hc1.com pioneers ‘Amazon experience’ for healthcare industry

“Shouldn’t your health be treated with the same kind of urgency and care that Amazon takes to deliver a teddy bear to your house?”

That’s the simplified and poignant question hc1.com founder and CEO Brad Bostic asks at the start of his presentation about personalizing the healthcare experience.

It’s the kind of question that can completely change your thinking on the subject; and with his cloud-based healthcare relationship management software in use at more than 700 lab and hospital locations worldwide, Bostic believes his company’s “mission to personalize” is helping to change the healthcare industry too.

hc1 is TechPoint’s “Featured Company of the Week.” Learn more about the program below.

The idea for hc1 — which actually stands for Health Cloud One — came following passage of the Affordable Care Act about five years ago. Bostic was both surprised and intrigued when Google returned zero results for the phrase: healthcare relationship management.

It’s kind of a shocking thought considering customer relationship management (CRM) software has been around and widely used in many other industries for 20 years.

But as Bostic’s opening teddy bear question demonstrates, the healthcare industry and its order of magnitude complexity has been very slow to adapt to the idea of putting the patient-customer at the center of its service model.

Whereas Amazon treats getting you your teddy bear on time and keeping you informed along the way as a matter of life and death, the healthcare industry treats actual life and death matters like a number.

In the U.S. alone, there are 320 million people and about 800,000 practicing medical doctors, so we’re talking about large numbers. Layers of complexity are added on top of those primary doctor/patient relationships because a doctor may see patients at her own office, at a clinic, and at a hospital, for example. Then there are records and information generated by multiple departments at each location as well as third- and fourth-party outsourced services.

In all fairness, Amazon was built from the ground up — just like hc1 was — to offer an exceptional customer experience at a time when technology enabled the company to do what it does so well.

Healthcare service is a mess, by comparison, with nameless, faceless people sprayed all over the place and with all of these compartments of data that don’t talk to one another built over time (decades). One trip to the hospital can produce three different bills from three different people — people that you never saw and don’t know what they did.

hc1 is bringing the customer-friendly Amazon experience to healthcare for patients and enabling healthcare entities to thrive in today’s increasingly competitive environment.

“A big part of the opportunity for hc1 is the Affordable Care Act and new regulations that mandate better experiences and quality outcomes,” Bostic said. “If you’ve been in the hospital for three days and didn’t have an infection when you came in, well, the new outcomes-based model means that the hospital can’t turn around and bill you for curing the infection that they gave you in the first place.”

With the prospect of being forced to swallow costs due to poor outcomes and patient satisfaction and patient choice both increasing in importance through cost visibility and health savings accounts, the healthcare industry is definitely taking note of and investing heavily in healthcare relationship management (which today draws 23 million results from a Google search).

In the simplest terms, what does your company do?

hc1 invented healthcare relationship management to bring personalized service and 1-to-1 engagement to the healthcare industry. As the world’s leading Healthcare CRM company, more than 700 client sites spanning health systems, laboratories, and post acute care facilities trust the hc1 Healthcare Relationship Cloud® to deliver a five-star service experience to consumers, patients, and providers across the continuum of care.

What are the most important features of your healthcare CRM?

1. hc1 is the only native secure cloud Healthcare CRM built from the ground up to meet the specific needs for healthcare providers and diagnostic laboratories to deliver a personalized experience. The hc1 platform includes healthcare-specific CRM, real-time analytics, secure collaboration, and intelligent automated integration capabilities.
2. Through hc1’s proprietary data science that automatically combines clinical and business data, healthcare entities gain live, holistic profiles for each provider, patient, and healthcare organization across the continuum of care.
3. hc1 supports best practices for high performance healthcare organizations aiming to grow and retain customers and can be configured to address the unique needs of each individual provider.
4. hc1 is extensible supporting the ability to incorporate various third party data sources, applications, and devices (e.g. FitBit and other wearables data) into the platform.

What pain points are most trying to help solve?

Healthcare today is shifting from fee-for-service to a quality-based, consumer-driven environment. Providers attract patients and are increasingly paid on the quality of the experience and related outcomes, not the number of services performed.

At the same time, consumers have more choices and higher expectations than ever before. hc1 enables healthcare organizations to compete and win in this environment.

Which major brands are hc1 customers?

National Brands: Cleveland Clinic, Alere, Sonic Healthcare, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, HCA.

Local Brands: MACL (Mid America Clinical Labs), St. Vincent Health, AmeriPath, Health and Hospital Corporation (HHC), and Eskenazi Health.

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hc1 is TechPoint’s “Featured Company of the Week,” a key benefit of our Tailwind Program for fast-growing scale-ups and other high-performance tech companies in our community.