Collaborative Care

That's the main reason he spent the 1980s working in banking and the 1990s involved in manufacturing. From 1985 to 1995, Capobianco sat at the side of Charles Wang, former CEO of the multi-billion dollar software company Computer Associates. Then, in early 2000, Capobianco pursued that passion even more when he joined Bluestone Software Inc., a successful technology company that eventually was sold to Hewlett-Packard.

"Bluestone served me well because it brought me up to speed on the next generation of software, all the Web services, service-oriented architectures and all the things people are talking about today," Capobianco says.

Starting as chief marketing officer at MEDecision in 2002, he helped to pioneer the integration paradigm within the healthcare arena and made integration and collaboration the company's core philosophy. "What surprised me-with all of the technological evolution that had been happening since I started my career in information technology-was the state of non-integration in healthcare, primarily on the care management side," he says.

He also helped to coin the term "integrated medical management" (IMM). According to Capobianco, IMM provides payers, providers and patients with a cooperative approach to healthcare. It offers a comprehensive medical management workflow and customized clinical information based on a common patient view of a person's medical record.

The goal: to allow healthcare stakeholders to collectively make better, faster decisions which accelerate the net impact of collaborative care resulting in improved healthcare outcomes and reduced costs.

Q. What do you see as the biggest challenge facing healthcare today?

A The biggest challenge to healthcare today is achieving better patient outcomes while making healthcare more affordable. The spiraling cost of healthcare has resulted in the emergence of both consumer-directed healthcare and collaborative care as solutions to reducing costs and improving care.

Consumer-directed healthcare consists of providing consumers with benefit plan options, but not necessarily more comprehensive and better access to patient health information.

Collaborative care provides a common view of a patient's health in order to foster better decisions which improve the outcome and affordability of healthcare. The electronic sharing of patient health records between payers, providers and patients ultimately will empower the consumer to make better healthcare decisions.

Q. How do you propose to address that challenge?

ABy focusing on collaborative care management. The operative challenge is to get the right information into the hands of the decision maker as a medical decision is being made. MEDecision's Integrated Medical Management is a comprehensive suite of collaborative care management solutions. It enables collaboration by providing a common patient view, an electronic picture of a person's historical and current medical data in a secure and protected environment. It's based on a payer-based health record. Payers, providers and patients are all decision makers and all will benefit from increased and better access to patient health records when medical decisions need to be made.

Q. How do you address the questions of access to healthcare data from disparate sources for providers, hospitals, employers and plans?