Axial Wins ONC Challenge with 'Elegant' Care Coordination App

A product pegged as an up-and-comer last September just popped back up on the radar, winning the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' "Ensuring Safe Transitions from Hospital to Home" mobile app challenge a few weeks ago. Axial Exchange's Care Transition Suite took first prize in the challenge. 

The challenge called for apps that use mobile technology to assist information exchange across different providers. We spoke with Jean-Luc Neptune, senior VP of Health 2.0, which ran the challenge for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, about what put the Raleigh, N.C. vendor at the top of the heap.

The suite is essentially a third-layer product that pulls data from inpatient, ER, pharmacy, testing and other systems to create central summaries that follow patients "from ambulance through inpatient and post-discharge," Neptune says. For example, EMS teams input patient data during transport and that data is pushed to a care summary for ER physicians ahead of the patient's arrival at the hospital. Post-discharge summaries are automatically generated and sent to the patient's physician and the patient's own smartphone or tablet, according to company officials. "It's elegant and nicely done," Neptune says...