Tim Smelcer has lived through every parent’s nightmare.
From the day his son Ethan was born, something wasn’t right. Neutropenia, colic, sleeplessness, hearing loss – the range of symptoms Ethan experienced led Tim and his wife Nancy to seek one specialist after another. While some of the most celebrated physicians in the one of the most advanced medical regions in the nation dismissed or could not diagnose the symptoms, none of the diagnoses seemed to make a difference.
The problem wasn’t with the physicians Tim and his wife consulted. The challenge was that each physician was working in an information “silo” of their own specialty – without the ability to compare information each of the other physicians had gained. Not until Johns Hopkins got involved with the use of their GE Healthcare Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system Centricity® did doctors have the ability to collaborate and diagnose Ethan’s illness, which turned out to be cytomegalovirus, or CMV.
Today, Ethan is a bubbly, bouncing three-year old with a healthy future in front of him. Tim Smelcer’s future looks to be on a good path as well. It’s a journey that has him confident he can help other parents avoid the nightmare he and his family lived through in bringing Ethan back to health.
Today, Tim is the CEO of Redbird Technology. Driven by his experience with the healthcare system, Redbird Technology today is focused on making it easy, efficient and inexpensive for individual physicians and small practices to use the Centricity system to connect their practices with other hospitals and other physicians and practices. By offering the ability to review each patient’s file comprehensively, the idea is to be able to develop more accurate diagnoses and more effective treatment plans, more efficiently.
It’s a goal that has the support of the U. S. Government behind it. The HITECH Act provides incentive payments of $44,000 to $63,750 for physicians to implement a government certified EMR system. One of the largest of those suppliers is GE Healthcare, whose Centricity system is already at work for some of the largest health provider organizations nationwide.
For individual physicians, though, the cost of incorporating a system like Centricity (in the realm of $500,000) is too much for an individual or small practice to bear. And many hospital systems are loath to share information.
That’s where Tim Smelcer’s big idea comes in. After months of studying his plan for Redbird Technology to provide Centricity services through “the cloud” to physicians at a fraction of the cost to own it, GE Healthcare has agreed to partner with his company. It’s one of the few partnerships of its kind nationwide that GE has agreed to support.
For physicians, this “Software As A Service” (SAAS) technology allows practices to use the Centricity EMR system without any hardware purchases or software to install. They simply access it through the Internet.
“There are many EMR management systems out there,” Smelcer says, “but none with the kinds of capabilities Centricity offers. Now that’s available for individual and smaller practices as well.”
While electronic medical record keeping is here to stay, the financial incentives that the HITECH Act offers individual physicians will only last until December of 2012. After that, the cost to incorporate these potentially lifesaving advancements doesn’t necessarily go up, but the incentives to make the switch early do go away.
For Tim Smelcer, the urgency for physicians to connect electronically is more than a business opportunit.
“I see it as a way to help other parents avoid seeing any child of theirs in distress. I’ve been there. It doesn’t have to be that way. This is bigger than business for me. It’s personal,” he says.
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