Kno2 rides 'tail winds' of post-acute care

Kno2 announced partnerships with Stratice Healthcare and DMEhub recently, allowing the HME providers who use those two platforms to access, effectively, any electronic health record system. 

Here’s what Therasa Bell, co-founder, president and CTO of Kno2, had to say about how to “do interoperability right,” and how the company made a bet several years ago that information exchange needed to happen beyond the walls of hospitals and physician offices.

HME News: How does Kno2’s Interoperability as a Service work?  

Therasa Bell: We aggregate all the networks into one simple platform – we like to say we’re health care’s largest network aggregator. Stratice or DMEhub connects once to a set of Rest-APIs and they can communicate across the care continuum – Epic, Cerner, ambulatory EHRs, post-acute EHRS and many more. When an order is initiated out of the EHR, it allows providers to get the patient record they need to create a CMN. Now the provider can communicate everything to fulfill that order to meet Medicare’s requirements. Once that’s complete, we’ll send the completed order not only to the provider but also back into the EHR for the referring provider.

HME: You say interoperability has been an option for only the “elite” providers in health care – hospitals and physician offices – and not post-acute care providers. How does Kno2 widen access to interoperability?

Bell: It’s not only our connectivity but also our economics. Interoperability has largely been unavailable to many because of the costs. They can’t afford to engage with multiple networks or endpoints, one by one, every time. In some cases, we’re being used by a small office for as little as your monthly coffee allowance.

HME: Another reason that, when it comes to interoperability, the focus has been on hospitals and physicians is the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use, which provided incentive payments to these providers to use certified EHR systems in a “meaningful manner.” Why did Kno2 think beyond these providers?

Bell: If we go back 10 years, everyone was focused on the Meaningful Use dollars that were incented to eligible providers. We said, “We’re going after the underserved markets.” We knew it was just a matter of time before post-acute and other would need it. We took the hard road and the one that was maybe not so obvious to people, but now the tail winds are in our favor.

HME: Do you think everyone also thought everything would consolidate into a Cerner or an Epic, minimizing the need for a service that aggregates so many networks?

Bell: I do think people had blinders on. When you say the word health care, people think doctor. That is a narrow view of what health care is. Healthcare covers many disciplines and the need to securely share patient information spans the continuum.