Companies exist for many reasons. Some are born from a vision of a founder. Others were created because a smart businessperson identified an opportunity in the marketplace. And some are created to solve a problem.
Healthjump has a humble, heartfelt beginning...as an idea for a solution on the back of a napkin.
The problem that our founders Martin Aboitiz and Cliff Cavanaugh were trying to solve seems pretty simple at first: giving patients access to their medical records.
The concept for Healthjump was conceived at the 2013 Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in New Orleans. The theme for that year was, “Health IT: Right Time. Right Place.” (Oh yea, our marketing team loves that!)
At the time, Martin was running his data integration company in Argentina and Cliff was running his own electronic health records (EHR) deployment firm. It didn’t take long for the two to decide that they each held pieces of the puzzle needed to solve the healthcare data access issue.
As nearly everything that has ever been good has started, they met for coffee.
Martin reflects that it only took him 10-minutes to know that a) Cliff was someone he wanted to partner with and b) they had a great concept to bring to market.
It was during this coffee chat that they drafted the initial concept of what would become Healthjump on the back of a napkin.
As heartwarming as the back-of-the-napkin story is, the reality is that what Martin and Cliff were setting out to accomplish with Healthjump was not only ambitious but ahead of where anyone really saw healthcare data going - even back in 2013.
Visualizing a Patient-First, Data Management Solution
Though founded by Cliff and Martin, along with two other founders, Mark Ribeiro and Shanti Aboitiz, they knew immediately that something, or someone, was missing. A short two weeks after that fateful HIMSS conference, Cliff and Martin met Jim Rowland, our Chief Revenue Officer.
Jim’s background is deep in healthcare and he was the right person to help translate Healthjump from an idea on a coffee shop napkin to an operational company.
Their goal, from the beginning, was to focus on the patients. The trio dreamed of a patient-controlled, data management solution. Cliff Cavanaugh says of their initial idea:
“The idea of healthcare data being disconnected was very personal for two reasons. One, my mother has a very rare chronic condition and sees specialist after specialist. It’s a terrible experience when everywhere we go, she gets asked to do the same MRIs and same studies. Even in the same health system, every single clinician was starting from ground zero every time and so much was lost in the mix.”
The second reason Cliff explained was that, as an Electronic Health Record (EHR) developer, he believed that Healthjump needed to be a product that was adopted as easily as software.
When the Healthjump Portal was launched, our company existed to deliver improved access to healthcare information for patients. Our goal? To make medical records available to all members of the care continuum, from physicians to patients and their families.
The Future in Focus: Collect, Aggregate, Benefit
Healthjump was doing something completely unique in how they were accessing and collecting health data for use in their patient portal. The process that Cliff and the team developed to extract data from electronic health record systems (EHR Systems) leveraged over a decade of specialized know-how from their years in deploying and integrating EHR systems for practices. The data that the Healthjump Portal was automatically extracting from health record systems for patients was not only rich, detailed, and readable, but it was doing this across multiple EHR systems with the same results.
For 6 years, Healthjump proudly solved the problem it was created for with this patient-first mindset. The Healthjump patient portal connected patients with physicians, specialists, health care systems and gave them access to all of their healthcare data before others started taking notice. Healthjump started getting a lot of questions about how they were getting such good data across multiple competing EHR systems. As more and more companies in the industry became interested in extracting data from ambulatory EHR systems for use in their own applications, the leadership team began to seriously evaluate the opportunity.
While the product was initially meant to be a patient tool, it had the potential to solve the problem of a lack of interoperability between EHR vendors, practices, and the digital health companies serving them. By turning Healthjump’s existing data collection infrastructure into a data interoperability platform, new organizations were able to automate their access to practice EHR data for use in patient engagement tools, quality measures reporting, reputation management services, and population health. Healthjump could still serve the same mission of making medical records available to all members of the care continuum, from physicians to patients and their families. As the heartbeat of healthcare data for services and software applications throughout healthcare, Healthjump ensures that information and data could be more than just exchanged, but adopted.
“We all think, as patients, that if the doctor is typing notes that the data is being recorded for some reason. We just assume it’s being used for something, so it’s easy to think that the problem Healthjump is solving doesn’t exist. Patients may think they don’t see what the outcome of the data is, but the doctor must. But, it doesn’t. In the end, the data is stuck.” -Martin Aboitiz
Working to ensure that the data being collected by practitioners makes it full circle from patient to EHR and EHR to digital health applications, it creates new value for everybody in the care continuum. There is no question that improved interoperability allows practitioners to make better decisions for their patients and practices can make more informed decisions about the patient populations they serve.
In the end, whether it’s healthcare practitioners or technology vendors that are partnering with Healthjump, our mutual goals have remained the same: to improve patient outcomes and enhance the overall patient experience.
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