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Phyzit Puts App On Athenahealth Marketplace, Adds Greg Bledsoe As Adviser

3 min read

Phyzit of Little Rock announced Monday that its transitional care management app will now be available from the online Athenahealth Marketplace.

The Phyzit TCM app helps doctors and health care systems with transitional care management — the process of monitoring patients for 30 days following their discharge from a hospital.

Arkansas Surgeon General Dr. Greg Bledsoe has also joined the Phyzit advisory board and will become an equity owner of the company. He said he would be doing so as a “private health care person.” The state and governor are not endorsing Phyzit, he said.

“I think it’s a great company,” Bledsoe told Arkansas Business. “Its focus is transitional care, and one of the problems that we’ve had in health care with rising health expenses has been that there hasn’t been good communication between hospitals … and doctors, with all the different specialists and primary care doctors.”

Athenahealth of Watertown, Massachusetts, is a publicly traded company that provides cloud-based services for health care and point-of-care mobile apps. According to its most recent proxy statement, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April, Athenahealth has $924.7 million in total revenue and net income of $53.6 million.

Phyzit’s partnership with Athenahealth is part of Athenahealth’s “More Disruption Please” program. It has been vetting the Phyzit app for about eight months. The app joins about 50 other products in the Athenahealth Marketplace, making it available to Athenahealth’s network of more than 75,000 health care providers.

Phyzit CEO Keith Moore said Athenahealth makes integrating Phyzit easy; those using its electronic medical records software can also use Phyzit’s app. 

“Instead of Athena going out and chasing all these smaller focus areas, they make it easy to … integrate within their tool so they can get these solutions in front of their customers more quickly,” he said.

That marketing reach will help promote Phyzit. 

“They have account reps that are already in communication with their active customers/clinics, that will say, ‘Here’s another product that is part of our suite that would be good for you,'” Moore said.

The Phyzit app has helped doctors’ offices gain an average of $1,400 to $2,000 in new revenue per provider per month, and it has decreased hospital readmissions by more than 60 percent, Moore said.

The app helps users efficiently complete the necessary paperwork to be reimbursed for transitional management care, which is reimbursed at a higher rate than regular follow-up visits.

Phyzit’s software automates tracking and billing, and improves patient-provider communication via telemedicine and mobile messaging. It has a dashboard system that reminds offices of deadlines and provides billing reports.

Bledsoe on Board

Phyzit’s advisory board meets once a month to evaluate the startup and offer input on how it should move forward. The advisers “help open doors,” said Dr. Stephen Canon, Phyzit’s co-founder and chief medical officer.

Bledsoe said transitional care is highlighted in the Affordable Care Act as a way to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs. He said Phyzit offers a “great system” and that he respects the startup’s team, which he said is “off to a good start and should have a big impact soon.”

Canon said Bledsoe likes what the company is doing. 

“He likes health care innovation. He likes health tech startups,” Canon said. “He, in his role as the chief clinical officer at Arkansas Heart Hospital, is really trying — along with Dr. Bruce Murphy, the CEO there — to encourage a health care innovation environment … I think what we’re doing embodied a lot of what they’re wanting to do and wanting to encourage.”

Phyzit President Mike Blanchat said the board of advisers offers a larger perspective on the industry.  He said Phyzit is consistent with Bledsoe’s mindset as surgeon general, which is “it would be better to manage health proactively wherever you are.”

Phyzit’s Athenahealth partnership follows an agreement announced in December with a subsidiary of Baptist Health to provide transitional care management for 52 affiliated health-care providers at 21 clinics in Arkansas.

Phyzit now serves over 6,000 patients in five states and around 200 providers in Arkansas.

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