Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Lou LaRocca, CEO of J2 Interactive:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: J2 Interactive is an award-winning healthcare technology firm with over 250 consultants and engineers in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Our primary focus over the past 20-plus years has been interoperability, which basically means connecting systems so that patients can receive the best possible care across all of their encounters with the healthcare system. Our work spans all corners of healthcare: providers, payers, labs, health information exchanges (HIEs), public health research organizations, and federal agencies such as VA, IHS, and SSA.
Q: What makes you the best choice? How are you unique?
A: Our customers really appreciate that we’re not just technologists, we’re genuine healthcare people with a real passion for making providers’ jobs easier and empowering patients to achieve better outcomes. The people we work for are very mission-driven, and that’s who we are to a T. That makes it very easy for us to fit right in with their existing team and get quick results – because we understand not only what it takes to get the work done but also why the work is so important.
On the technical side, we’re experts in the latest standards for delivering coordinated care, but we also understand all the various systems that need to be connected, some of which are older and more limited in what they can support. That means customers can rely on J2 to help them innovate on a budget by modernizing the systems they already have, thereby avoiding expensive rip-and-replace approaches.
Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: I think our customers already know that the best thing about J2 is the quality of the team we’ve managed to assemble – their technical expertise, their passion for healthcare, and their dedication to the mission. That’s the best compliment I get all the time – “Where do you find these amazing people?” And the answer is simple: if you hire people with the right personal qualities in addition to the required technical skills, and give them a culture of mutual respect and support, you can trust them to help customers achieve their most ambitious goals because you know how deeply they share in that same motivation to do some good in the world.
But something else that truly sets us apart is our commitment to sharing our knowledge so that a customer’s internal staff can achieve self-sufficiency with the solutions we deliver. It’s always great when a client tells us we’re “indispensable,” but we’re not the kind of firm that’s trying to leave them with no choice. When the internal team is looking to stand on its own, we will help them get there. That’s how to act like a genuine partner to your customers, and that’s what keeps them coming back when they have another project to tackle.
Q: What can we expect from you in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: We’re always looking for new ways for people to benefit from increased connectivity, and one topic that’s getting a lot of attention right now is community information exchanges, or CIEs. A CIE can be seen as an extension of the HIE concept that expands the definition of a person’s overall well-being by tying in non-clinical data related to what we call social determinants of health (SDOH). Knowing the full context of people’s health with regard to their economic stability, food security, housing, transportation, and other social factors can make all the difference in achieving better healthcare outcomes, both for individual patients and the community as a whole.
Once SDOH data is integrated into the patient record, there’s incredible potential for provider organizations to initiate community-based interventions that can have a huge impact on patient health – such as sending a taxi to take someone to their doctor’s appointment or automatically connecting them with a local food bank so they’re getting the nutrition they need.
However, one of the potential obstacles in connecting these community-based organizations with the CIE is that the information typically doesn’t conform to any data-sharing standard, and it’s often stored on paper. How do we get all the data on those paper forms into a structured data format? We think that more and more the answer is going to be AI.
J2 recently partnered with an AI startup called Morph Services, which has built an impressive natural language processing (NLP) solution to transform hand-written paper forms and other documents into structured data that can be used to support everything from care workflows to community referrals. We’re looking forward to applying Morph’s AI technology to a wide range of use cases for providers, payers, HIEs, and CIEs.
Q: What kinds of organizations are you looking to work with?
A: We get excited about projects that let us use technology to make a tangible positive impact on patients’ lives. Our favorite customers are the ones who want to build a strong foundation of high-quality data through interoperability, and then leverage that data to improve the provider and patient experience. There is still so much untapped potential for healthcare organizations who want to improve quality of care, support advances in clinical research, and promote wellness across their communities – and we’re here to help.
Stay in touch!
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