MaxMD is a leader in secure healthcare information technology and interoperability solutions. MaxMD is committed to providing secure communications solutions that enable superior coordinated care for healthcare practices, organizations, hospital systems, and HIT application service providers.
In this Interview with Mr. Scott Finlay, let us know more about the company.
Tell us about the company.
From its inception, MaxMD’s mission has been to create scalable, affordable clinical data liquidity. By providing customers with technology that improves the coordination of patient care and enables better healthcare outcomes, MaxMD has earned the trust of healthcare customers across the industry. Today, MaxMD prides itself on its ability to provide value by making it safer, easier, and more cost-effective to handle inputs and outputs to or from any new or legacy edge system at scale.
MaxMD maximizes our technical capabilities and knowledge of healthcare information technology standards to dramatically improve the value proposition beyond simple data transport offered by many of our industry competitors.
We believe reliance on a single technology standard isn’t optimal or feasible given the fragmented nature of the healthcare market. MaxMD leverages what works today while positioning for what’s coming tomorrow.
MaxMD stands out in the market, owing to its ability to innovate for customers. Unlike other HISPs that focus solely on secure and trusted data transport, MaxMD offers solutions with more significant features that improve workflows and leverage both emerging and widely adopted HIT standards. The company’s services include features such as a sophisticated integration engine that transforms data from one format to another, converting proprietary outputs to standards-based HL7 C-CDA or FHIR formats.
While the company has added a data validation engine to manage data quality and a robust rules engine to control the flow, it also has a Natural Language Processing engine to make better use of narrative data too. As a result, the company’s services enable clients to receive information in a format that is compatible with their existing technology and current workflows or convert to new formats supporting a transition toward new technology and new improved workflows.
Our vision is that of an “interoperability solution provider” that creates scalable and affordable clinical data liquidity without the need to abandon legacy systems or relinquish control. It’s about offering “instant interoperability” by providing technology solutions that make it easier for other organizations to make use of emerging capabilities like mobile apps, digital devices, and web-based solutions poised to improve healthcare communications and outcomes.
Our approach allows data to be more widely distributed as opposed to creating redundant consolidated data repositories, which we believe is a superior approach to security.
Our vision is that of an “interoperability solution provider” that creates scalable and affordable clinical data liquidity without the need to abandon legacy systems or relinquish control.
Perhaps most important, MaxMD does not claim our client’s data to monetize people’s private information. It is one thing to provide technology in exchange for the free use of an application; it is entirely something else to usurp the data flowing through that “free” technology for monetary gain. Our HISP roots run deep. As a trusted steward of protected health information, our business model isn’t based on monetizing other people’s data.
We leave decisions about how data will be used to the rightful owners. Our clients can verify and trust that we don’t aggregate and sell their data. That’s not what we built our business to do. Administering ethical data privacy and consent policies is an important part of what MaxMD believes.
What were the initial challenges you faced?
Healthcare interoperability challenges have been compounded by longstanding industry dynamics such as reliance on outdated siloed systems, lack of uniform data standards, and an incredibly fragmented healthcare marketplace. However, these are also the market dynamics that our solutions are ideally suited to tackle. MaxMD builds standards-based, scalable solutions designed to create cost-effective clinical data liquidity.
While Progress on exchanging interoperable health information has been slow it is improving and the pace of change is poised to accelerate with the passing of the 21st Century Cures Act. There’s the complexity to overcome in multiple areas. MaxMD provides easily accessible tools and services that interface with virtually any existing Healthcare Information Technology system. Our technology supports bi-directional exchange, which makes closed-loop communication possible and encourages patient-provider engagement.
Which was that point that triggered the growth of the company?
We’ve grown significantly over the past couple of years and we are expanding our services in response to clients’ needs. There is no single factor that has created growth; rather it is an accumulation of factors such as the creation of the Office of the National Coordinator of Healthcare Information Technology, the development of standards such as Clinical Data Architecture (CDA), the Direct Protocol (DSM), Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and the movement towards value-based care and just as important legislation such as the 21st Century Cures Act that is driving both innovation and growth.
We believe reliance on a single technology standard isn’t optimal or feasible given the fragmented nature of the healthcare market. MaxMD leverages what works today while positioning for what’s coming tomorrow. MaxMD has the deep technical expertise and offers leadership in the application of standards such as HL7 Version 2 (V2), Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). We enable our customers to leverage available standards and achieve the interoperability they require. Our solutions address a wide range of client types and customer needs.
We automate event notifications for admissions, discharges, and other types of care coordination. We make it easy for health information technology (HIT) innovators to exchange standard Consolidated CDA (C-CDA) documents to and from legacy HIT systems. MaxMD is at the forefront of deploying information exchange solutions that bridge the use of existing C-CDA standards and newer FHIR-based technology. Our solutions support providers, payers, and patients, and offer mobile app technology that can augment traditional EMR and edge-system user interfaces.”
What is the reason behind your company’s long-standing success?
Several factors separate MaxMD from peers in the industry. What distinguishes the company is its commitment to the principle “best idea wins” and its competence in leveraging HIT Standards to accelerate creativity and innovation. A master of HIT standards, MaxMD offers compliant solutions that create market differentiation. MaxMD sees standardization as a catalyst that accelerates innovation and differentiation, not something that limits differentiation. Creating technology that does more than meet the compliance requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act is fueling growth for MaxMD.
Powered by a multi-disciplinary team of experienced healthcare professionals with complementary skills and creative problem-solving natures, MaxMD is committed to creating scalable and affordable clinical data liquidity across a technology-dependent and fragmented healthcare ecosystem. We brought together people with backgrounds in standards development, insurance, EHR systems, and clinical care. We have talented software engineers focused on the vision of creating solutions that leverage standards and scale.
The Products/Services
What are the products/services the company focuses on? How are your services different from those in the market?
Although several factors separate MaxMD from peers in the industry, what distinguishes the company is its commitment to the principle “best idea wins” and its competence in leveraging HIT Standards to accelerate creativity and innovation. A master of the standards, MaxMD offers compliant solutions that create market differentiation. We see standardization as a catalyst that accelerates innovation and differentiation, not something that limits differentiation. Creating technology that does more than meet the compliance requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act is fueling growth for MaxMD.
Powered by a multi-disciplinary team of experienced healthcare professionals with complementary skills and creative problem-solving natures, MaxMD is committed to creating scalable and affordable clinical data liquidity across a technology-dependent and fragmented healthcare ecosystem. MaxMD brought together people with backgrounds in standards development, insurance, EHR systems, and clinical care. We have talented software engineers focused on the vision of creating solutions that leverage standards and scale.
Is there any new addition to the list of products/services? Anything exciting you would like to share?
In light of the 21st Century Cures Act requirements MaxMD’s lightweight data transportation and transformation solutions provide customizable rule sets and real-time delivery of clinical data will be valuable to many Payer Organizations. The customizable rules engine and data validation capabilities can automate unique workflows and ease interoperability across the care ecosystem—delivering the right information in the right format at the right time.
Additionally, we are particularly excited about The MaxMD Patient App. The MaxMD App is already CMS Blue Button 2.0 Approved and compliant with CARIN Consumer-Directed Payer Data Exchange. It natively supports consumer access to Explanation of Benefits information from CMS and private payers and is compatible with Certified EHRs another FHIR Enabled system.
The MaxMD mobile app is a patient-facing application available for Android and iOS devices to maximize communication efficiency. It provides a personal user interface that creates a secure bidirectional communication channel for any type of information that needs to be shared between payers, providers, and patients. It supports consumer-directed exchange with both query and push capabilities.
