History

KidneyTIES is a collaborative effort that brings together companies with an established history in the healthcare industry. NephTech is a select team of nephrologists, educators and support staff that have been caring for patients in the Pittsburgh and surrounding areas for 40 years. And Flipside Media has been creating software for the healthcare industry for more than 15 years. In 2012 these organizations joined forces to create KidneyTIES.

For NephTech, education of their CKD patients has always been a priority for the practice. When CMS announced that they would reimburse for six sessions of CKD education while the patient was CKD Stage 4, NephTech hired a physician's assistant to manage the administration of the reimbursable education sessions. To track all of the related information, NephTech developed an elaborate system consisting of an assortment of color-coded Excel spreadsheets, an Access database, and other software tools. Over the years they continued to refine this system, investing the time and effort to ensure that the processes, procedures, collected data, and reports optimized the care they provided to their patients.

However, as the number of patients referred to the program grew to over 300, the Excel spreadsheets and other tools filled with patient, lab, diagnosis, access and education information was ceasing to be a productive way to track information. Despite being an extremely effective system, the mere task of updating the information in the disparate tools and tracking the information took more time and effort than the actual education of the patients. NephTech knew they needed a better implementation of their CKD education documentation system.

Flipside has worked with organizations large and small to create robust, secure, HIPAA compliant online applications. This included systems for a wide array of clients including the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the American Diabetes Association, the American Association of Diabetes Educators, and McKesson Health Solutions. Flipside's software platform was an ideal infrastructure on which to implement NephTech's comprehensive CKD education documentation system. Working in close collaboration, Flipside and NephTech created a purpose-driven software product that met the needs of both the educator and the practice. After months of extensive in-practice testing, KidneyTIES was ready to be brought to market.

At the time of KidneyTIE's launch, NephTech had over 500 patients being tracked software, with that number growing every day. Preliminary results from the integrated analytic reports show a 30% improvement in a patient's health with education as compared to a patient that did not receive education. NephTech has also seen a significant reduction in hospitalizations during the first year of dialysis for those patients who received CKD education.