Verge Health: Re-inventing Healthcare

Protect Patients. Protect Margins.

Verge Health started its journey eighteen years ago and built a loyal client base by meeting specific needs in the market for credentialing and accreditation and then growing to encompass safety. Currently, the company has partnered with more than 900 healthcare organizations. They have helped them through their software and services which unite historically siloed areas like credentialing, peer review, event management, claims, patient experience, accreditation and regulatory, and payer enrollment. By vertically expanding capabilities, the company became a true platform to unite these siloed functions that could deliver incredible benefits to health systems that often operate in the dark.

We interviewed Connie Moser, CEO of Verge Health to gain an in-depth understanding of the industry.

What is your top priority as an organization?

Verge Health strives to help clients make zero harm in healthcare a reality. We are making this happen by following the path of airline and nuclear industries that have already made significant strides in achieving high reliability, driving towards zero harm.

Verge Health has already deployed the Governance, Risk and Compliance structure for healthcare (GRC^H) at organizations both large and small across the nation. And the results achieved are transformational. The company ensures that its clients and all stakeholders throughout the organization have perfect visibility about the potential risks that are accompanied by breaking down silos and standardizing work.

The company follows a proactive versus reactive strategy to ensure patient safety with the help of insights gained from thousands of data points collected from rounding, event management, patient relations, and accreditation and regulatory work, we can identify potential risk, providing time to take preventative action.

What are your products and services?

Verge Health provides software and services that empower healthcare organizations to proactively protect and defend patients, caregivers, and facilities against errors, adverse events, and policy violations for optimal quality and safety. Rooted in best practice, the Converge Platform delivers robust analytics, a comprehensive operational solution, and support for organizations working towards high reliability. Converge unites organizational compliance, patient and employee safety, and practitioner management. Strategic Advisory Services provide the pathway and change-management to get to high reliability and stay there.

Share with us your view of the challenges that healthcare faces today?

It is said that a hospital inpatient experience begins months or even years before the patient arrives in bed because the whole experience is based on preset processes that are all intricately connected. For instance, when a patient arrives at the bed, the ED physician reaches for a kit or asks for medicines and it has to be there. Also, the person assisting or administering the medicine should have received training that’s recent and relevant, and in the end, the physician goes to an EMR and tells everything he just did. This is the system that is followed even in world-class hospitals. That kit, or that process, even the training has no medical record number, no place to record it in a clinical system, yet the entire clinical experience rides on it being there. The new challenges are about getting that right. 

The past world of change the policy, train the people, wait until entropy takes over and accept mediocrity is not going to work.

One of the company clients who are in the top few health systems in the country does 250,000 audits of the process and environment of care annually, across more than 50 facilities, with 1000 users of our software. If something isn’t right, anywhere, they can see it, and track how long it takes local leadership to address. No matter what challenges come their way, they can now move as an organization to address it, reliably, and sustainably.

Tell us about a time when you came up with an innovative solution to challenge your company.

Verge Health has brought in world-class BI and analytic tools that allow for platform level data to be accessed from a single dashboard. The Converge analytics tool, “Insights”, automates the data analysis process to draw conclusions, create trends and make connections between issues and helps people to gain deeper insight into risk and compliance performance.

The ultimate business impact of intelligent analytics in a GRCH environment relates to proactive insight for the enterprise. The value of this addition to the Converge platform is tied to earlier identification of risks and potential incidents, as well as deeper insight into factors contributing to risks and relationships between key risk indicators and key performance indicators.

What do you see as the future of healthcare?

Transparency of quality and provider data has given rise to informed patients and they will determine which organization will move ahead in the future. Also, with the continuous increase in healthcare expenses, patients are likely to demand a higher level of convenience, access, and quality matching the expense.

Consumerism and transparency around performance will become a catalyst for moving faster down the road on the journey to high reliability. Healthcare organizations worked hard to get data and ended up with data overload that wasn’t providing insights. Soon enough organizations will start getting to the “why” of their data and ensure all efforts are centered on the patient.

Meet the Apothecary

Connie Moser brings to this position more than 30 years of experience in the healthcare technology industry. Connie has distinctive leadership abilities around predictive analytics, strategic use of data, and delivering operational efficiencies with cloud-based software solutions. She also ran the credentialing business while with McKesson. She has presented on various healthcare topics at meetings sponsored by HIMSS, HFMA and NAHAM, and the HFMA Thought Leadership Conference in Washington DC.

“With the Converge Platform, everyone in a healthcare organization becomes part of delivering on the promise of clinical excellence and safe, positive experience.”