TactusMD Moves to the Cloud for Strong Security; Maximum Flexibility and Convenience
4 min read
Electronic Health Records (EHR) organization TactusMD, Inc. is one of only a few firms that offers its doctor-clients a streamlined, workflow-based solution for creating and retrieving patient data. To allow flexibility of use, the EHRs need to be highly accessible to authorized individuals. Yet, patient privacy acts (HIPPA) and doctors’ own beliefs that patient confidentiality is paramount—means TactusMD’s cloud solution offering must be extraordinarily stable and secure. When TactusMD sought a new hosting environment, it found the perfect combination of accessibility, security and cost effectiveness with Novatech.
“From a security and reliability standpoint, we wanted to bring everything into a single datacenter,” says TactusMD CEO Dr. Anthony Mari. “I had met Dave (Moorman, Novatech’s President of Managed IT Services) and had heard great things about Novatech’s service organization. They are personal and professionals and that is the way I like to run our company. Dave worked with us to help architect the type of hosting solution we knew we needed to ensure success for our business.”
Building Meaningful Patient Health
Even though TactusMD’s software communicates with hospitals and ties into their systems (through a third-party gateway), it is the local community doctors who actually use TactusMD EHR to record, update, access and share patient data. TactusMD’s unique ability to configure workflows for different doctors based upon the way they practice medicine, combined with visually pleasing user interface and health information exchange capability, makes trading and viewing patient data easy enough for any referring/referral doctors to review patient data in a meaningfully way.
“We offer an ambulatory health record system with the ability to trade patient data with larger enterprise medical systems and any other relevant third party healthcare software provider,” says Mari. “We can hook directly into the hospital system and trade patient data in real time, adding true life saving capabilities.”
TactusMD also enables universal access to patient records for the doctors themselves, via smartphone, tablet, notebook or through the hospital system. This enables TactusMD’s doctors to meet the criteria for meaningful use (a component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which provides a financial incentive for healthcare providers that use data in a meaningful way).
Supporting this criteria was a crucial step for TactusMD (the firm, which is still in its early growth phase and is 100% Meaningful Use 2012 Certified), but it made accessibility, security and reliability vital elements of its IT solution. TactusMD can implement an on-premise client-server solution or a SaaS cloud/hosted solution with in-house customer support. Prior to engaging Novatech, TactusMD’s cloud solution was divided among hosting providers from Chicago, Atlanta and New York.
“I believe sharing data is key and essential in providing quality healthcare in todays market, but you have to have the appropriate security and permissions in place to allow access to third parties. Our client-partners are counting on us to keep the data not only accessible but secure,” says Mari.
All-in-One Convenience
Thanks to its breadth of offerings and expertise, Novatech was able to help TactusMD transition to a fully hosted solution with best-practices security and reliability for medical data. Novatech hosts TactusMD’s cloud infrastructure, its business and client side infrastructure, and its development servers. “Novatefch provides consistency,” Mari notes.
“They provide as close to perfect uptime as anyone possibly can,” he continues. “And, they are responsive. I like to be able to pick up the phone and get in touch with someone. That is a big deal for me.” When speaking to the security aspects of the Novatech solution, Mari likens it to that of a bank. “We are confident that when you log-in, there is security that will protect your ID and information.”
TactusMD is in the process of developing a web-based application, and Novatech is ensuring the firm has the right foundation as it makes code modifications for that transition. “It’s a matter of attending to the right things,” says Mari. “We needed an environment to be stable as we were a developing company and preparing to scale. We started with a few servers and the relationship just grew.”
Mari says Novatech’s solution is also the most cost-effective option for TactusMD, both now and as it scales up to being a larger enterprise. “It was the best business decision for us,” he says. “Add to that the capital investment; the learning curve; everything would have been twice as expensive, if not more. Besides, who needs the stress of doing it yourself?”
