Big Blue Points SaaS ISVs at Healthcare Market

To make its point about SaaS vertical development, IBM is showcasing providers of cloud-based services in the healthcare market. One such partner, MedTrak Systems, based in North Muskegon, MI, has built a cloud-based solution for American Occupational Network, a $5 million, privately-held organization of five medical clinics in California. The solution provides patient registration, scheduling, patient electronic health records, clinical workflow, billing and collections in one cloud-based system.

“We began talking to AON in 2003 about using our services to move from practice management software to an integrated, clinical management solution,” said Rick Schanhals, MedTrak president.

“Our whole model is SaaS,” he said. “We can handle a sole practitioner seeing 20 patients a day to a multi-clinic operation seeing hundreds of patients a day.” Clinicians work off a patient status screen that records their findings in real time at the point-of-care and also creates billing information.

Larisa West, AON director of administration, said that AON was unable to find an on-premise application that met the organization’s needs and turned to a SaaS solution instead.

“Our field is always changing,” she said. “Software must relate to five different specialties, including primary care, urgent care, occupational medicine, orthopedics and rehab services and that’s not easy to find.”

Schanhals said that MedTrak’s solution was priced on a transaction basis depending on how many patients were seen on a monthly basis. Typical fees range from “2 percent to 3 percent of what a patient pays.”