Most recently CEO of Alere Health, LLC, Underwood brings over 22 years of healthcare software executive experience to Sandata, including building healthcare technology start-ups and leading large public companies. Alere Health is a $500 million subsidiary of Alere Inc. (NYSE: ALR). The Atlanta-based subsidiary provides health management services incorporating in-home monitoring devices for medium and high-risk patients.

Prior to becoming CEO, Underwood held the roles of President of the Technology Solutions Division and Chief Information Officer. He arrived at Alere through its merger with Matria Healthcare where he was President and Chief Operating Officer. Before Matria, he spent the earlier part of his career in various executive roles including President of Global Shared Services for First Consulting Group and President and CEO of Paragon Solutions.

“I am looking forward to this exciting opportunity and couldn’t be happier to join the outstanding team of people at Sandata,” Underwood was quoted in a company release. “As the clear market leader in home health care with a compelling value proposition for home health providers, state governments and managed care payors, Sandata is in the early stages of capturing an enormous market opportunity. My focus will be to continue to enhance our strategy of decreasing fraud, abuse and waste for state government and Medicaid managed care organizations and providing state of the art technology solutions for home care providers. I am excited to build on Sandata’s reputation of providing quality solutions and excellent service to all our customers.”

“We are excited to have Tom join Sandata as CEO to further build on our leadership position providing technology solutions to the home healthcare industry,” added Bert E. Brodsky, Sandata founder and Chairman. “Tom’s industry and senior leadership success will be a tremendous asset to our customers and our organization.”

“Tom’s proven leadership skills, domain expertise and track record of building innovative, rapidly growing healthcare and technology companies, coupled with Sandata’s dominant leadership position and strong management team, provide a solid foundation to accelerate the Company’s momentum,” said Ken Fox, Managing Partner of Stripes Group. Founded in 2003 and based in New York, Stripes Group is a private investment firm focused on growth stage minority and majority investments in rapidly growing and profitable Internet, software-as-a-service, technology-enabled services and consumer products companies. Stripes Group acquired a minority ownership position in Sandata in March, 2010. Ken Fox also sits on the Sandata board.

Ms. Pure comes to the Ozark, Missouri-based long term and post-acute care (LTPAC) technology developer as part of a growth equity investment in HealthMEDX by Spectrum Equity Investors and Trident Capital. The new partners will own a majority interest in the company. As part of the transaction, Jim Quagliaroli and Steve LeSieur of Spectrum Equity, Arneek Multani and John Reardon of Trident Capital, and Ms. Pure will join HealthMEDX’s board of directors.

With Ms. Pure, Vince Estrada, former SVP Business Development and CFO of Visicu, Inc. will join as EVP of Business Development and Chief Financial Officer. HealthMEDX Co-Founder Charlie Daniels will remain as President and Co-Founder Dan Cobb will remain as Chief Technology Officer. Co-Founder Jim Atteberry will move from CEO to a new role as Strategic Advisor.

CEO’s story: from McKesson to caregiver to HealthMEDX
We spoke with Ms. Pure this week to ask about the process that brought her to this new position and her plans for HealthMEDX. After leaving McKesson, Pamela Pure was going to take a year off to spend time with her family and do some traveling but events — including a father-in-law’s heart attack right in her driveway — caused her to spend that time as a full-time family caregiver instead. In succession, she brought three different parents, hers and her husband’s, into her home.

“I was a healthcare executive but I found out that does not prepare you to serve from the other side of the equation,” she said. “I was impressed with the whole post-acute world so much, it inspired me to write a business plan about what could be done to improve it.”

Once her family members were living on their own again, Ms. Pure joined a private equity firm. Her goal was to find a company to manage in order to use its technology as the basis for her post-acute care plan. After looking at twenty companies, she found HealthMEDX, with its origins in long term care, to be unique. “Its medical system allows post-acute providers to follow a patient from one care setting to another with a single patient record and offer integrated billing across that spectrum,” she explained to HCTR.
“There is a great culture here, a great team, and they have been growing dramatically.”

She added that she has long known that even the leadership at the home care division of her former company, based in neighboring Springfield, has always shared a mutual respect with the HealthMEDX founders. “Chris Dollar and his predecessors Craig Frazier and Billie Waldo always spoke highly of Charlie, Dan and Jim,” she said.

Post-acute care will be key
“Post-acute providers are becoming strategic players in the healthcare delivery system,” Ms. Pure was quoted in a prepared HealthMEDX statement. “They serve as the cornerstone of care for senior Americans recovering from significant health incidents, for frail and elderly people requiring ongoing management, and for the millions of people working to manage chronic conditions. HealthMEDX provides a highly differentiated technology platform to facilitate organized, proactive post-acute care delivery.  The system design inspires team-based care and can provide health systems and post-acute providers with the tools required to align incentives and foster collaborative care. Working with a world-class management team and two outstanding financial partners, we will continue to expand and augment the platform to enable long term and post-acute organizations to prepare for value based payment, support blended payment and actively participate in Accountable Care Organizations.”

It would seem from our conversation with her that she intends to stand behind those words as she eases into her new role. Look for HealthMEDX to move into a supportive role for its software customers that are heeding the call to take an active part in the movement toward coordinate post-acute care. “Sharing patient data across the care continuum, proactively moving patients to the proper locale — which is always the lowest cost locale for which they are appropriate — and managing chronic conditions to achieve improved quality of life, not just to reduce avoidable hospital admissions. These are healthcare’s goals for a future that has already started,” she concluded.

HealthMEDX Co-Founder and President Charlie Daniels could not agree more, “HealthMEDX works with skilled nursing facilities, continuing care retirement communities, home care organizations, rehab centers and hospice providers who aspire to use technology to increase quality of care, improve patient safety, reduce costs and dramatically impact the patient experience. As many LTPAC providers are diversifying, we see home care agencies expanding their service offerings to provide rehab and hospice services and many skilled nursing facilities are acquiring home care agencies. The HealthMEDX platform is uniquely designed for our customers who are extending their reach.”

Commenting on the Spectrum and Trident investment, Daniels added, “This transaction will support our efforts to rapidly expand our footprint. Pam’s experience in delivering innovative solutions to large and small health systems and managing growth in evolving markets will be a great asset to the team.” The company release said that the transaction provides liquidity to the Company’s founders, as well as access to additional capital for investment in new products and future acquisitions. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Investors understand post-acute importance
Arneek Multani, Senior Managing Director of Trident Capital, added, “We are excited to invest in a company that is addressing the needs of patients and providers in one of the fastest growing areas of healthcare. The long term and post-acute care continuum is an essential and growing component of healthcare delivery. We are excited to partner with Spectrum, Pam, Vince and the team at HealthMEDX.”

Spectrum and Trident were advised by Brian Lenihan and Rees Hawkins of Choate Hall & Stewart LLP.  HealthMEDX was advised by Dennis Gallitano and Robin Bergman of Gallitano & O’Connor LLP.

About HealthMEDX
HealthMEDX offers an interoperable SaaS platform to skilled nursing, assisted living and independent living facilities; continuing care retirement communities and rehabilitation centers; and to private duty home care, certified home care and hospice providers with a software application that supports integrating them all. The HealthMEDX Vision Platform is currently used in more than 3,000 locations across the country.

About Spectrum Equity Investors
Spectrum Equity Investors is a private equity firm focused on investing in growth businesses.  Spectrum’s current and historical healthcare investments of note include Passport Health Communications, a provider of patient access solutions for hospitals and physicians; and QTC Management, the nation’s largest provider of outsourced disability evaluations (acquired by Lockheed Martin). Spectrum has been an active investor in software and information service providers including iPay Technologies (acquired by Jack Henry & Associates), RiskMetrics Group (acquired by MSCI), Seisint (acquired by LexisNexis/Reed Elsevier), and World-Check (acquired by Thomson Reuters), as well as digital media franchises including Ancestry.com (NASDAQ: ACOM), Demand Media (NYSE: DMD), NetQuote (acquired by Bankrate), Seamless, and SurveyMonkey. Founded in 1994 with offices in Boston and Menlo Park, Spectrum has raised $4.7 billion in capital across six funds.

About Trident Capital
Trident Capital is a leading venture capital firm with more than $1.9 billion of capital under management, including its most recent fund, Trident Capital Fund VII. Trident invests in software, internet and business services companies across multiple stages, from startup to growth equity. The firm has helped build large numbers of successful companies within its areas of focus since firm inception in 1993. Trident is broadly recognized as one of the leading investors in cloud computing, IT security, health care IT, online advertising and outsourcing. Current and former health care IT investments include: Acclaris, a SaaS based software platform and services company that manages the administration of employee reimbursement accounts, including consumer directed healthcare accounts; Advanced ICU Care, a telemedicine company focused on delivering outsourced intensive care to hospitals; Teladoc, a telemedicine company that provides patient care through a nationwide network of board-certified doctors; Resolution Health, a health care informatics company (NYSE: WLP); and Chamberlin Edmonds, a revenue cycle management company focused on eligibility management (acquired by Charterhouse Group and MTS Health Investors).

www.healthmedx.com

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Pereira was CEO of Healthcare-Automation, a Home IV software vendor, and Advantage Reimbursement Inc., a billing services company, until he sold both companies to Mediware in late 2009. Mediware created a business unit, Alternate Care Solutions, to manage and promote Healthcare-Automation products HomecareNet® and HomecareNet® Mobile, the billing services and a previous acquisition, Ascend™ Specialty Pharmacy. CareCentric will be added to that group, which is led by Pereira.

“This is a great acquisition,” Pereira told us. “It gives us the ability to expand from Home IV software, where we were already strong, to Home Medical Equipment (HME) and Home Nursing.”

CareCentric, whose long and bumpy history as InfoMed and as Simione Central Software Holdings we detailed last week (Mediware Completes Acquisition of CareCentric), had been on an acquisition spree of its own before CEO John Festa was replaced by Darryl Young, who had been called out of retirement by the CareCentric board to try to turn the company around. Longtime HCTR readers will remember that the first thing Young did was cancel the company’s appearance at two 2008 conventions, NAHC and MedTrade.

Under Festa, CareCentric acquired HME software vendors Dezine Systems and MestaMed and launched two failed attempts to replace the company’s legacy, UNIX-based home nursing software application, STAT, with a Windows product. Young changed directions, declared an end to the acquisition era, and created the patient-centric, .NET and SQL system they dubbed Caretinuum. CareCentric was in the process of converting HME and home nursing customers from MestaMed and STAT to Caretinuum when Young departed in anticipation of the Mediware acquisition.

Customer relations with experienced staff, wearing kid gloves

“We
know what it is like from the customer perspective to watch one’s software vendor being acquired by a new owner,” Pereira said. “My team has had a lot of experience with that situation, though, so we knew what to do. We called, or visited in person, every CareCentric customer to explain our plans to them. We told them there is no rush to move from any legacy products that are working for them and that the upgrade path to newer CareCentric products is what they can continue to prepare for if that is what they prefer.”

Pereira was referring to his experience as Healthcare-Automation CEO. He had sold the company he founded but later found it necessary to buy it back. During that second tenure, his development team created a Windows application to replace the DOS-based software that he found still in use
upon his return. The smoothness of upgrading every customer from DOS to Windows without losing any was a testament to his team’s ability to service and reassure customers, Pereira belives.

“MestaMed customers wanted to know that no one was going to pull plug on them,” he continued. “Prior to the acquisition, CareCentric had actually been pushing them fairly quickly onto the Caretinuum platform. We assured them we would slow that down and give them all the time they needed to make adjustments and be fully prepared.”

While not every CareCentric employee could be kept, Pereira said, Mediware was able to retain key development, management and support staff. What’s more, they will be moved into new, more modern offices but will not have to relocate. CareCentric’s Atlanta personnel will move in with another Atlanta-based Mediware subsidiary and the MestaMed staff in Pittsburgh will also get new digs.

“I know we have a big job ahead of us,” Pereira concluded. “At the end, we will be a strong company with multiple product offerings but a single patient intake system for home nursing, home medical equipment and home IV, plus the support of a large, publicly-traded company that is committed to our success.”

Apparently someone had an interest in our knowing about the lawsuit.

The suit claims that HomecareCRM, the Atlanta-based software company, infringed on HMS intellectual property rights, which HomecareCRM flatly denies. On Wednesday, June 22, HomecareCRM released the following statement:

“Recently, many home health providers and the media received an email
referencing a lawsuit filed by Health Market Science, Inc. (HMS) against
HomecareCRM over the use of data which HMS asserts to be their exclusive
property. HomecareCRM believes that the allegations in the lawsuit are
unfounded.  HomecareCRM has never used data that belongs to HMS in any
of its offered products or solutions. The suspect nature of the lawsuit
is exemplified by the fact that an unnamed entity used an anonymous
e-mail distribution service to create the illusion that the allegations
in the complaint were a legitimate news story. HomecareCRM intends to
protect its clients from false information, regardless of the source.”

Health Market Science provides market research data to hospitals and other healthcare providers, including Amedisys, a multi-state home health care corporation. HomecareCRM recently won the contract to provide its Customer Relationship Management software to Amedisys. (See Home Care Technology Report, 4/27/11, “HomecareCRM Inks Deal with Amedisys to Provide Sales Support Software“)

To substantiate the allegations, HMS would not have to prove that HomecareCRM incorporated HMS data into its software, with Amedisys permission and for the convenience of Amedisys. That would not be an infringement since Amedisys pays to use HMS data for its own internal purposes. It would have to prove that HomecareCRM then took that HMS data to other customers. That is the accusation that HomecareCRM asserts is false and frivolous.

Interestingly enough, a careful reading of the complaint fails to find a direct claim by HMS that HomecareCRM did take its data outside Amedisys walls. There is an implication that it could, now that it has used that data for Amedisys inside its own software, but not that it actually did.

We will continue to attempt to reach HMS to find out what “HomeCareNews@vistomail.com” is. The attorney who filed the lawsuit has already told us she has no idea who may be using that email address. Watch future issues to see what we have been able to learn.

The company said it will dispense with the CareCentric name and assign its products and customers to its Alternate Care Solutions (ACS) product line, formed following last year’s acquisition of Healthcare Automation Inc. and Advantage Reimbursement Inc. and the November 2008 acquisition of Hann’s On Software.

ACS already supports almost 400 customer facilities with software for home medical equipment, home health, home infusion, specialty pharmacy and other outpatient care providers. “Through Mediware’s ACS product line we are dedicating business, healthcare and technology resources to develop and deliver the industry’s most comprehensive software solutions,” said Thomas Mann, Mediware’s president and chief executive officer. “We believe this segment of healthcare shows immense promise. The nation’s population continues to age and we believe the use of home and outpatient-based care will increase. Providing these services outside the hospital is more cost effective and is simply more appealing to patients. As these services expand, we believe the demand for safe and efficient care management systems will increase.”

Mediware’s Alternate Care Solutions group is led by Mr. Ken Pereira, who was formerly the CEO of Healthcare Automation. Mr. Pereira and the Mediware ACS team met with customers, prospects and partners during MedTrade’s recent conference in Las Vegas.

About Mediware
Mediware delivers interoperable software systems that support care processes and cost efficiencies for healthcare organizations. Core Mediware solutions include blood management technologies for hospitals and blood centers; medication management solutions for hospitals, behavioral health facilities, infusion and specialty pharmacy providers; and business intelligence-based performance management solutions for clinical, regulatory and financial aspects of the broader healthcare market. www.mediware.com.

About CareCentric
Following the firing of top executives four years ago and the arrival of CEO Darryl Young, the 40-year old software company reinvented itself as a continuum of care solutions provider. Products once known as MestaMed, Dezine (HME), STAT and AcCura (home health) were conflated into “Caretinuum” last year. Under Young, years of growth through acquisition (MestaMed, UltraBridge, Alternative Billing Solutions) gave way to a focus on solving product and customer satisfaction problems. (See our interview with Darryl Young from December, 2008, in which he frankly and in shocking language explains his assignment was to turn around the company with the worst customer relations reputation in home care and why he decided to skip back to back annual NAHC and MedTrade meetings and hang an “under construction” sign from the ceiling over the empty CareCentric booth area instead.)

Originally known as InfoMed, the Atlanta company made its name in home care with one product, STAT, which it had bought from HBOC (now McKesson) long before HBOC acquired its way into the home care software business. InfoMed had a short-lived but closely watched merger with Simione Consultants and the troubled Central Health Management Services, Inc., when it was temporarily knows as Simione Central Holdings, Inc.

After separating from Simione and acquiring the assets of a failing startup home care point-of-care software developer, it took that company’s name as its own and has been known as CareCentric ever since. At about the same time, primary CareCentric investor John Reed, Chairman of Mestek, Inc., an HVAC manufacturing company based in Westfield, Massachusetts, took the public company private and assigned MesTek subsidiary MestaMed to CareCentric.

Care Innovations came to life this year as a separate company formed by a joint venture between GE and Intel. Headquartered near Sacramento in Roseville, California, the new company inherited from its parents the “Intel Health Guide,” a tabletop vital sign monitor and two-way telehealth communication device, as its first product. We spoke with Aaron Duerksen, General Manager of Disease Management, to find out what plans Care Innovations has for the product.

He immediately couched the discussion in terms of the industry’s need to prepare for the rise of Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), which have already begun to form in communities around the county in preparation for next year’s demonstration projects.
“We will be moving away from ‘purpose-built’ devices, such as our Intel Health Guide,” he explained, “and toward medical apps.”

Flexibility for providers and patients is the goal of developing software that can run on various devices instead of designing, manufacturing and marketing one proprietary device with medical software embedded. Duerksen calls it piquing and sustaining patient engagement.

The first product will be dubbed simply “The Guide.” Essentially the software currently driving the Intel Health Guide tabletop device, it will run on any Win7 platform, allowing providers to offer devices that best fit each patient’s needs.

“This way, we can empower people to make their own decisions for their own health,” Duerksen told us. “With The Guide, patients move to the center of their own care planning and management, or at least become key players in this new model we’re calling “participatory healthcare,” which is already developing in off-site care service delivery.”

Whereas the Intel Health Guide is a physician-prescribed device, with hospitals, medical practices, home care agencies or even payers installing it in the home and monitoring vital sign data elsewhere, The Guide allows patients to choose the apps that they need — from a menu still under development — as well as select a monitoring service from a range of outsourced entities.

Duersken explained that Care Innovations itself will suggest monitoring service partners to hospitals or other healthcare entities if they do not have or cannot allocate staff of their own to monitor patient data gathered from The Guide. As one example: self-insured employers may contract with an outsource sub-contractor to provide remote patient monitoring and tracking services for employees with chronic conditions.

“Developers of The Guide were able to focus on innovations within the application side instead of on the hardware device side, which is of value to patients or customers in several ways,” Duerksen believes. “Their care, in effect, is more customized when they can install only the apps needed.”

Device independence means providers and patients can move their apps to more advanced devices when these devices become available.
“What we’ve done,” Duerksen continued “is provide obsolescence protection.”

Asked whether the medical app concept would reduce home telehealth costs, now that off-the-shelf computers can replace proprietary devices, Duerksen cautioned that there is one catch. At first glance, it may seem that the concept of device-agnostic medical apps will lower costs to home health care providers of initiating home telehealth services. He clarified, however, that, in order to earn FDA approval, every hardware/software pairing must be certified. The Guide will be the only software running on a dedicated device. In other words, this is not something you can install on the patient’s home PC along with email, browsers and games. The concept, therefore, does provide some flexibility over today’s lineup of proprietary home telehealth devices but some hardware costs still have to be incurred.

A clinical study of use of The Guide is currently underway at the Mayo Clinic, which will report on its effectiveness in reducing hospital readmissions by the end of this year. We will contact Care Innovations in January to report on the results of that study.

Select Data (Anaheim, CA) has announced that it will swap out its existing document management system and replace it with the Xerox DocuShare enterprise content management platform. The Xerox system promises to significantly simplify and speed home health care agency’ access to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), OASIS assessments, administrative records and other related patient and agency data.

Select Data customers will be converted to the new system at no additional charge as part of their established agreements with the company. Select Data’s new strategic alliance with Xerox is one of two major announcements it has made this spring. The company has also launched SmartScribe EMR, a point-of-care data capture system.

By incorporating the Xerox platform into its existing system, it can help fuel Select Data’s hybrid approach, combing the features of SmartScribe EMR and Select Agency Manager, an analysis tool for administrators and DoNs.

Using any electronic device, including iPads, laptops, netbooks and tablets, or paper document scanning, SmartScribe EMR captures clinical data from OASIS Assessments, patient charts, patient visit records and notes, Plans of Care (PoCs) and other relevant clinical data. The Xerox platform supports these functions providing secure data storage in the cloud and easy access to records from any authorized user who has access to the internet.

Once captured, data is automatically fed into the complete EMR, electronic chart and other clinical data storage systems. Home health care agencies can fax requests directly from any device to a physicians office to get a signed Plan of Care (PoC). Physicians can sign these documents electronically or fax hard copies. When SmartScribe EMR captures data from a paper document, it can re-size the document electronically so that all documents are the same standard size and format. The ability to capture data from paper documents and populate EMRs and Plans of Care with that data eliminates the need for certain clerical staff that have chiefly entered data from disparate hard copy documents such as faxes from physicians offices.

“We are not just creating a document imaging system for users to scan in paper documents,” emphasized Jeff Brittain, Select Data Chief Technology Officer. “We are taking information captured in the EMR and converting that to a user friendly document that can be read side by side with all documentation. This saves users from having to navigate two systems.”

Xerox and Select Data have also created portals specially designed for authorized users of home health care agency systems. These are designed to provide greater remote access to EMRs, clinical and administrative data. The portals provide secure HIPAA compliant remote access from any location where an authorized team member has access to the internet.

Accessing reports, records and other data does not require querying tools or special training. The Xerox system makes it possible for those who are not tech savvy to search for records via a patient’s name or via a name and a date and other basic keywords.

For example, using the Physician Portal, doctors can now remotely search for and, where necessary, make changes to established Plans of Care and EMRs based on new diagnostic information. The Physician Portal also allows doctors to submit and sign Plans of Care electronically.

Home health care workers also have their own specially designed portal as well.  Full-time staff and workers filling in for a short time or doing just a few therapy visits can also access the system with authorization from the agencies they work with. This allows home health care workers to remotely access Plans of Care and other records from home or anywhere they have internet access without having to go into the office.

The system also makes it easier for auditors to quickly access OASIS assessments, EMRs and other documents to check on compliance with CMS and other regulations. Directors of Nursing and other administrators also automatically receive weekly reports from Select Data that include important alerts such as outstanding Plans of Care that require signature and any other issues that need attention to ensure regulatory compliance.

Later this year, Xerox and Select Data  are set to jointly release other new portals along the lines of the physician portal, especially designed for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and, with patient authorization, family members and friends.

ContinuLink offers a web-based, SaaS software application, also known as ContinuLink, for home health care providers. The company has reported substantial growth since becoming a separate entity in January, 2010. ContinuLink CEO Satish Movva remain with the company, taking on the title of business unit president.

Movva told us in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that ContinuLink is already approaching 50 customers and 6,600 users at 250 client sites. Prior to becoming a separate company, the software product that eventually took shape as ContinuLink was developed for and used exclusively by Interim branches and franchisees.

Procura president Warren Brown told us that ContinuLink will continue to operate as a separate business unit, with its own sales staff,
support personnel and implementation and training team, with no changes expected other than the usual back office consolidation of HR, payroll and A/R functions. Detailed FAQ documents were sent to customers of both companies last week, introducing each other and explaining that all three software products will continue to be developed, sold and supported and that no customers of either company will be asked to migrate to a different platform.

“The ContinuLink team has built a sophisticated, reliable and simple software solution that complements Procura’s goal to enable better patient care and satisfaction,” Brown stated in an official company statement. “Our companies share similar values; we both always put our customers first and are committed to delivering leading-edge solutions that enable organizations to focus on the business of delivering care. Together, we offer our customers the same solutions and support that they have come to depend on as well as the resources, experience and methodologies of the combined company.”

Though transaction details were not released, Brown told us that the idea was germinated during a casual conversation earlier this year when he and Movva met at a home care conference. Asked whether less than 18 months in business seemed early to seek acquisition, Movva explained that the circumstances were actually more involved than that.

“After emerging from the provider that created the software application,” Movva said, “ContinuLink was owned by Sentinel Capital Partners, the same equity partnership that has an ownership stake in Interim. Their commitment to the software enterprise was due to end next year, which meant that, even though we were doing well, we were not able to look beyond Sentinel’s time horizon for our strategic planning. The acquisition actually comes at a perfect time for us.”

With the addition of Procura’s resources, Movva added, his team will be adding new positions and now be able to extend their strategic plan well into the future.

ContinuLink’s application supports the clinical and financial complexities of Medicare, Medicaid, commercial insurance and waiver programs. Its web-based SaaS platform can scale from a single location agency to an enterprise level agency with thousands of locations. Operating as a member of the Procura Group, ContinuLink will retain its experienced management team.

“The missions of Interim HealthCare and Procura reflect a mutual culture of respect and a desire to provide services that assist entrepreneurs to grow and diversify their businesses,” commented Kathleen Gilmartin, President and CEO of Interim HealthCare Inc. “We look forward to a long term relationship with Procura and ContinuLink that will provide great benefits to our franchise network.”

About Procura
Well known for its Procura Home Care and Progresa Health Systems solutions, the latter of which was acquired from 3M Healthcare in 2007, Procura offers home health systems that support operational, financial and clinical functions.
It is the dominant home care software provider in Canada and has marked steady growth since entering the U.S. market. With U.S. offices in Westmont, (Chicago) Illinois, Procura is headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia. The company’s point-of-care and financial / billing / management systems are connected via workflow process and business intelligence tools. Over 6,000 users at more than 350 client sites use Procura to manage over 50,000 employees. Clients range from small start-ups through to multi-site and franchise organizations.
www.goprocura.com

About ContinuLink
ContinuLink is a software solution for health care businesses including Home Health Care, Hospice, Private Duty, and Supplemental Medical Staffing. Over, 6,600 users at 250 client sites use ContinuLink to manage over 19,000 field employees in the United States.
www.continulink.com

When patient vital sign information must be manually transferred from a telehealth system into the patient record in clinical or billing software, time is wasted and errors can creep in. When back office software vendors get together with telehealth software developers and build an interface to exchange data electronically, everything changes, from cost, to time and effort, to accuracy.

Nowhere is the advantage of collaboration so clear as in the case of OASIS analysis. Though a few back office vendors include some OASIS accuracy features within their core product, it would be expensive to develop all of the comprehensive analysis and benchmarking capabilities that are offered
by the six vendors that focus on them exclusively.

Thornberry Ltd. president Tom Peth reiterated that viewpoint this week when we spoke with him about his new cooperative arrangement with Home Health Gold. “We considered building something
like what they and SHP and PPS Plus and the others do,” he explained, “and we certainly have the expertise to do it; but we have a lot of other features our customers have asked us to work on. So, we decided, why allocate valuable resources to a project that would be nothing more than reinventing the wheel?”

Peth and company were not only committed to the idea of partnering in order to provide enhanced OASIS analysis to their customers, they found in Home Health Gold a willing partner and an affordable, comprehensive solution. Consulting with his team, Peth decided to begin to include the Home Health Gold system in every new customer implementation of Thornberry’s home health application, NDoc.

“Of course, we can’t force everyone to use it,” Peth smiled, “but we can certainly encourage it and make it as easy as possible for them to do so.” To make it easy, Thornberry will provide the linkages Home Health Gold’s founder and developer David Merk will need to build a data extraction routine from NDoc.

As Merk told us, his system is able to make use of OASIS files generated by most home care clinical software systems, since they are all in the same format. “It is simpler and much more efficient, however, when we have the cooperation of the software vendor,” he explained. “With Thornberry’s cooperation, we will be able to offer a range of advantages to NDoc user.”

To be sure, alliances of this sort are becoming more and more common
and the Thornberry-HHG combination is not unique. In fact, a quick glance at homehealthgold.com reveals that the Waterville, Maine company also partners with GLMI, CareFacts (now owned by HealthcareFIRST), Visions, Golden Rule, HealthCare Synergy, Meditech and Sansio. What does seem to be unique is Tom Peth’s decision to package his partner’s product with his own in every sale rather than making it an option.

ClinicalVirtuoso™ is a simple documentation system for therapists, whether employed by one or multiple agencies. It includes
an intelligent user interface that streamlines and simplifies the documentation process, including scheduling, evaluations and follow-up visits.

For a limited time, Delta is offering ClinicalVirtuoso™ at no charge. Premium add-ons, including electronic integration with other documentation systems, and versions geared for occupational therapy and speech-language pathology, will be available throughout 2011. For additional detail, see our April 20 story, “Delta Health Technologies Releases Free Software for Therapists”

Delta will be at the American Physical Therapy Association’s Annual Conference & Expo (PT2011), June 8-10 at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center, National Harbor, Maryland, Booth #1015. A
brief demo is available at ClinicalVirtuoso.com .