MIQS develops product to manage hospital data

BOULDER – Medical Information Quality Systems Inc. has developed a data-storage solution that is the central nervous system for the health-care industry.

The product, Disease Manager Plus, is a knowledge-based, decision-support system that controls the complex data for chronically ill patients by integrating clinical treatment data with administrative and financial information to improve patient care. Test results, diagnosis and observations of patients during treatment are entered into the system by health-care professionals.

The system can be used by physicians to monitor an individual patient’s progress and treatment. Currently, patients with chronic, long-term illnesses such as renal disease, AIDS, cancer and heart disease are being tracked.

“The system records every entry made about patients during their lifetime, organizes the data and reports it in a form relevant to the needs of physicians, accountants or administrators,´ said Stephen P. Pollak, chief executive officer of MIQS. “With accurate knowledge about a patient’s disease, the treatment and his reaction to it, a physician is able to make better decisions quicker.”

The system also has several ways to alert health-care providers when something is amiss with a patient. These include paging a physician when data shows a patient to be outside the normal limits of their individual responses.

Conventional medical data-processing systems are islands of data with their priorities in reverse order, according to Pollak. “They use administrative and financial data to track a patient’s care. But when you use clinical data in a centralized database to drive the process like we do, you eliminate inefficiencies and overhead, and you provide individual patients with a higher quality of care at a lower cost,” he said.

According to a New York study, a group of health-care providers using Disease Manager Plus experienced a reduction in the standardized mortality rate by as much as 45 percent below the national average. Clinical staff could care for 42 percent more patients when they were monitored by the system, and billing was automated so that only one person was needed for 10 hours a month.

The quality of patient care also was improved because treatment was adjusted based on the outcomes of the individual patient rather than using protocols established for an “average” patient. Other benefits include the system’s ability to monitor regulation compliance and compare the outcomes of treatment for multiple patients.

The system’s largest user is New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, one of more than 1,000 users in 76 locations nationwide. Later this year, MIQS will be implementing the first provincewide system in Saskatchewan, Canada.

The initial idea for the product came from Pollak’s father, Dr. Victor E. Pollak, a noted kidney specialist and expert on lupus. The elder Pollak was unable to find a system that would track the variability of the lupus disease or the consistently changing patterns in individual patients, so he designed a custom system using spreadsheets. It evolved into the current, sophisticated Disease Manager Plus that is platform-independent.

The system’s object-oriented design allows it to be accessed anytime, anywhere from the Internet, a wireless device, a LAN or a WAN. Physicians can collaborate with colleagues while both view the patient data on a secure, centralized system.

In 1997, the Ohio company founded by the Pollaks moved to Colorado to tap the state’s software and technical employee base near Boulder and to take advantage of the quality of life the state offers. It incorporated here as MIQS Inc.

In addition to Stephen and Victor Pollak, Jim McGroddy, a former senior vice president at IBM, and Tom Carson, former chief financial officer at Access Graphics, are shareholders in the company. McGroddy is chairman of the board, and Carson is a director. MIQS currently has 12 employees and anticipates to grow to 35 by year end. The company reported annual revenues of approximately $1 million.

MIQS

Mariann Starkey

Page 2

on Facebook on LinkedIn