Alere Medical Incorporated is a leader in specialized, disease management services focusing on select high cost diseases to maximize clients’ return on investment. Alere is dedicated to improving care and reducing costs for patients with chronic diseases. Its services are provided as a value-added benefit to health insurance providers looking to better manage their chronically ill customers.
Alere produces unequalled clinical and cost saving results by precision targeting the patients who will benefit most from specialty interventions. Alere’s integrated care monitoring system identifies and monitors all medium and high-risk patients, and prioritizes those patients to facilitate efficient workflow. With published outcomes that exceed those of any competitochronic conditionsr, Alere Medical’s disease management programs result in improved clinical outcomes for patients and guaranteed savings for clients.
The flexibility of Orion Health’s technology has allowed Alere to expand the Allegro system from tracking a single disease to five , growing revenues by more than 280 percent.
Ron Geraty, President and CEO
Alere Medical, Inc.
NEED FOR A NEW SYSTEM
In 2004, Alere had solidified their position in the market as the best of breed solution for heart disease management. They wanted to leverage this success and grow their capabilities into providing services for patients with other chronic diseases including Coronary Artery Disease (CAD), Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), Asthma, and Diabetes. The main barrier to adding these diseases to their roster, thereby growing the company, was existing legacy applications. Their non-integrated legacy systems couldn’t support the new disease offerings. A major investment in systems was needed to move forward.
Alere defined the business requirements for a new system. There were some unique challenges that needed to be handled, namely the ability to be flexible enough to satisfy Alere’s unique and specialized business operations and its client’s needs.
A TIME FOR INTELLIGENCE AND BOLD DECISIONS
The search for a solution then began in earnest. Alere researched over 70 companies, and received many presentations and proposals, including the development of a new system from scratch. After careful consideration, the search team ultimately chose Orion Health HIE’s Clinical Portal and Orion Health Rhapsody Integration Engine.
This recommendation was based on the solutions that the tools could provide for serving each disease and client including;
- Ability to leverage forms, workflow, etc., across diseases and clients
- Scalability to support the growth of the company
- Ability to integrate the tools into a single system
- Convenience of a single vendor
Now that the solution was clear, the search team, and Alere, had one last obstacle–the proposed solution would cost 25 percent of the company’s revenues.
Alere’s CEO gave the project a green light and the new system, named Allegro, was born, having carefully weighed the risk of the implementation against the risk of not being able to scale the business to meet its aggressive growth targets.
ALLEGRO ENABLES GROWTH
It took nine months for the development team to create Allegro and integrate it with the specific needs of Alere’s Heart Failure patients, and Alere’s clients. Leveraging this solution, it took only four months to enhance the system for the specific needs of the next disease offering (CAD). Each subsequent disease took half the development time to integrate into Allegro, with the last two diseases in the portfolio, Asthma and COPD, being developed together over a two-month timeframe.
During 2006, Alere converted its existing clients from legacy systems, and despite this company-wide conversion, the system availability was over 99 percent.
Alere’s Allegro disease management solution supports more than 300+ users using the system concurrently. The highly complex system includes more than 35 workflows containing more than 300 tasks, with 20-30 rules per task. Average workflows for other solutions might contain 10-15 tasks. Allegro’s underlying technology from Orion Health enables the system to be easily scalable to meet the needs of Alere’s expected growth—and beyond!
ASTOUNDING RESULTS
The decision to risk a quarter of the company’s revenues on a new system may have raised a few eyebrows in the boardroom, but the results speak for themselves. Within eighteen months of Allegro’s roll-out, Alere’s revenues were up from $16 million to $64 million – a 280 percent increase!
Allegro enabled Alere to increase the diseases they service from one to five, thereby growing its client base and limiting its risk of having all its business tied to a single disease. Alere’s patients and employees grew at rapid rates during that same time period, but one key metric showed a sharp decrease: IT expenditure as a percentage of revenue, which was down 37 percent. Allegro fueled astronomical growth for Alere, to the point that Allegro’s initial cost became a non-issue.
HOW IT WORKS
Allegro helps optimize the workflows of a traditional disease management and patient care system. Patients use medical devices at home to take daily readings which are immediately uploaded to the Allegro system and made available to Alere’s team of staff and nurses. Concerto clinical workflow assists with the management of the patients, by creating tasks if the daily readings are outside of the require norms, or if they have not been submitted. The system also consolidates enrollment information from insurance companies and alerts doctors when they need to be involved with providing consent or consultation for a patient’s care. Allegro presents a patient-centric view to its users, providing nurses with an up to date and accurate picture of a patient’s condition. Nurses can then use Allegro to alert patients by phone and physicians by fax with specific concerns or suggested actions. Specific educational materials and other letters can be generated by Allegro and mailed directly to patients.
ALLEGRO’S TOP FEATURES
Allegro features include:
- Ability to electronically collect patient specific data, providing nurses with an up to date accurate picture of the patient’s condition.
- Through the use of a proprietary algorithm, patients are reprioritized multiple times throughout the day, thus assuring that patients are presented to the right nurse at the right time.
- Ability to graphically display the above data and trend key data over time.
- Ability to “alert” nurses to changing clinical conditions.
- Ability to then ‘alert’ patients by phone and physicians by fax with concise easy to understand graphical data.
- Ability to monitor and adjust to open workflow tasks based on volume and available resources, insuring timely completion of all processes.
- Scalable technical environment to easily accommodate increased patient volume, new clients, and new requirements to meet the needs of the client.
- Ability to get a patient-centric view of the patient improving the ability to manage multiple chronic conditions or diseases – such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
- Ability to make client specific questions and corresponding structured responses to Initial Assessment calls and other communication with the patient.
- Allegro functionality allows for extensive reporting capabilities on many different reportable criteria.
KEEPING PATIENT INFORMATION SAFE
In addition to standard security provisions such as firewalls, VPN, personal logons, and forced password changes, Allegro meets all regulatory requirements of HIPAA to protect personal health information. These measures include encrypting all e-mail messages containing personal health information, logon lockouts to prevent password guessing, periodic administrator reviews of potential breaches, workstation screen locking, and a limited-access server room.
