timely reimbursement.   WoundExpert is helping each of the medical directors and program directors prove the value of their wound clinic to hospital management.   We’re also excited to help clinics understand when advanced therapies are needed. This is a direct result of our real-time clinical decision support and advanced reporting functionality. Clinicians can easily determine when a wound is not healing at an acceptable rate and make the decision to proceed with advanced therapies.   TWC: What are your most popular products and/or services?   CH: WoundExpert offers outpatient wound clinics; dynamic, real-time collection; analysis; and visualization of a wound care clinic’s success.   We offer the most complete clinical dataset and benchmarking solution for wound management, supporting a 100 percent paperless patient record.   Because our software is configurable to the facility’s needs, integration with existing hospital systems is easy and cost-effective. This combination of reporting, benchmarking, configurability, and integration is what our clients find most appealing.   And, our clients really do get emotional about how this product has changed their lives, as evidenced by our aforementioned Lichtenstein-style artwork.   TWC: How do you ensure proper training on products and services?   CH: We are dedicated to ensuring that WoundExpert fits into a wound clinic’s workflow.   To make that happen, WoundExpert trainers are onsite with our customers, in their clinics, working with them side-by-side.   This isn’t something we think is negotiable – we provide this extra level of service because we strongly believe these clinicians, these physicians, these program directors are experts at what they do and our team simply needs to help integrate their customized WoundExpert into their operations.   TWC: What are the future goals for you and your company?   CH: We really want to provide more time for nurses and physicians to be with their patients.   We know that the end game is 100 percent to enhance patient care. Every new advance we make to WoundExpert has that as the underlying goal.   Of course, we believe that by giving more time to medical teams we are by default allowing them to improve their outcomes.   What else could we really hope for as we continue to grow? For more info on the WoundExpert or the company Net Health Systems Inc., call 800-411-6281 (option 2), visit www.woundexpert.com or email feedback@woundexpert.com.