What if you went to a web site and didn’t find what you wanted? Or didn’t understand what you found? This describes what most people encounter when trying to access revenue cycle data. We knew it didn’t have to be that way, so we started Anodyne Health.

In this blog, my first on our new site, I’d like to briefly describe our purpose and, frankly, give you new hope for managing revenue with business intelligence tools.

IT folks: Please don’t take offense when I say that the pioneers of business intelligence designed BI for use by equally techno-astute individuals. But guess what? About 85 percent of people in provider organizations who need to access information find BI tools too difficult to use.

Having spent our careers managing the healthcare revenue cycle, we had seen this happen time and again. In starting Anodyne, we eschewed traditional ways, building a custom application instead of relying on readily available BI tools.

Here’s the key: We’re non-technical healthcare professionals designing solutions based on our knowledge of what people need at their fingertips. The insight we glean for you is highly relevant. There’s no useless information. It’s all information you can act on. There is not a comparable tool that gives non-technical people at healthcare provider organizations such easy, quick access to very specific revenue cycle information.

As I write, we’re significantly expanding our development team. We’re creating complementary solutions that have the same principles in mind—better information, better results. Our dashboard is an example. It will meet the needs of physicians within large enterprises.

More to come on that.

For now, I simply want to share this: Whether billing or BI, Anodyne delivers powerful insight accessed by people experienced in managing the healthcare revenue cycle, and demonstrates a clear commitment to driving better results. Put it all together, and you have something of extraordinary value that doesn’t exist out there today.

Thanks for dropping by.

Michael

----

Michael Funk | CEO, Anodyne Health

Greetings and welcome to the Anodyne Health IT Blog. I’m Sean Molley, Chief Technology Officer and your guide into the world of the propeller-heads. The title of this post is drawn from one of the most frequent comments I’ve heard over the years when speaking to groups of end users and business executives who have been burned by bad implementations of Business Intelligence (BI) software. Information technology in general and BI in particular are a huge part of what we do here at Anodyne, but I think one of our biggest strengths as a company is the way in which we take IT and make it work for users in a way that is intuitive and powerful. I’m consistently thrilled by how quickly people are able to get up and running with our software and make the leap from novice to power user in such a short period of time. This is in stark contrast to what many organizations experience when they purchase and install supposedly high-powered BI software – you don’t have to look very hard to find horror stories told by people who’ve spent millions of dollars on hardware and software, spent years on planning, implementation, and customization, and then failed to derive any significant value from those massive investments. That’s exactly what we are in business to help people avoid.

At Anodyne, our approach to technology is unique, and it’s specifically designed so that our clients never have to tell those kinds of horror stories. We think that BI should be inexpensive to buy, fast to implement, and easy to use – with an immediate and tangible return on investment that keeps right on delivering measurable value each and every month. And our clients agree – as you can read in the many testimonials to be found elsewhere on this website. As the CTO, I’m supposed to tell you that this is because our nerds are smarter than everybody else’s nerds. They are, of course, but that’s not why our BI delivers results that are unmatched in the industry. We build better BI solutions because we start by focusing on real-world expertise and only then do we build software that translates that real-world expertise into code. No mere program will ever fully replace the experience and common sense of a human being, of course, but software has the power to sift through massive quantities of data at a much faster rate than any human ever could, and our challenge in healthcare IT is to figure out how we can combine the brute force of a computer’s power with the insight and intelligence of a revenue-cycle expert.

That approach is really what attracted me to Anodyne in the first place: I’ve been building software for a long time, and I’ve been building what most folks would call “business intelligence” software almost exclusively for the last 10 years, the vast majority of it for healthcare. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to observe what works and what doesn’t. The traditional approach to BI has always been to start by focusing on the software instead of on the problem that software is supposed to solve. The most powerful BI tool in the world is useless unless it’s been built and customized by people who have deep knowledge of the specific domain in which you need it to solve problems. I think that’s why so many organizations have been frustrated with their “enterprise” BI implementations – they bought “enterprise” software that was designed to be all things to all people, which really just means that it can do a lot of things at a mediocre level instead of doing one thing well. At Anodyne, revenue-cycle management is what we do, and we do it well. That experience and expertise is what we translate into our software. Our BI tools are better because they were designed by people who think like you do.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on a variety of topics, from BI in general to Anodyne’s BI in particular and everything in between. Other members of our IT team will also take the floor from time to time and discuss topics that fall within their specific areas of expertise. Our hope is that this blog will both inform and entertain you – and that by the time we’re finished, you’ll agree that “business intelligence” doesn’t have to be an oxymoron after all.

Talk to you later --

Sean

----

M. Sean Molley │ Chief Technology Officer, Anodyne Health