The Minneapolis-based health-care/IT company formerly known as VisionShare began in February in its offices near the University of Minnesota and ended the month as
ABILITY Network in its newly designed headquarters in Downtown Minneapolis' Butler Square.
The new 51,000-square-foot digs--designed to meet LEED Commercial Interior standards--reflect the 11-year-old company's physical growth. Now with 135 employees, ABILITY has added 100 jobs in the past few years and expects to add a hundred more in the next few, including dozens more jobs this year, says CEO Mark Briggs.
Meanwhile, the fresh moniker reflects the substantial growth and change of the business; after many years enabling secure internet Medicare transactions, ABIILTY has extended its services to more health-care providers.
ABILITY now connects 3,500 hospitals nationwide--about half the hospitals in the country, says Briggs--as well as tens of thousands of other health-care facilities.
Furthermore, ABILITY now allows those customers to do more than just administer Medicare transactions, but to work with commercial payers or plans, says Briggs.
He characterizes the network as a "Google for doc[tors]" that "enables clinicians to be aware of the fragmented nature of their patients' clinical record," says Briggs.
"When I show up at the hospital for the first time, I start with a blank manila folder," he explains, "I've got health information scattered across the health-care network. There was no way, pre-ABILTIY, for the health-care-giver to know where all that information was."
ABILITY allows the care-giver to locate the information and bring it together, with patient consent and in a secure way that takes the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) into account, Briggs notes.
The result is "more efficient health care that leads to better patient outcomes, lower costs [for both insurers and patients] and to take the same budget and provide care for more people instead of less-efficient care for fewer," he says.
Briggs notes that stimulus funding and the attention the current administration has given to health care have "been helpful in enabling health-care providers to have the resources to connect." IT advances have made the work possible.
"Only recently did the technology mature to the point where this became feasible," says Briggs, "and hospitals and doctors have funding to enable these types of networks to grow profitably."
Source: Mark Briggs, ABILITY Network
Writer: Jeremy Stratton