Company: QualityMetric, Inc.
Location: George Washington Highway, Lincoln
Owner: 70 percent employee-owned, 30 percent outside investors
Employees: 35
Established: 1997
Annual Sales: $4 million (projected in 2000)
DR. JOHN E. WARE, JR., founder of the Lincoln-based QualityMetric, Inc.
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Dr. John E. Ware, Jr. is an academic – a researcher. He is also an advocate for accountability in health care.
Before forming QualityMetric, Inc., Ware was a senior scientist at the Health Institute, New England Medical Center for more than 10 years and senior research psychologist for 14 years at the RAND Corporation.
He also holds positions as: research professor, Tufts University School of Medicine; adjunct professor, School of Public Health, Harvard University and as a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences.
Armed with such extensive research experience, Ware decided to add another title to his calling card – that of businessman. In 1997, he and partners formed QualityMetric, Inc. in Lincoln. Ware’s partners are Eleanor Perfetto, Ph.D., who serves as executive vice president and chief operating officer, and Richard Vance, MD, who serves as vice president and medical director.
Perfetto has nearly 20 years of experience in pharmaco-economic research, reimbursement policy, drug advertising regulation and business development. Prior to joining QualityMetric, she was the chief executive officer for MEDTAP systems.
Vance served as a teacher, researcher and executive at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he also earned his medical degree and completed his residency. Board-certified in anatomic and clinical pathology, Vance has extensively researched, published and taught in the areas of medical humanities, ethics and public health policy.
Ware is highly regarded. In 1999, he received FACCT’s Ellwood Award, in recognition of his lifetime efforts and contribution to the “creation of a consumer-focused, accountable health care system.” In 1998, he received the Novartis/Zitter Group’s “Outcomes Leadership Award” for his work in advancing the science of outcomes research.
”For 30 years, I developed toolsbut these tools were only being used in research projects, not to help with the quality of health care,” Ware said.
Like others, Ware saw a health care system spinning out of control. And he saw few legitimate attempts to get it back on track. Ware’s attempt to help is to provide information to both consumers, and industry-wide clients.
”We believe that one of the reasons for the disarray of the health care system is that it is a system that does not know much about itself,” Ware said. “They have just been following the dollars. Our whole business mindset is to provide that other information that complements the cost data. It is the information the public really wants.”
QualityMetric bills itself as the first company ever to offer brief – and scientifically sound – health assessments with results that can be used in the medical decision-making process.
Now, in just its third year of operation, the company has launched a new generation of health survey tools. And it has signed on with Humana, Inc., the first managed care company to implement the new technology, called the Dynamic Health Assessment System (DynHA), to identify high-risk patient populations and monitor treatment progress.
The DynHA engine provides access to calibrated pools of questionnaire items from widely used health assessments, standardized scoring algorithms and built-in interpretation guidelines. In short, the questions are short and to the point – and the system makes a point of skipping over questions not relevant to the person taking the survey.
QualityMetric fuses measurement science with Internet technology to help its clients:
Evaluate and manage risk
Monitor disease severity
Measure the impact of treatments
Precisely monitor outcomes
Enhance clinical decision-making
Improve health care services
Ware calls that fusion – DynHA — a breakthrough in high technology, describing it as combining psychometric methods that measure “what a patient thinks of their health” with computer adaptive testing. That information is delivered worldwide, via the Internet. It is information sought by a wide range of clients, beginning with the general public.
”The public is always looking for information,” Ware said. “They want to be better informed. And there is a lot of superficial information about health and health care on the Internet. We’re looking to provide something of much more depth.”
Capitalizing on the Internet, Ware said, removes time-consuming and expensive manual processes and paperwork.
”The Internet removes the financial barriers making it possible to administer accurate surveys at a fraction of the cost of traditional health assessments,” Ware said.
Over a two-year period, Humana plans to administer more than 3 million assessments to their Medicare and commercial populations. The Dynamic Health Survey will be administered in a doctor’s office or a member’s home. It will run through QualityMetric’s amIhealthy.com, a program that has found immediate success.
amIhealthy.com, launched last June in conjunction with a health care conference in Barcelona, Spain. The site included a “headache test” which took 1.2 million hits during its first 10 days up.
”We were going to shut it down after the conference, but there was so much interest we left it up,” Ware said. “We hope that it will help headache sufferers get better treatment.”
That the Internet has opened a seemingly limitless opportunity for QualityMetric comes as no surprise to Ware and his partners.
According to Manhattan Research, 33.6 million people searched for health and medical information on the Web last year and an estimated 52 million will seek online health information throughout 2000. And according to Goldman Sachs Investment Research, health care IT applications and services represented more than a $14 billion market in 1998.
The amIhealthy.com program is QualityMetric’s way of having direct contact with the general public. Consumers are not charged for the service.
”We’re trying to provide a solution based on data that doesn’t make any assumptions about what is the best approach to health care,” Ware said. “We are an information system that will provide a much better answer to what is the best way to provide health care to the public.”
Vance sees amIhealthy.com’s potential as “powerful.”
”This site will dramatically change the way our members and doctors obtain and use health information,” he said. “If we have better information, our doctors can make better decisions to help improve their patient’s health and quality of lifethis new technology will strengthen early intervention, which can lead to reducing a patient’s risk of serious illness.”
In this, its third year of operation, QualityMetric appears to be on to something. Sales in its first year were about $1 million, and about $2 million in its second. The projections suggest that sales will double again this year – to $4 million.
Ware is presently negotiating with other Internet sites to make sure that QualityMetric’s products and services reach the largest audience possible.
”We want to be the health assessment and health care tool for all of the Internet,” Ware said. “To do that we need to be at all the sites where people go.”
As for the company’s home in Lincoln, Ware said he and his partners couldn’t be happier. Any questions about attracting a talented and qualified workforce in this market have been answered.
”We’re getting real good people,” said Ware. “We’ve had no trouble attracting programmers and scientists. And geographically, it’s in-between where we all live.”
