Elation Health, an electronic health records company for primary care, is teaming up with startup Dock Health to automate downstream clinical tasks to relieve the workload of already burned-out doctors.
Elation Health is integrating Dock's healthcare task management solution with its EHR to enable care teams to collaborate more efficiently, executives at both companies said. More than 23,000 clinicians use Elation Health's EHR system.
The integration of the technologies improves practice performance and reduces "dropped balls" by leveraging Elation’s robust API to securely transmit relevant patient data and clinical events to automatically activate workflows in Dock, which helps to streamline time-consuming and often routine administrative processes, said Pratik Savai, chief technology officer of Elation Health.
Launched in 2020, Dock Health was built by healthcare providers for healthcare providers and the company joins Elation’s marketplace of more than 300 integrators and strategic partners.
Dock is designed to bridge the gap between the administrative and clinical halves of healthcare. The company's workflows can automate many of the mundane, yet essential tasks among healthcare teams, according to Dock Health's CEO and co-founder, who perhaps has the best physician name in the industry, Michael Docktor, M.D.
"We create the workflows and processes to tackle the downstream administrative work. We're building the administrative hub for healthcare and replacing the antiquated tools, such as Post-It notes, Excel files, faxes and other tools of the trade, being used right now. We want to create the singular place for administrative work to be done," Docktor told Fierce Healthcare.
As a pediatric gastroenterologist and clinical director of innovation at Boston Children’s Hospital, Docktor said he faced the same problems experienced by many physicians—the gap between the clinical intent and all the administrative work required to ensure a patient’s needs are delivered upon.
For many doctors, there are too many balls in the air, too many administrative tasks to track and no good way to reliably work with a clinical team or ensure all the loops have been closed.
"Healthcare is a team sport," he said. "You have doctors working in the EHRs and administrative staff in Excel files, and there is so much workflow crossing between those two spheres ."
Incubated in the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator at Boston Children’s Hospital, Docktor and his team, which included seasoned UX designers, built Dock Health as a HIPAA-compliant workflow management platform purpose-built for healthcare.
The company also participated in other healthcare incubators including MassChallenge, KidsX and the Cedars-Sinai Health Accelerator.
Docktor said Dock Health's existing customers were calling for deeper integration with Elation Health's technology.
"This is the first version of the integration, where we are passing on information from our side to their side. Depending on how the market receives it, and we're seeing strong signals from the market, we'll look into other ways to further integrate or things that we can embed. There are many ways we potentially see this fanning out," Savai said.
Elation Health, a 10-year-old company, has raised $58 million to date.
“I have been using Elation for multiple years now in my functional medicine practice and needed a workflow management solution immediately after significant growth. My team and I found and promptly chose Dock Health. This combination has been a game-changer for my practice and facilitates efficient in-office and remote workers while flawlessly integrating with Elation,” said Melanie Dorion, founder and medical director at Be Vital Health, in a statement.
"Today’s primary care clinicians require innovative solutions to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving, and increasingly complex healthcare landscape. Elation is committed to enabling physicians with an end-to-end platform of tools and workflows purpose-built to advance the craft of medicine and restore the joy of practice,” Savai said.
The ongoing shift to value-based care models also requires better coordination between clinical care teams.
"As we move toward more toward value-based care, we can’t have accountable care without accountability," Docktor said. "We can help provide that structure, processes and best practices and by automating those downstream tasks, we can help tackle the administrative burdens in the practice of medicine."
The ability to connect Dock Health's system to Elation’s EHR augments the user’s productivity, and saves "hundreds of hours" wasted on administrative inefficiencies that can be reclaimed for patient needs and organizational growth, he said.