The healthcare industry currently generates about one-third of the world’s data. As technology becomes more integrated into health services, the annual growth rate of data in the healthcare industry is expected to continue to outpace that of other industries like manufacturing and financial services.
The burgeoning amount of unused and under-utilized data in the healthcare industry has caught the eye of companies like Amazon, which attempted to provide a tool—Amazon Haven Healthcare—to leverage data. The ultimate failure of that venture demonstrates how it’s going to take more than a widely touted organization with a lot of money to address the need in the healthcare industry. After spending nearly two decades in the healthcare industry, Jeff Maze believes he has the right solution with his startup Quinsite.
Chapel Hill-based Quinsite is a healthcare analytics platform that brings together data from disparate sources into one central hub, providing hospitals and private practices with detailed visibility into operations and offering actionable insights based on that data. Maze co-founded Quinsite in 2017 with his wife, Jenny Maze; Jeff serves as CEO while Jenny is COO. Quinsite was tabbed as a new addition to Scot Wingo’s 2021 Triangle Tweener list.
“In healthcare, where many organizations use ten or more vendors to collect and store data,” said Jeff Maze, “it’s very challenging especially for large systems to be able to aggregate all that data together in an automated robust process that puts that information readily at the fingertips of leadership.”
The platform comes with different permission levels and is meant to help leadership staff make data-driven, system-wide decisions based on holistic reports and summaries of operations. For instance, the dashboard shows trends of what day and time patients come in most frequently, so staff and resources can be optimized and allocated appropriately to avoid either overstaffing or long waiting times. Quinsite also sends weekly reports on daily operations and sends text alerts when things are getting backed up.
“Despite the significant movement of technology over the last 20 years,” Maze said, “healthcare has been on the tail end of these changes in terms of using technology to do something meaningful with information for things like helping patients or improving physician lifestyle.”
Most of Quinsite’s several dozen customers so far are private practices in specialty fields like radiology. Much of the initial customer feedback Quinsite received was that physicians felt uncertainty regarding their compensation and what is expected of them. So the Quinsite app is meant to provide transparency into the evaluation process in part by giving visibility into exactly how an individual physician’s productivity throughout the day compares with their peers and against a general benchmark number.
If a physician is consistently performing below average, they can talk to their peers to see what they’re doing differently and change their behavior, Maze said.
Improved productivity and revenue collection
In a study with one of Quinsite’s customers, where half of the doctors from that organization used the app and the other half didn’t, the half that used it saw a 5% increase in productivity. They were still working the same number of hours as their peers, but because the app set clear expectations, they were more productive during that time period, Maze said.
Quinsite also helps organizations increase their billable revenue through an audit process that tracks what a patient was initially charged within the hospital system and follows the trail to what was ultimately received. The complex billing process involves multiple steps and transfers to third-party billing, trading and insurance companies, meaning revenue can easily slip through the cracks, Maze said.
In the same vein, revenue earned from a procedure is often recorded in a completely different source than a procedure’s expenses, so even organizations that perform high-reimbursement procedures like radiology practices tend to be in the dark when it comes to knowing whether they actually made a profit off of a procedure.
By compiling both sources together to calculate net profit, Maze said it’s like Quinsite is applying basic business principles to healthcare.
“Physicians spend years in advanced training, but don’t get a business class taught to them,” Maze said. “At the end of the day, they still have to pay their bills so that’s where Quinsite helps—by putting that information at their fingertips so they can quickly make smarter decisions while still focusing on the patient.”