Company Profile: Kryptiq

Digital communication and administration tools help healthcare professionals and patients

By Carri Bugbee

How many times have you emailed your doctor to ask a quick question that doesn’t seem to warrant an office visit? For most of us, the answer is “never” because 85 percent of the medical community doesn’t have the ability to make that happen in a secure, systematic way. Kryptiq, however, is helping to change that fact – locally and throughout the United States.

Emailing your doctor is just one of dozens of medical communication and administration functions that Kryptiq has tackled. Kryptiq’s software products help doctors communicate with each other, internally and externally; they help insurance companies negotiate and track contract details with healthcare providers; and they provide ways to transmit digital medical records safely and confidentially.

Carri Bugbee: Jim, can you give us a quick overview of your marketplace and where Kryptiq’s products fit in?

Jim Coppa: Most people outside of healthcare – especially people in high-tech – are a little astounded when they find out that the medical community still deals primarily in paper records and gets information from one place to another through fax machines. Even data that is stored digitally is typically printed and faxed to other medical professionals. It’s business 1980s style. Kryptiq is a healthcare connectivity company. We provide ways to connect healthcare professionals with each other and also with patients in a peer-to-peer way.

CB: Who are your customers?

JC: There are two business areas that we focus on: health plan providers and healthcare providers such as physicians groups or individual doctors. This can include everything from small medical practices to large, integrated delivery networks.

CB: What are the products or services that Kryptiq provides to those groups?

JC: We provide a secure messaging platform to connect healthcare professionals. This suite of products includes ClinicalMessenger, which adds electronic communication capabilities to existing information systems; CareCatalyst, which provides medical practices with portal capabilities to deliver online health services to patients; CareManager, which tracks patient information related to chronic medical conditions; DocuTrak, electronic document management software for medical offices; and eScriptMessenger, which connects doctors and pharmacists.

On the health plan side, we help companies manage work flow by providing automation tools to facilitate the contracting process with healthcare providers. This allows contracts to be negotiated by email.

CB: Can you elaborate a little more about Kryptiq’s contracting software and how it’s used?

JC: Health care contracting is one of the last paper-based, non-automated key business processes in the industry. They’re way behind the times – they have to pull paper out of filing cabinets to follow up on contract details, which might take weeks in some cases. Also, most health plan providers have no formal mechanism to track contracts, when they’re due, what they’re obligated to, etc., and that’s key to understanding financial obligations as well as effectively managing relationships with networks of providers.

For example, if a change in federal regulations could impact specific terms of healthcare contracts across the board, plan administrators have no way to address this issue en masse. We’re enabling customers to break down specific portions of contracts so if a specific clause needs to change in every contract across the board, they can broadcast that change electronically. This is important not just from the standpoint of health plan administrators, but also for physicians or provider groups. A doctor might have contracts with 20 different health plans, so it gets to be a tangled web if it’s all managed by paper.

CB: Backtracking a little, can you tell us just a little more about Kryptiq’s other products?

JC: Everything we do is based upon secure messaging and integration. There are hundreds of different systems used in the healthcare industry to create and manage electronic information, but all of them were set up from the beginning to be closed systems. That means people can’t get information from one provider to another electronically, quite often even within the same clinic when they are using the same system. Getting information, such as health records or lab results to a provider in another clinic on a completely different system has been impossible. That’s why the information gets printed and faxed, or sometimes out of frustration healthcare providers will just use regular email to send information, but that’s really not secure enough for sensitive data.

What we’ve done is build a bridge between closed systems so people can safely trade information and digital documents between otherwise incompatible systems. We’re like Switzerland. We don’t compete with the companies that have created the closed systems – we’re not in the business of aggregating data. We just help people get it from one place to another in a secure, seamless way.

CB: If people using two different closed systems want to communicate with each other, do they both have to be using Kryptiq products?

JC: Both practices don’t have to use Kryptiq products. As long as one is on board, they can communicate with patients and other practices.

CB: What sets Kryptiq apart from companies with similar products in the marketplace – if there are any?

JC: There are some companies doing messaging, but we’re different because we’ve based our business model on integrating with the closed systems that people in healthcare are already using. Other products in the marketplace require users to leave their own internal systems and go to a Web-based system that is separate. Our products are integrated with the workflow within systems that healthcare clinics and businesses already use. That’s really important because we get a lot of feedback from people in the industry saying they need to communicate with people in the field who are outside their walls, but most doctors don’t want to spend time on a learning curve for new technologies because that takes time away from their job of seeing patients.

CB: It seems like security would be an important aspect of any messaging related to electronic medical information or records. Can you tell us about how Kryptiq has addressed that issue?

JC: Our focus on security starts at the database level where information is encrypted and bubbles up to the architecture of our products. We separate all the components with multiple layers of security to make it very tough to penetrate the messaging platform. In fact, what we offer is much greater security than what is currently in place for most healthcare organizations.

Frankly, paper records are much less secure than an encrypted database. And our system has many built-in levels of security that plain, old email does not. You’d be surprised at how many health providers use regular email to send sensitive information – lots of doctors do this. They’re like us in that they use email for other tasks in their lives, so it’s just too easy to use it for medical information as well. Organizations try to control this with policies, but until they actually offer medical professionals a safe, easy alternative, it will continue to happen.

CB: It seems like there are a number of technological and societal trends that are driving the need for Kryptiq’s products. Can you tell us about other related factors in the marketplace?

JC: There are several things happening at once to create a favorable climate for our solutions. There is a national push to drive widespread adoption of electronic record-keeping of medical records. In fact, President Bush has made this one of his issues. Once you start managing records electronically, it doesn’t make much sense to print and fax that information, so we’re ideally positioned to facilitate medical record sharing among providers.

The need for this was painfully obvious in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Since most patient records are still in paper form, there was often no way to get crucial medical records about patients who were moved from New Orleans to hospitals in other cities. And, of course, many records were destroyed forever in the flood.

Patients also want access to their medical records. We conducted national focus groups with patients and they overwhelmingly said they would like to see their medical records online. People today are used to banking online and the average person is more worried about having his financial information online than his medical records.

The market is definitely driving the need for Kryptiq’s products. Our products are well received on sales calls because there is no doubt today that patients want to have electronic connectivity to their doctors and their records. Providers realize this and know they need to offer online services to be competitive. Offering these types of services to patients is just part of being in the game now. And, of course, efficiency is an important factor to any business trying to keep costs down.

CB: Can you give us an example of how Kryptiq has helped a customer?

JC: One of the shining stars is right here in Portland with Providence Medical Group. Providence was one of our early customers, with about 150 doctors. In many cases, they were scanning documents and faxing each other in the same building. Obviously, manually scanning, faxing and shredding documents was a very inefficient way to do business. Now they’ve cut the patient paper referral process from about a week to an electronic process that takes minutes. It’s saving about $10 a referral for the organization.

CB: Tell us how Kryptiq got started.

JC: Kryptiq originated from an idea by our CEO, Luis Machuca. He wanted to email his doctor but found there wasn’t a great way to do that. A light bulb went on and Luis joined with Murali Karamchedu (chief architect), Kurt Koehler (chief financial officer) and Jeff Sponaugle (chief technology officer) to co-found the company in November 2001. They were all connected from previous jobs and they began working on what became our first product, RosettaStone Gateway, to provide secure messaging. I joined in April 2002 to develop ClinicalMessenger, which integrated secure messaging with electronic medical record systems. That was released the following summer. Now we have close to 90 employees and we’re still hiring.

Early on, we worked very closely with local healthcare providers to develop products that would specifically work for a variety of needs and could be integrated with technologies already in place. Those early relationships all turned into customers. Even now that we have 650 customers in 46 states, we continue to work closely with healthcare professionals to make sure that every new product or enhancement is completely geared to the needs of the marketplace.

CB: How important is new product development?

JC: Engineering makes up 50 percent of the company. We’re always working to create or improve upon our product offerings. We’ve also acquired three small companies that have brought additional intellectual property into Kryptiq.

CB: Is there a hardware component to any of Kryptiq’s products?

JC: Kryptiq is purely a software company, but we support multiple deployment methods. Sometimes our products are hosted locally by a customer; sometimes they exist within an ASP model. We’re doing some very good engineering in these areas. It pushes us hard every day we come to work. As a company, we’re very customer driven. Our number one value is customer satisfaction, so we’re very involved in deployment issues.

CB: Do you have staff all over the country to help get new customers up and running with your systems?

JC: Kryptiq’s products are sold directly to customers and also by our partners as integrated solutions for their software. Some of our products don’t require much implementation and sometimes a channel sales partner will assume implementation services. For example, G.E. Healthcare creates software for electronic medical records and we’ve integrated our products with theirs so they can offer customers a more complete package.

CB: How has Kryptiq benefited from being located in Oregon?

JC: I think the healthcare community in this part of Oregon is particularly well-suited for Kryptiq. There are visionaries in this area who are able and willing to implement new technologies. I moved here from Texas and have found the caliber of engineers here to be very good as well. It’s been a great place to recruit and build a team.

CB: Does Kryptiq have offices elsewhere in the U.S.?

JC: We have a national team of sales people, but no secondary offices. Our national headquarters are in Oregon and the founders are firmly committed to staying here.

CB: What’s the one thing you would want everyone to know about Kryptiq?

JC: We are passionate about making a difference in healthcare. We’re fortunate because Kryptiq is a place where we can work at this every day and apply innovative technologies to solve real problems.

Carri Bugbee is the proprietor of Big Deal PR, a small firm that serves as a virtual marketing team for innovative businesses and organizations. With over 15 years experience in advertising and public relations, Carri has quite a knack for developing astute strategies and compelling messages that help clients get noticed. She launched her own business in 1993 after working for powerhouse agencies Wieden & Kennedy and Hill & Knowlton. Solving marketing conundrums is still Carri’s favorite part of the job. If you have one, you can reach her at 503-297-4043 or carri@bigdealpr.com.