Company provides MDs billing, IT, financial support

LOUISVILLE – Dr. Joel Montbriand, founder of Gastroenterology of the Rockies and Medamorph LLC, has taken the next step into the application service provider market.

Medamorph, a company that provides billing, information technology, human resources and financial support to surgical centers and medical practices, is poised to make the move from a smaller office to a new 19,250-square foot office/flex building it purchased at the Colorado Tech Center in Louisville. The move will help the company approach the regional application service provider – known as ASP – marketplace.

“We haven’t gone to the marketplace yet, but we’re poised to do it. A big part of that was our move to the new building,” Montbriand said. “We are still in the same tech center right now but in a much smaller building.

“We’ll be set up facilitywise to provide the ASP locally and regionally. We’re also in discussions with one of the main electronic health-record practice-management software companies to be their ASP provider for this region.”

Medamorph’s purpose is to make medical practices and surgical centers “paperless.” It will provide a centralized collection of servers in which offices can keep information and access it with the click of a button.

Montbriand has been working on this paperless approach for the past 10 years and has contoured his business to adjust to changing medical technologies. Through the process he saw an opening in the marketplace to provide this service to smaller practices that didn’t have the infrastructure to support the technology on their own.

“It was part of the growth of our business, and we didn’t see in the marketplace that other people were providing it for small to medium-size practices,” Montbriand said. “We decided to create it on our own, and from what we learned we found that there is a real need in the marketplace for a cost-effective solution for small- to medium-size practices.”

Montbriand has hired information technology experts from other industries to assist in the stabilization of the Medamorph technology. Danny Olsen, the IS/IT program manager for Medamorph, was brought in two years ago after working in several different industries – including the U.S. military.

Olsen said he was brought in to make sure that “everything was cohesive.”

Part of Olsen’s job is to make sure all information is secure and available to specific individuals. Through passwords and an enclosed network, Medamorph is as secure as possible, he said.

“It has a dual password, and it’s an enclosed system that is not accessible to the outside world,” Olsen said. “You have to be on our specific network beyond our firewall in order to see the information. There is a password to get on the network and one to get a patient’s information.”

Medamorph can make an office paperless within a couple of months of going through a four-part process. A client must be trained on billing and demographics, learn scheduling, adjust work flow and then implement the physician component.

The work flow component is particularly important because implementing a paperless environment means a totally different office environment.

“When you move to electronic it really changes the work flow of the office for the better. It actually makes things more efficient, and it frees up your staff to do more important things,” Montbriand said. “However, it’s a whole different work flow so you have to sit down with that practice and make sure they understand what they are trying to accomplish and what is going to change.”

Medamorph will lease its server space and technology on a monthly basis, which is more cost-effective for smaller offices that don’t have the resources to go electronic on their own.

Once an office goes electronic, all of its paperwork will go through Medamorph, where it will be scanned into its particular server, then shredded for security purposes. Doctors can then bring up the information on the computer or even on PDAs.

“If a doctor needs information, we basically pull it off the computer and then he has everything – the X-rays, the labs, anything he could need,” Olsen said. “It’s as easy as knowing a name or a patient’s identification number to pull the information up.”

Montbriand was unable to release the name of the software company he is negotiating with, but mentioned it was the most efficient he has come across during the 10 years he has been working toward going electronic.
Currently he and the software company are deliberating about who will do the marketing and how aggressive it will be.

“After we go through with these negotiations we will figure out if they will be marketing, or if we will be marketing,” Montbriand said. “This could be national, not just regional. It depends upon how aggressively we market it.”

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