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HIStalk Interviews Laurie McGraw, CEO, Shareable Ink

January 15, 2014 Interviews 2 Comments

Laurie McGraw is president and CEO of Shareable Ink of Nashville, TN.

1-14-2014 12-27-26 PM

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve been in healthcare for 20 years. I started way back when at IDX in Burlington, Vermont. In the late ‘90s, they broke off a subsidiary called Channel Health. I was running development at the time. That got bought by Allscripts. I was part of the Allscripts team from 2000 up until the time that I left in January of last year. 

When I started at Allscripts, we had five customers doing the EMR. It was called EMR back then. When I left, it was a $1.5 billion company that was pretty large. Those 12 years were a blast, just an absolute blast for me. 

This past summer, I joined Shareable Ink. I am the CEO of Shareable Ink today. It is a young and vibrant company that was founded by a brilliant innovator named Steve Hau who took a common sense approach to doing clinical documentation.

Shareable Ink does clinical documentation and we do it really, really fast. We take existing paper forms, tag them, digitize them, and preserve workflows for physicians to document, Again, very efficiently, very fast. We have these analytic tools where people can get great insights from the data that they’ve put in and drive financial outcomes and quality improvements.

 

Part of the appeal of the digital ink option for data input was that CPOE adoption was pathetic and electronic physician documentation wasn’t common two or three years ago. Usage of those has improved. Is there still a need for an alternative form of input?

I think so. I’ve worked with physicians all these 20-plus years. I’ve been in front of hundreds of physicians, physician audiences from physician groups to hospitals to whatever. What I know is, physicians don’t hate technology. They don’t. They love technology.

But what they hate is they hate being slow. Everyone appreciates getting quality data at the point of care. They want all that information. They just hate being slow. 

With Shareable Ink, we can extend the investment that’s already been made in electronic health records, or we can just simply replace paper that still exists in lots of different places in the healthcare system. Just making that physician fast, it’s very valuable. People have already made significant investments in clinical technology, but when physicians are slow, there are a lot of things that need to be done to improve that for them.

 

Part of your value proposition is the concept of clinically rich documentation. Does the typical electronic medical record product support that?

Fundamentally, the answer is yes. Electronic health records — and I’ve worked on them for all 20 years — are good products. Whether it was ones that I had worked on previously or other companies who are putting out electronic health records, they’re fundamentally good products.

Where the electronic health record falls short for physicians, in terms of what I’ve seen, is where they start to slow the physician down. It doesn’t mirror workflows that previously worked, either in the paper world or in the newly adopted electronic world. That’s where I see the need to either augment or go back to workflows that were previously really fast.

I know I keep saying fast, fast, fast as a theme here. I say that because all of the benefits of electronic health records, everybody still wants them. Many, many organizations are achieving them. But they’re still falling short. Everything in healthcare is driving towards more need for data at the point of care. That’s where we’re focused.

 

Is it common for hospitals that have successfully implemented CPOE and clinical documentation for physicians to add a product like Shareable Ink or do they usually use it before they are ready to adopt those EMR tools?

It’s pretty rare that an organization is completely on paper. Usually Shareable Ink is in a place that is supplementing some already automated clinical workflows. We’re either extending an EHR investment that’s already been made by some specific workflows in a particular specialty or we’re replacing some existing paper forms that are still being used because those particular paper forms capture all the data in a really efficient manner for the clinician. 

For example, we do a lot of work in the area of anesthesia, where a lot of paper still exists. We’re replacing the paper. But in many other places, we are replacing paper where clinical technology already exists.

 

I made the observation when I interviewed Steve Hau four years ago that the higher you go up the specialization chain of physicians, the more reliant they are on very specific forms rather than the general documentation that an internist might us. What areas of the hospital are most reliant on those specialized forms that don’t translate well to an EMR?

A couple of years ago, I would have said specifically areas like cardiology or orthopedics or something of that nature. The discussions that I’m having today, it’s back to areas — surprisingly to me — like primary care, where, quite frankly, there’s a lot of documentation needs, but organizations are still needing to supplement what their primary care physicians are doing because the speed at which they need to document in the electronic health record isn’t fast enough because of the tools that they’re using. They’re going back to things like paper to supplement it and scanning it in, or they’re looking at hiring scribes to help those physicians meet their productivity objectives. 

The premise of “the more specialized you are, the more likely that there are paper forms to supplement that” … it’s not that that is not true, it’s just that there are more general areas like primary care where there still is a lot of paper because of the productivity needs of those clinicians.

 

Hospitals put in systems, find them to be a burden to productivity, and then come to you for an alternative?

Absolutely. There’s opportunity to extend that electronic health record. The investment has been made and everybody is driving their quality programs based on what they can get out of their electronic health records, but they have to also meet certain productivity objectives within their organization because the volumes for these physicians and clinicians are increasing. 

Shareable Ink can help expand an electronic health record in those areas where you hear of physician dissatisfaction with their electronic health records. That’s a pretty common complaint. The reason is rarely because they don’t believe in the electronic health record. It’s always because of the speed issues and the productivity issues or how they’re encumbered because of using the technology. They just feel it slows them down. I’ve heard this directly for such a long period of time.

 

Most of the new hospital EMR sales are by either Cerner or Epic. What are some examples of integrating the Shareable Ink offering into those products?

We can integrate through interfaces so we can provide data into those systems, whether they’re Cerner or Epic, in the hospital. We have partnerships with vendors like Allscripts, like Greenway, where we use their open APIs to send discrete data into the electronic health record. 

Those are ways that we can extend the electronic health record investments organizations have made with those vendors. We’ll be looking to do more extensions like that in the coming year.

 

For a company like Epic that hasn’t offered too many hooks into their application, what would be a functional view of an Epic hospital implementing Shareable Ink?

We’re exploring those workflows now. Shareable Ink is a young company, but where we’ve implemented today is in specific areas where we’re replacing paper forms that already exist. They go into a McKesson system, a Cerner system, through a document viewer within that other system. Shareable Ink preserves the view of the form that has been filled out as well as all of the discrete data that is under the covers of that paper form.

 

There’s a lot of richness involved with what you can write on a piece of paper, even including the way you write it, where you write it, or what you draw as a picture. Are people realizing that that sterility of a set of fields that are extracted into an electronic medical record may lose some of the patient context?

I think that is a problem. I think that is an issue. I believe Shareable Ink can help solve some of that by bringing some of that richness back.

I’ve seen the discussions and been in the discussions with physicians who feel like they’re looking at a SOAP note or a clinician note that may be complete, but it’s so sterile they’ve blocked all the nuances of the care that was provided to the patient. Can Shareable Ink help in that regard? Sure, it can help — but not necessarily in the same ways as speech – through different pictures or notations or things of that nature. But I don’t want to pretend for a second that getting to that specific discrete data is still incredibly important for all of the quality metrics and everything else that an organization’s trying to drive toward.

 

Can you hand forms that have been turned into Shareable Ink to someone with no training and turn them loose?

You can. It is a stretch to say no training. There is some training required, but it is simple training. 

With Shareable Ink, when clinicians adopt it, they are not clearing their schedules. They’re not reducing their patient volumes to then adopt this additional clinical technology. What they’re doing is taking some additional time. The paper metaphor or what they’re used to with a form — that’s the workflow that’s preserved. 

It’s already a workflow that they’re familiar with. Now they’re just doing it on an iPad, or that same form on an iPad, or they’re doing it with a digital pen.

 

How is Meaningful Use affecting your business?

I’m hoping that it will increase the need for tools from Shareable Ink because Meaningful Use means a whole lot of additional data is required at the point of care. Just simply voice recognition into blobs of text is not going to be enough in terms of all the data that’s required for Meaningful Use. 

Shareable Ink can provide that additional rich data at the point of care while still keeping that clinician very, very fast. I’m expecting Shareable Ink to again be a great addition in complement to the EHRs that are out there.

 

Do you have any final thoughts?

I’ve spent 20 years in healthcare. While it has been awesome in terms of paving the clinical information highway, today what I see is that we spend a lot of time on all of the challenges that are out there: adoption, physicians being slow, needing better data, the challenges of Meaningful Use and ICD 10. What all that points to is really the need for better data at the point of care. 

I am optimistic that what we’re doing at Shareable Ink in terms of providing that rich data at the point of care and by doing clinical documentation in a way that is fast and efficient for the physician that we’ll be able to deliver on the promise of data-driven healthcare.



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Currently there are "2 comments" on this Article:

  1. She couldn’t come up with even one example of where this could be applied in a health system that has Epic — doesn’t sound promising. This company could have succeeded 10 years ago, but not today.

  2. At the end of the day, you’re still documenting on paper (special paper on top of that!), which in a drug trial would be considered “source” and held to a higher standard than that electronic copy. I assume these paper charts must be archived or shredded — wouldn’t that add to the overhead of such solution? Having studied the ED workflow and those dense forms for several years, I do agree that this is fastest and least disruptive approach. No argument there. But Shareable Ink is just building on the Anoto digital pen and paper technology has been around for a long time and there are several companies using it in healthcare and trials. Respectfully, I don’t get the “innovation” claim.







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