gloStream

gloStream Grows Office Solution for Medical Practices with Cloud-Based EMR and PM Offerings

Situation:

gloStream is a privately-owned software development company based in southeastern Michigan that specializes in solutions for the the healthcare industry. Often referred to as “glo” by its clients, the company also operates a wholly-owned subsidiary in India with more than 100 team members , and is associated with more than 175 partners.

gloStream began when two software developers with experience in the healthcare industry — co-founders Yaw Kwakye and Milind Ghyar — met online. They realized there was a pain point in the healthcare industry that they could solve by developing Microsoft-based Electronic Medical Record and Practice Management solutions.

Solution:

“Doctors require technology that’s powerful yet also easy to learn and use ,” says Todd Krieger, Marketing Director at gloStream. gloStream saw an opportunity to provide solutions that were user-friendly and easy to integrate into a doctor’s existing practice.

So, when gloStream began development in 2005, they had one question in mind: What is the most prevalent productivity software?

I believe strongly that Office 365 is the future for us as a whole company.

–Piyush Khanna
CIO
gloStream

The answer was Microsoft Office. Due to its familiarity among medical practice staff, building on the Microsoft Office platform perfectly positioned gloStream’s offering. “Everyone, even if they don’t have an EMR platform, is familiar with Office,” says Piyush Khanna, gloStream’s CIO.

gloStream decided to leverage Word to create the “exam note” – one of the most important needs in a physician’s practice – within its flagship offering, the Electronic Medical Record solution, gloEMR.

“A lot of software providers think doctors have to adapt their business process to the solution,” says Khanna. “We start with the Word document and let the practice decide what the template should be. We allow the practice to pull in both structured and unstructured data.”

The solution benefits not only from Word, but from the Office suite as a whole, Khanna adds. “We use it extensively to create our data sets and analytics within the product, so it’s not just Word, it’s using the entire Office platform.”

Benefits:

Flexibility of Platform

Krieger says: “We’re leveraging Office to create a friendly interface for our doctors and allowing them to personalize a Word template so it meets their precise needs.. gloStream products are just really flexible because they use so much Microsoft technology.

The strength of their solutions has allowed gloStream to make a promise to their clients – a money-back guarantee that the practice will get back to full patient load in just 15 days after implementing gloEMR.

Gregg Hammerman, Director of Business Development at gloStream, points out the edge this guarantee gives them in the marketplace. “It takes some providers three, six, nine months to get back to full patient load after an EMR is implemented. We’re guaranteeing we can do it in 15 days or they get their money back. We can do that because of Microsoft technology and its flexibility. That’s unheard of in our industry.”

The flexibility of the Office platform has also allowed the company to extend its solutions to meet the needs of virtually any medical specialty , something competitors have not been able to do. “We can personalize our solutions to virtually any practice type,” says Krieger. “A lot of EMR providers have systems that work for one specialty or another. For us, the technology is so flexible, it works for just about all of them.

Building their solution on the Office platform has also enhanced the company’s relationship with its partner community, says Khanna. “Most of them already understand Microsoft technologies, so for them to transition to the new product, it makes it even simpler for them.”

Power of Word

One stand-out feature of the EMR product is the integration of dictation right into the exam note, a feature that saves customers big money. “Transcription costs run into the billions of dollars in the industry,” says Khanna. “We decided to go a different route. When the doctors are dictating into the speech mike [in gloEMR], they are seeing the text right in front of their eyes in a Word document, in real-time.”

According to Hammerman, the flexibility of Word enhances the doctor-patient relationship. “We have doctors that use it to pull up a diagram and draw on it. They’ll embed a video of a surgery to show their patients. There’s a lot of power in a Word document, so our doctors leverage that to the fullest extent possible.”

Cloud Offers New Capabilities, Revenues

gloStream is taking its solution, currently built to work with Office 2003, 2007, and 2010, into the cloud with Office 365.

In 2010, when gloStream deployed Office 365, it faced a few challenges aligning its solutions’ needs with the new platform. But a visit to Redmond to take part in an Office workshop with Microsoft engineers helped iron out the glitches for a successful deployment.

Office 365’s features lined up perfected with gloStream’s initiatives, says Khanna. In fact, he sees Office 365 as a complete game changer. “Our vision with Office 365 is to actually change the way we are doing business now,” he says. “One of the things that attracted me to Office 365 is that we have alignment with our current architecture to the Office 365 offering. Winforms build using C# will transition into SharePoint online, scheduling and tasking within our software can move to Exchange Online and encounter notes within gloEMR, which doctors depend on each day, can move to Office Online.”

gloStream is also looking into enhancing its community of practices through social collaboration – a perfect fit for Lync Online, says Khanna.

The company is also looking into the possibility of integrating the dictation element of the medical record into the cloud, says Khanna. “The doctor could speak into a Windows 7 phone or a microphone on a laptop and that would go into the cloud, the speech could convert to text, and go into an online document.”

Working in the cloud would also enhance the patient’s experience. “The patient could log in to a practice’s SharePoint site and see their patient data, like ‘How much will the practice bill me today? Can I pay online?’”

Khanna says: “Our question had been, ‘How do we take our existing implementation in Office and move it into the cloud?’ As I looked at what was offered in Office 365, everything lined up exactly with what we were doing. I believe strongly that Office 365 is the future for gloStream. For us, Microsoft has come up with a perfect solution with Office 365.”

Hammerman says: “We’re out there in a competitive space. There are a lot of choices out there for doctors as they choose to implement systems like this. The differentiation of having Office embedded and having people understand the technology and be comfortable with it makes a big difference. It does influence the buying decision quite a bit.”

In the years since implementing its Office solutions, gloStream has experienced 100 percent year over year growth.

Khanna adds: “Once the purchase is complete and we’ve made the guarantee to get a practice up and running in a short time, it really makes sense to them how we’re going to be able to do that, once they see that we work with these kinds of tools and technologies from Microsoft.“

Source:

Microsoft Case Study: gloStream