Ordering marketplace the 'new wave' of software

Health Gorilla, the online healthcare marketplace connecting doctors and clinicians with diagnostic labs and radiology centers, has released Health Gorilla mobile for access to its marketplace through iPhones and iPads.

This online marketplace is the "new wave of software in medicine," said Steve Yaskin, CEO, speaking to Clinical Innovation + Technology. Health Gorilla’s founders realized that “on a daily basis, all physicians, whether independent or employed, follow a very simple workflow while treating patients." They place orders which is a process not very different from typical consumer ordering, he said. Physicians place 20-30 orders a day on average. While that is typically easy to do within an organization through its EHR, most independent physicians are not connected to outside labs and other organizations and even fewer can receive results.

Health Gorilla already is connected to more than 9,000 labs and 35,000 radiology centers as well as skilled nursing facilities, sleep centers, surgical centers and more. The goal, said Yaskin, is to establish a 100 percent catalog of all ambulatory vendors so ordering clinicians can look them up by turnaround time, services and tests offered, and more in real time.

Health Gorilla automates the ordering process including receipt of results right into patient records. “That eliminates fragmentation of the chart created right now by using different EMR systems at the facility and the physician office. We aggregate all external data automatically in the chart and make it available online or on mobile devices to all providers to facilitate care coordination.”

Yaskin said other companies have tried to do this but the marketplace is the business model that allows Health Gorilla to implement current workflows. Physicians can quickly log in and create accounts and use the marketplace for free. The vendors pay a small fee for each transaction. Vendors win, he said, by getting their business in front of providers. “We’re sending them business. We put them on the map for the smaller guys and for the larger guys, we automate their processing.”

Much like websites like Orbitz, ordering clinicians can go to Health Gorilla and compare several vendors. “We are successful where others couldn’t achieve complete coverage because of the marketplace concept.”

Health Gorilla first tried out the marketplace in the Silicon Valley area and found that everyone who tried it loved it. Ease of use is just one benefit, Yaskin said. Health Gorilla is fully compliant with Meaningful Use Stage 2 so physicians can earn incentive money for using it plus the tool fills in modular criteria for other objectives including electronic ordering, results and referrals. “The goal is to increase the quality of care and decrease the associated costs while being clinically integrated.”

In case you’re wondering, the company got its name for a few reasons. While the industry is full of medical names that are very similar, “we wanted a sense of something fresh, disruption, something new, friendly and something people would remember. The reaction is always the same—a big smile.”