Health care share

For both good and bad, the health care industry has played a key role the past two decades in Lou Galterio's life. That includes more than five years spent as a medical system executive and much of the rest of it as a longtime patient. After a severe car crash left the 61-year-old computer engineer disabled, Galterio has finally recovered and is rebooting as an entrepreneur.

Putting his experience as both patient and techie to work, Galterio founded SunCoast RHIO Inc. to help hospitals and doctors to improve the use of their digital medical records.

Like virtually every other health care technology company worldwide, Galterio's Sarasota-based business sells and consults on electronic patient record software. But the area where Galterio hopes to separate from the pack is in data sharing.

SunCoast RHIO's technology and services allows its clients — mainly hospitals — to share their patient medical information with other approved hospitals or doctors across a variety of technologies. As part of a health information exchange, SunCoast also allows health care providers to trade data with the federal government. This feature aids in compliance, particularly with the new standards and incentives associated with Medicare and the Affordable Health Care Act.

Galterio says this information is becoming more important for federal funding. “The government is pushing for more quality-based measurements. You are only seeing the start of penalties,” Galterio says. “We know what criteria the government is looking for and can help our clients to report that.”

At the same time, Galterio is promoting SunCoast RHIO as one of the few open-source software alternatives to proprietary patient record systems. This means the company offers its records in a format that it says is vastly more transferable across software systems.

Building business
Started as a nonprofit in late 2008 to educate the public and health care organizations, six months ago Galterio converted the firm to a for-profit business. He says the attractiveness of the business plan was too strong to stay a nonprofit.

Today, the company is working with a handful of health care clients primarily as a consultant. He estimates that the company and its joint ventures and partnerships, which include arrangements with Verizon, Thrasys and Imedicor, among others, is generating $2 million in revenue a year.

For the past four years, SunCoast RHIO and Galterio have been working as a consultant to the 49-bed DeSoto Memorial Hospital in Arcadia. According to Dan Hogan, DeSoto Memorial's chief financial officer, the firm has been most helpful in directing the implementation of a new system the rural hospital is purchasing from a separate patient-record software provider.

“Hospitals are doing a lot of head scratching about the regulations,” Hogan says. “We use them as a sounding board to help us design the architecture of the systems we use. As a small hospital, we still have maybe 200 or 300 patients here from Michigan. There's a lot of regulations when you cross state lines.”

SunCoast RHIO is also in close negotiations with New York City-based billing and finance medical practice management company MPG Systems Inc. to use SunCoast RHIO's electronic medical records (EMR) software. MPG Systems owner Sedique Mohammed hopes to have a deal in place by the end of the year to use the software for its 30 medical practice partners.

“We are wanting to do an EMR system as an incentive program for the doctors,” he says. “This is really about maximizing our reimbursement. It removes a lot of the paperwork, which reduces time and cost.”

For example, Mohammed says insurance companies now want detailed treatment information for patients with chronic illnesses. SunCoast's system makes it easier to retrieve patients' charts and share them. Mohammed says his company will more than likely lease the software for three years with an option to buy the code.

Circuitous route
Galterio's career has taken a decidedly technology-focused route to the health care industry, starting with a chance telephone workers' strike in 1971 that forced him into the banking industry. Working in quality control and as a teletype operator, the nine-month strike against New York Telephone left Galterio and his pregnant wife nearly destitute.

“I was desperate for work,” he says. “I started selling vacuums door to door for about three weeks and applied for a job in a bank as a teller.”

That application for a teller job led to a 16 years in banking with Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co. and Bankers Trust Co.

Galterio then worked on national accounts for computer vendor Digital Equipment Corp. Eventually, he took a job as the first chief information officer (CIO) of the New York City Health and Hospital Corp., the city's public hospital. During his time there Galterio installed one of the first electronic health record systems in the United States.

In 1991, he became CIO of New York Hospital.

Then came the accident.

“A truck jackknifed and hit my car,” Galterio says. “I sustained a brain injury and a number of broken bones.”

After his bones healed, he tried to go back to work. He took a new job as CIO at Horton Medical Center in Middletown, N.Y. But the effects from the crash were far from over. Galterio says he experienced random dizzy spells, but it was his memory loss that was disabling.

“I had an epiphany moment when I was talking with a friend of mine I had worked with for many years,” he says. “I had to ask him what the difference was between source code and object. How could I run people when I forgetting basic terminology? That was my last day. It was very depressing and very sad.”

Galterio quit his job to focus on recovering. Around 2000, he moved to North Port and by 2006, he had started feeling better. Galterio calls it his rebirth. He still couldn't, and can't, stand for long periods without a form of vertigo, but his memory came back. He went from needing nine hours or more of sleep a day to less and less.

“I slowly had to re-establish my credibility,” he says. “I can't do the detail work like before that's gone forever. Fortunately, I did some very good things before, and I didn't burn any bridges.”

Eventually, a health information exchanges seminar planted the seed of the idea that would become SunCoast RHIO.

Looking to the future, Galterio expects to continue to grow his company while the rest of the health care technology market faces continued consolidation.

“It's pretty clear to me that the health care market is getting unsustainable,” he says. “There are some monster companies going into it right now, companies like AT&T. I expect of the 900 companies selling electronic health records we are going to be down to six in the next few years.”