Decades ago, Dr. Victor E. Pollak came to an important realization: For all the good they do, doctors fail miserably when it comes to organization. They keep inefficient, inadequate medical records that fail to show a patient's long-term history.
Consider how traditional records for a typical diabetic patient are arranged. The patient's blood sugar results are in one place, his latest insulin prescription is in another, and the nurses' notes are somewhere else.
"I came to the conclusion that I was unable to care for my patients, I was unable to teach medical students, and I was unable to do research on my patients. And I decided that the problem was with the medical records and that a new medical record was needed to solve those problems," says Pollak, a leader in the field of nephrology, which involves the diagnosis and treatment of kidney diseases.
That revelation came in the mid-1960s, prompting Pollak to start building a new way of keeping records on his patients' treatments, prognoses and progress.
At a Glance
* MIQS Inc. in Boulder, Colo., makes Disease Manager Plus. A medical records software system for clinical and administrative use, Disease Manager Plus is designed to help caregivers manage patients with chronic diseases -- particularly those undergoing dialysis. MIQS wouldn't disclose its annual revenue but says its software has had a role in the care of approximately 150,000 patients by more than 5,000 users over nearly 20 years.
* Project champions include John P. Flynn, vice president of engineering and co-founder; Dr. Victor E. Pollak, senior vice president, medical director and founder; and George F. Rovegno, president and CEO.
* MIQS has five IT staff members, including Flynn. Four are programmers working on Disease Manager Plus, while the fifth provides IT support for customers and the company itself.
* Disease Manager Plus users see a financial return on investment as well as better patient outcomes. MIQS officials say typical system costs are $35 to $75 per patient per month, while revenue improvements run $125 to $250 per patient per month. The best benchmarked performance was more than $1,500 in revenue improvement per patient per month.
Pollak's frustration and subsequent innovation eventually led to the creation of MIQS Inc. and its Disease Manager Plus software package, which delivers a new type of medical record for the care of patients with chronic diseases. The software brings together in real time all the formerly separate data points on each patient or patient group and presents them according to each doctor's individual preference.
"All the information about a patient needs to be accessible equally. Our major asset is how we organize the data on the back end. It gives the doctors what they want to see at the point of care in the way they want to see it," says MIQS President and CEO George F. Rovegno. "And we have pretty persuasive data that if you get the data at the bedside, the patient will do better."
MIQS, which primarily markets Disease Manager Plus for the care of dialysis patients and patients with kidney disease, was named a 2009 Computerworld Honors program honoree for its work on the software. And Disease Manager Plus itself has earned significant praise from medical professionals.
"There's nothing that comes close," says Dr. Jonathan Lorch, director of medical informatics at The Rogosin Institute, a treatment and research institution for kidney disease in New York.
Lorch, a nephrologist, started using Disease Manager Plus nearly 15 years ago while at a different New York clinic. "I wanted something that wasn't just a repository of data but rather something that would help us care for patients," he says, noting that dialysis patients experience a range of medical problems that must be managed.
Disease Manager Plus essentially provides a reporting engine to deliver better insight into patient care management, a function that Lorch sees as a key
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