GSI Health A Vision of a Future in Which the Problems of Today’s Healthcare Are Solved

Founded in 2003 by LeRoy E. Jones, GSI Health helps to solve a problem—the uninformed, uncoordinated care being practiced in today’s healthcare system. Its cloud-based software solutions unite patients, health care payers and care providers of all kinds, enabling “whole person” care through efficient communication, workflow, information sharing, and built-in analytics and reporting—all in a single integrated platform. The company’s configurable solutions help care teams across the community manage, analyze, and engage with patients in real time as they move through the care delivery system to prevent avoidable hospital readmissions and improve population health.

In conversation withLeRoy E. Jones; Founder, President, and CEO

What industry problem is the company trying to solve?

While we cannot guarantee a world free of health issues, we can work towards a world in which the care everyone receives for those issues is optimized. When care providers just treat a disease instead of treating the whole person—including the medical, social, and behavioral issues that can impact their lives—patients are not receiving the care they need to achieve optimal health. While this problem is larger than any one organization can tackle alone, GSI Health is committed to helping drive the solution.

What macro trends in the industry are driving your growth?

The healthcare industry is transitioning to a value-based model, compensating organizations not for services performed but for keeping patients well. This model, which incentivizes providers to improve efficiency by better managing their populations, is being adopted by federal, state, and commercial programs across the country. As a pioneer in this space, we’ve been successful at looking ahead, seeing what will be useful to the market, and creating a product that will satisfy those needs. We embraced the transition to value-based care early, well before the vast majority of health IT providers, and developed a comprehensive population health management platform ideal for value-based healthcare models. Now, we are a leading provider for care management tools supporting value-based programs.

Tell us about your product.

Our cloud-based GSIHealthCoordinator solution delivers collaborative care management and robust analytics in a single platform, bringing insights closer to those who are delivering care and empowering those caregivers to make decisions about how to best spend their time and resources. We help organizations reduce unnecessary hospital and emergency department usage and lower risk  so they can achieve their clinical and financial goals. What’s unique about our product is that it has been supporting patients since 2012—before the population health management movement took hold.

What challenges did you face in your initial years? What can your peers learn from it?

One of the biggest challenges we faced early on was being a market pioneer. We were doing population health management before there was jargon to describe it, so we spent a lot of time educating the marketplace about the problem we solved, and often getting our customers to realize they had that problem. I think most organizations that live on the leading edge of a new industry segment will find the same set of circumstances. Our advice is to spend extra time telling the story that links your customer’s issue to your value. There should be resonance there, and rewards will follow.

What learnings helped you to grow this company?

In the early years of the company, we focused on interoperability, helping the industry develop standards and protocols that enabled safe and consistent sharing of data. Our epiphany was realizing what people were trying to do with interoperability. Just exchanging information wasn’t enough—they were trying to use that information to collaborate with one another. Once we understood that interoperability was trying to do something bigger than itself (collaboration), it helped us recognize what was missing to achieve that broader growth. Interoperability isn’t the end result; it is the means to collaboration.

What drives you to excel in your field of business?

I’m driven by the prospect of saving lives. I’m not a clinician, but I believe what we do is nonetheless critical to the future of care delivery as the stethoscope has been over the past two centuries. Every practitioner who is empowered by our care management software, or who gains insight on the best care delivery strategy, allows us to vicariously participate in the delivery of healing and wellness. That is motivation enough to keep me coming to work each day, and to strive to do the best I can in this business.

Meet the Key Executive

LeRoy E. Jones strives to drive innovation in the healthcare IT industry, to create a world in which data-driven technology optimizes care delivery, and ultimately results in healthier patients and populations.

Lee has helped several states develop architectures and operational models for healthcare information exchange, and has contributed to a number of federal programs and industry initiatives that establish standards and shape the future of healthcare IT. He has served as senior advisor to the president-appointed National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, responsible for managing the strategic technical directions for the national healthcare agenda. Under his leadership, GSI Health has pioneered working models for effective collaboration in community-based care delivery and become an industry leader in population health management solutions.

Lee holds an M.S. in Engineering in the Management of Technology jointly from The Wharton School and the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

“Making a difference for the health of patients and populations across the nation”