IMO Health has continued to push the boundaries in healthcare with innovative solutions for three decades. As a leader in both data analytics and healthcare IT, we are immensely proud of our recent recognition at the 2024 Best in Business Awards by Modern Healthcare. To commemorate this achievement, our CEO, Ann Barnes, sat down with Maria Castellucci of Modern Healthcare to discuss the factors that make IMO Health a superior company in such a competitive market.
Catch the full interview here:
Pressed for time? Keep scrolling for the full Q&A.
Modern Healthcare: Ann, congratulations on this achievement and thank you so much for being here.
Ann Barnes: Thank you. I’m so honored to be here accepting this on behalf of IMO Health and just glad to chat with you.
MH: What about IMO Health’s approach makes it a differentiator?
AB: We’ve been in business about 30 years, and we have about 90 percent market share in our foundational product. Our clinical data intelligence stack is built on a combination of a little bit of AI (artificial intelligence) and a whole bunch of clinical expertise. We have a large staff of clinicians that work very closely on this to improve our products on an ongoing basis.
On the provider side, we are embedded in every EHR (electronic health record) that is a major EHR and most ambulatory EHRs. In fact, we’re embedded in over a hundred EHRs as a foundational piece of the clinical workflow, which is really important. And we work with hospitals and health systems of all sizes, along with ambulatory organizations as well—we’re at the point of care, supporting doctors.
But we’re also working with health tech, life sciences, payers, as it relates to data quality solutions in health tech or payer life sciences to improve data quality and get it back to the level of specificity where IMO Health shines. That’s really where we’ve made a name for ourselves. There is not another company that can do what we do at the level of clinical specificity that we do it. So, it makes a very big difference, and we focus on real outcomes for our customers. That is physician satisfaction. We focus on better patient outcomes, but we also know we have to focus on return on investment for our customers by either helping them make more money or helping them save money.
MH: How does IMO Health stay ahead of these changes and continue to meet the evolving needs of your partners?
AB: We stay very closely connected with our EHR partners as well as our customers. And we hear a lot from our customers right now that vendor consolidation is really important to them. They just don’t have the resources or the bandwidth to work with lots and lots of vendors to try to solve simple problems for them. So, we help them easily add to the foundational products they already have from us by adding new products that improve the workflow and improve the data quality.
We work on things like HCC (Hierarchical Condition Category) management, optimizing OR scheduling, data standardization, looking at unstructured data with NLP (natural language processing). And we can provide all of those things from one vendor as a one stop shop. We also collaborate on an ongoing basis through a customer advisory council; it represents all different sizes of health systems and hospitals across the country. And we have many, many dev partner clients where we’re actually exploring products together and building products together. So, it helps keep us very closely connected.
MH: How does IMO Health tailor its solutions to address their unique goals and challenges?
AB: As I said earlier, we spent 30 years as a trusted foundation for clinical terminology and that level of understanding of what the clinician’s trying to do at the point of care is really, really critical, and we recognize that there’s an interconnectedness between what payers need and providers need. So, that allows us to do things like streamline risk adjustment and ensure alignment and understanding and very clear communication.
One of the challenges there is dirty clinical data leads to missing or misaligned HCC, ICD-10 codes, which then disrupts reimbursement, CMS reporting, and causes a lot of frustration and a lot of manual work. So, we integrate payer-sourced insights directly at the point of care so that the physician can see them while they’re working with the patient and allows them to make the appropriate changes they need to make or address the missing information at the point of care while the encounter is happening. That accurate documentation then reduces all the clinician rework that has to go on; it improves RAF (risk adjustment factor) scores; it can fix the care gap closure that we sort of are working on all the time; and then improves audit compliance—but most importantly, just streamlines the whole process for the clinician.
MH: What does this recognition mean to you personally, as a leader, and to the IMO Health team?
AB: It means so much. This team has worked so hard and has such a passion and such a vision for what we want to do and what we want to accomplish with healthcare. We’ve made a big impact as it relates to our clinicians at the point of care. We want to continue to do that, but we also very much want to impact data quality as it relates to healthcare so that better decisions can get made and better patient outcomes happen. So, this is just recognition that validates what we’re doing is on the right path and we’re excited to do more.
