The Origin Story
Anodyne Clinical and FreeTime is the result of a three decade journey, and always the result of applying the most current technology to lift the burden of encounter documentation from the physician's shoulders...
It started with...
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Early 90's
EMR Pioneer
Long before electronic medical record (EMR) use became widespread, Joseph A. DiPoala, Jr. MD, a second generation internist, recognized that information technology could greatly improve the way physicians worked and enhance their effectiveness. Before finishing his residency training, Dr. Joe began work on his first EMR, with the goal of improving visit workflow by better organizing clinical data and making it easier to access.
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1997
Leveraging IBM's ViaVoice
Dr. Joe was also an early adopter of voice recognition technology, beginning in 1997 when IBM's ViaVoice® was first released. At the time, the product did not have a dedicated medical version, and so Dr. Joe trained it on medical terminology and developed dictation and navigation macros, further reducing documentation burden.
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Early 2000's
Becoming an EMR Entrepreneur
Realizing the need for a comprehensive system to streamline business and clinical aspects of his practice, Dr. Joe collaborated with a regional practice management software vendor to integrate his EMR and greatly extend its functionality. The big breakthrough was modeling “passive documentation” whereby progress notes were created based on mapping EMR data to diagnosis and order entry. A large healthcare payor saw the EMR as a way to increase practice profitability without increasing payments and agreed to pilot the EMR in several practices. This is when Dr. Joe cut his entrepreneurial teeth. To this day, practices are happily using the EMR.
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Late 2000's
Transition to a National Vendor
After 8 years, Dr. Joe left the company he co-founded and he made the difficult decision to transition his practice to an alternative EMR. The move proved to be a challenging yet invaluable learning experience. It required the careful transformation and migration of over a dozen years' worth of medical records—a daunting task given the limited standardization of medical record data at the time.
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2010's
The move to athenaClinical (now athenaOne).
Dr. Joe became frustrated with the slow pace of improvements and tired of the work of maintaining the IT infrastructure software updates required to support the EMR. His practice was considering selling to a large health system when athenaHealth began promoting its EMR as providing a way for private practices to remain private. Because it is cloud-based, it also greatly reduced Dr. Joe’s IT workload. Dr. Joe convinced his partners to undergo another EMR migration to athenaClinicals®.
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2017
Anodyne Clinical and FreeTime are born...
Always looking for ways to improve workflow, Dr. Joe worked with a talented software engineer to streamline his morning huddles leveraging athenaHealth application programming interface (API). Features were added that further streamlined and automated the office visit workflow.. Dr. Joe saw an opportunity to share his innovation with other physicians and founded Anodyne Clinical.
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The Journey continues...
...more to come.