Three years ago, Red e App Founder and CEO Jonathan Erwin responded to a perceived business need for a growing mobile workforce to better communicate with each other. Communication problems among health care providers are the root cause of over utilization of diagnostic testing and misdiagnosis of conditions. Jonathan spoke to ACO News about fixing these communication problems in the health care space.
ACO News: Red e App has been around for a few years now. Why is health care an important segment?
Jonathan Erwin: As we look at the unconnected workforce of the world, health care is big. Greater than 50% of the retail, hospitality, government, manufacturing, and education workforce is mobile. Health care workers are not the traditional knowledge workers sitting at a desk. So they need different tools for their communication. They need a more finite set of communications.
ACO: How are the communication needs of a hospital-based surgeon, psychiatric nurse, or radiologist different than a hospital administrator?
ERWIN: Management has always treated these workers the same as their desktop workforce. Typically, those people do not have corporate email addresses. They are not responding to emails or communication the way typical desktop workers do. They don’t need another login for an intranet they never use.
ACO: How does the changing reimbursement structure in health care drive the need for a different communication tool or protocol?
ERWIN: If I am an ACO that’s compensating a workforce for compliance or reimbursing providers for achieving certain metrics, then those workers need to be compliant to me. There are other messaging apps out there, but they are built around the consumer. Red e App is built around the premise that the organization comes first.
To meet the goals of the organization, there is information, files, and communication that workers need to have to do their job as it relates to goals of the organization.
Nobody measures internal communication. They all measure external communication and marketing. It is time to measure internal communication, because that will translate. It will go straight to your consumers and your business.
ACO: What problem do ACOs want you to solve?
ERWIN: When we talk to ACOs, they want to know how we connect them to the clinical workflow. ACOs have to shift their thinking.
We are not solving a problem regarding clinical workflow. There has been no communication between providers or secured transmission of data among affiliates. ACOs need to start at the bottom and recognize that they have a communication problem first and solve that securely, then they can layer all the other issues that they think they have on top of that.
Amee Kent
Red e App Marketing Director
