South Florida Business Journal
Brian Bandell
Friday, July 9, 2010
After creating mobile communication platforms for major corporations, Boca Raton-based 3Cinteractive has targeted the health care industry as a promising market for expansion.
The company has a pilot program with Walgreens to alert customers via text message that their prescriptions are ready. It’s working on similar patient notification applications for physician offices and pharmaceutical companies.
3Ci has done mobile applications work for national companies including AutoNation, AT&T and ESPN, mostly with cell phone mass messaging, billing and reservations. Mike FitzGibbon, 3Ci’s co-founder and president, said it spent much of the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first few months of 2010 planning its strategy for the health care market, where inefficiencies abound.
Health care is one of the few employment sectors that’s shown growth over the past year. The combination of aging baby boomers and increased access to medical services through the health care reform law should continue to make technology services for this industry a big market.
When it comes to being interactive with patients, health care is among the least technology savvy fields, FitzGibbon said, but 3Ci aims to change that.
One of the main targets for improvement is cutting down on medical appointment abandonment, he said. “Each appointment is worth a specific dollar amount and staff time,” FitzGibbon noted. “That’s lost revenue.”
Instead of having nurses and office staff call patients, 3Ci has designed an automatic text messaging application that alerts patients about their upcoming appointments. FitzGibbon said it’s more efficient than making calls, especially since some people don’t answer calls when they don’t recognize the incoming number.
For pharmaceutical companies, 3Ci is working on a text messaging application that would remind consumers when to take medications or order a refill. The pharmaceutical companies could also use the application to text coupons to consumers.
Sunrise-based Interim Healthcare is using a text-messaging system designed by 3Ci to contact its home health care providers in the field through mass messaging. The company often uses it to offer assignments and call multiple employees to the office, said Linda Shaub, Interim’s VP of marketing. While it’s not in all 312 of Interim’s offices yet, those that are using it have found it useful for communicating, she said.
John Styers, VP of corporate strategy at 3Ci, said the employee text messaging application has also been used by hospitals, including Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Missouri, because it makes sure that requests for assistance reach employees quickly. 3Ci’s other mobile applications for hospitals are for patients: to give them health and wellness news, notify them of available test results and give billing information.
While 3Ci has many predesigned programs for health care companies, it also has the flexibility to customize programs to meet the needs of particular clients, Styers said. Most of the programs it is rolling out were developed by working with a few health care providers, and engineering solutions for them.
“We want to make mobile solutions easier to deploy,” he said “It’s getting the health care facility to crawl by implementing mobile solutions where they can see immediate results.”