sources, having a common clinical search
engine is another piece of standardization
important to improved outcomes via less
variation in practice, Beck says.
Beck acknowledges that an EHR de-
ployment is never finished. But he’s opti-
mistic. “In five years, we will have better
outcomes, safer cost and improved cost
control. We will eliminate redundant and
unnecessary tests. When patients realize
they are getting the best technology there
is to offer, they are happier with their
health care.”
Love and marriage
Some people are married to their jobs,
but you could say that
Brad Jannenga
married into his. A veteran of the 1990s’
dot-com boom, Jannenga designed and
wrote successful platforms for a number
of e-commerce companies. After moving
to Arizona, he met his future wife, Heidi,
who managed a large physical therapy
clinic in Phoenix, whose clients included
spring training baseball teams. Heidi
asked Brad to help locate an EHR vendor
to help reduce dictation costs and capture
documentation electronically. Discour-
aged by the high price—and limited util-
Name: Brad Jannenga
Position: President and Chief Technology
Officer
Organization: WebPT, Phoenix
Accomplishment: Launched Specialty
EHR firm
ity—of commercial products, the two hit
on an idea that not only transformed the
clinic but sent Brad down an unexpected
career path. Brad would write the code for
the EHR.
“I figured I could develop the software
over the weekend and help Heidi auto-
mate a little of her workflow,” he recalls.
“We realized this might be a bigger oppor-
tunity than just a small app for the clinic. I
had never done anything medical and my
previous software experience was b-to-b.
I figured medical is just another problem
to solve.”
For three months, Jannenga shadowed
Heidi and the other physical therapy as-
sistants and billing staff to learn the work-
flows and communications needs of the
clinic. After that, he started writing the
software package. By day, Jannenga would
write code and by night, share it with Hei-
di. “She was like the product manager,” he
says. “It was a lot of late nights.”
After nearly two years of development
work, Jannenga launched WebPT in Feb-
ruary 2008. Initially the software provided
clinical documentation capabilities, and
later expanded to include scheduling,
billing, and external communication fea-
tures which enable users to auto-fax or
distribute patient summaries to referring
physicians electronically.
WebPT now has a customer base of
3,800 clinics encompassing some 16,000
therapists, assistants and billing crew who
use the software. The company has grown
to 110 employees. The software is sold on
a subscription basis and is hosted remote-
ly for clinics at a data center in Phoenix.
WebPT is a certified registry for CMS and
clinics can use the software to capture
PQRS (Physician Quality and Reporting
System) data. Jannenga says that most
EHR vendors catering to physical therapy
clinics require client-server installations.
He kept his own development costs down
by writing the underlying program us-
ing open source software including the
“LAMP” stack—Linux, Apache, MySQL,
and PHP. Using the open source tools en-
abled him to keep the development costs
down, he says.
Name: Kevin Meldrum
Position: Senior Systems Designer and
Lead Developer
Organization: Dept. of Veterans Affairs,
Veterans Health Administration
Accomplishment: Lead architect, designer
and developer of EHR
Wake-up call
For
Kevin Meldrum
, the career wake-up
call was the pounding on the door. The
VA—a nationwide group of 152 hospitals
serving veterans—had launched an early
iteration of computerized physician order
entry, and the keyboard-driven system
flopped. “We wanted physicians to use
the orders,” he recalls. The door pound-
ing came from a group of residents who
demanded to know if he were the one re-
sponsible for the program. “They wanted
to know who wrote the software that they
didn’t want to use. It was a profound ex-
perience.”
That was in the early ’90s. Ever since
then, Meldrum has led the charge to try
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