Great demo by Kathleen Plath and her colleagues at HealthWyse yesterday.

HealthWyse has a full menu of options and services. They have an application for Home Health, Hospice, and Private Duty. There is also options for coding, a physician portal, and a more robust report engine.

They have a hybrid of web-based and local data, but do not require you to purchase and maintain a server in order to host your data locally. Your data is backed up on a desktop installation and synchs every 15 minutes with your data located at HealthWyse secure data center.
This is a great solution for areas without great internet connectivity or whose field devices take awhile to access the web. The application can be used by clinicians with or without internet.

While I appreciate that HealthWyse knows who their customer is, and it is NOT a start-up agency, HealthWyse has recently introduced a StartWyse option to bring their complete paperless solution to the small agency market. They identify a good candidate for the StartWyse option as having 100 -150 patients on census, less than 25 clinicians, and one line of business.
Agencies with more than 25 clinicians, more than one line of business, and/or more than one location would choose the regular HealthWyse implementation.

Implementation can be completed in around 10 weeks for the Startwyse option.
If you’ve read any of the previous reviews you will know how much I appreciate Medicare Eligibility Checking. HealthWyse users can select one to all patients for eligibility checks as frequently as you like. Any of you who have submitted a final bill only to find out that your patient has signed up for a managed Medicare plan knows the value of being able to check eligibility on your entire census throughout the episode!
While the implementation costs are higher than many of the other solutions reviewed here (over $25,000 depending on options), it should be considered that the solution is completely compliance driven and has a “HealthWyse Clinical Assistant” TM (thats a trademark sign–I don’t know how to make it on wordpress!)feature that prompts clinicians and managers to follow industry best practice. This may be an excellent solution for agencies with little industry experience.
While the implementation costs are on the high side, (they spend a lot of resources on building the back end, so the front end is more user friendly) the monthly costs are comparable to some other applications reviewed here at approx $1000-$3000 per month.
Contact Kathleen Plath at kplath@healthwyse.com and visit them at www. healthwyse.com