CIO Bulletin

Mpowered Health - Reinventing The Consumer Healthcare Experience

Healthcare in the United States is stressful - for the people and for the organizations that deliver healthcare services. Millions of people can't afford health insurance, struggle with increasing premiums, unanticipated costs, difficulty obtaining medical records,and have no clarity around the cost and quality of their healthcare choices. To make it simpler, Mpowered Health was founded to raise the health standards and enable people to take charge of their healthcare. We interviewed Nandini Devi, the Founder and CEO of Mpowered Health, to learn more about the company and services offered. Here are a few excerpts of the interview:

Q. Can you tell us a little bit about Mpowered Health?

Mpowered Health is a consumer-centered healthcare company that empowers individuals & families to take charge of their healthcare, and healthcare organizations to acquire & engage consumers more effectively. Mpowered Health's platform provides consumers with solutions for healthcare transparency, choice, access, and convenience.

Any individual in the United States – irrespective of age, gender, or coverage can use the free mobile and web app to consolidate health records from multiple healthcare organizations, share their records with family members & caregivers, search for and access healthcare services. Mpowered Health also provides enterprise solutions to enable healthcare organizations to acquire, engage and retain their consumers more effectively. Our enterprise offerings span compliance, analytics & consumer engagement and address unique challenges that organizations face in each of these areas.

Q. How did you get the idea of setting up Mpowered, and why?

We in the US spend nearly $4 trillion a year on healthcare, more than any other country, of which almost 30% is considered wasteful. Despite this spending, nearly 30 million people in this country cannot afford insurance coverage. We have thousands of households for whom a $500 unanticipated healthcare expense is a difficult decision between paying the bill or making their car payment.

We as an industry have tried to fix this problem for decades, albeit with mixed results. Most healthcare organizations genuinely want to and have committed resources to improve the consumer's experience. However, structural barriers, misaligned goals, and misdirected incentives prevent them from achieving better results.

We will not be able to solve this problem unless the consumer is back in the driver's seat. We need to empower consumers so that they can make the right choices for themselves and their families. To do that, consumers need (I) a platform to showcase their voice; (II) a solution that gives them the transparency, the choice, and the convenient access they desire; (III) a trusted partner that puts the consumer first. Healthcare organizations also need to see wins if we are to make this sustainable.

Q. How does Mpowered Health help patients take charge of their healthcare?

Mpowered Health's free mobile and web app can help consumers to (i) quickly connect to multiple payers & providers to consolidate their health records, (ii) conveniently share their records with family members, caregivers, doctors, and payers (iii) get a second opinion on a treatment or diagnosis (iv) purchase health insurance coverage and more – all from within their mobile app.

We believe easy access to information and services, the choice and convenience of doing this all from within the Mpowered Health app presents an opportunity to help consumers make the right healthcare decisions for themselves and their families.

Q. How does Mpowered Health help healthcare enterprises?

Mpowered Health offers enterprise solutions in compliance, analytics, and engagement that helps organizations acquire & engage consumers, comply with regulations and optimize their performance. Our solution helps these organizations reduce the cost of compliance while fulfilling the broader goal – that of consumers accessing their data. Our approach to enterprise offerings is that enterprises need to see winning value for them to participate in this collaborative ecosystem. Therefore, all our offerings are designed to solve unique problems that these organizations face but have not been able to solve due to structural barriers.

Q. Brief us about your end-end CMS 9115-F Interoperability Compliance platform.

Mpowered Health's CMS 9115-F interoperability compliance suite is, I believe, the industry's first end-to-end comprehensive and scalable solution for meeting compliance needs of CMS 9115-F interoperability and future regulations with a consumer-mediated exchange of data. The company's solution enables payers and providers serving Medicare & Medicaid to quickly & efficiently comply with the CMS 9115-F Interoperability and Patient Access final rule. Our comprehensive solution enable payers and providers to (i) Ingest consumer data through rich set of data connectors and mappers with extensibility via configuration to any data feeds-- both batched & Realtime (ii) Support robust set of FHIR APIs configured with with right protocols and flags to expose required data to the right member iii) Pivot around managing granular member consents and making data available based on the Security and Privacy principles and (iii) maintain strict vigil with reports and analytics on data usage, triggers to identify potentially fraudulent apps, etc.

Our solution would cater to all the Medicare, MA and Medicaid payers , providers & TPAs, State Medicaid FFS programs, Medicaid MCOs, (CHIP) FFS programs , Children's health insurance program (CHIP) managed care entities, and Qualified Health Plan (QHP) issuers on the Federally Facilitated Exchanges (FFEs)

Q. What are the key components and features of your CMS 9115F platform?

Mpowered Health's CMS 9115-F interoperability compliance solution has four components to enable:

Enterprise data connectivity with both realtime and batch data ingestion capabilities while maintaining data sanity and provenance
FHIR Adherence and Open API connection based on HL7 FHIR v 4.0.1 for standardized data access
Managing granular contents through strict guardrails by to Auditing , reporting, and analytics
Consumer Experience management with an app and web portal with deep system integrations, self reporting and advanced insights

Q. Can you tell us about your vision for the future?

We are just getting started on what will be an exciting journey for the next several years. We have multiple services planned for a rollout on the consumer side. Consumers will be able to track not only their health records but also self-reported data and more. We plan to roll out services that help consumers manage their healthcare expenses. On the enterprise side, we will continue to build out the platform for 9123-F & 9915-F compliance. In addition, we will be launching solutions for effective consumer engagement with a special focus on the elderly & vulnerable populations.

I envision Mpowered Health as a consumer-driven healthcare ecosystem, where consumers are empowered to make the right decisions for themselves, while organizations are empowered to engage their consumers more cost-effectively. We also plan to launch capabilities for consumers to manage their healthcare expenses.

About the CEO

Nandini Devi is the Founder and CEO of Mpowered Health. She is a seasoned entrepreneur, strategic thinker, results-driven executive, and an empathetic leader with a passion for building highly impactful, socially responsible companies. Prior to founding Mpowered Health, Nandini co-founded ZeOmega and helped scale it into one of the industry's largest population health management solutions companies. She holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University.