more interest in better serving patients with language or literacy challenges than they did when he founded the company in 2001.
“This is a population likely to come back to the hospital because of errors in taking medication,” Lee said. “It wasn’t a big issue for hospitals, but now, with the emphasis on reducing readmission and making sure patients are healthy, satisfaction and efficiency are on the radar.”
Polyglot raised about $1.2 million in equity funding in March, according to a regulatory filing.
In addition to its Meducation software, Polyglot offers TimeView, a tool that consolidates and visualizes a patient’s medication history. The program pulls prescription data from Surescripts, a national network of medication information, and distributes it to an EHR system for a care provider’s examination.
“The challenge we’re running into is disparate electronic medical record systems,” Lee said. “As a third-party player, we need to be able to convince them why they need to integrate with us.”
That’s an issue a lot of people have with the current state of electronic health records. But thus far Community Care of North Carolina has integrated TimeView into its system, and Carolinas HealthCare System and Duke Medicine might follow suit, Lee said. The company also has several partnerships with out-of-state networks, including the California HealthCare Foundation.
Lee said he expects the market for TimeView to expand as EHR interoperability improves. “Now, we’re working on our products and increasing awareness on a national level,” he said.
Other companies around the country are capitalizing on the shift toward consumer-focused healthcare, as illustrated by recent developments in telemedicine. This week, San Francisco-based Doctor on Demand teamed up with Tacoma, WA-based MultiCare Health System to create MultiCare Doctor On Demand, a video consultation service available to patients in Washington state. And earlier this month, Palo Alto, CA-based HealthTap unveiled DocNow, a telemedicine app for the newly released Apple Watch that connects wearers with a network of 68,000 care providers.
On the medication adherence front, Durham-based HAP Innovations is developing a device that tracks a patient’s prescriptions and dispenses the pills when he or she needs to take them. And companies such as Needham, MA-based MedMinder offer pillboxes that alert patients to take certain medications at the right times.