Foothold Joins InterSystems at Global Summit

Just a few weeks after HIMSS14, I found myself back in Orlando (I can’t get away from that place!) for the InterSystems Global Summit 2014. It was an honor to be invited to this event, especially given the incredible treatment I received from one of the most generous companies I’ve had the pleasure of working with – InterSystems. In case you are unfamiliar with their work, InterSystems builds large scale database platforms that are designed to complete the operations that smaller platforms cannot, such as take huge amounts of data, crunch it, analyze it for trends, exchange it with other database, and so on.

Foothold’s relationship with InterSystems began a year ago when we were looking for a partner to help us prepare for the new world of Healthcare in which our Behavioral Health and Mental Health customers would be expected to share data electronically with HIEs and other entities. As usual, we were looking for best-of-breed technology and when InterSystems (who usually partners with organizations with names like “the Country of Scotland” and the European Space Agency) heard about the populations we were working for, they were just as excited to work with Foothold and our clients. Since then, it has been one of our best partnerships to date.

At the conference, I was placed on the Healthcare Leadership track – one of three tracks offered. Of the sessions I attended, I heard everything from how a hospital in China was implementing the InterSystems EHR (TrakCare) to how an oncologist in Boston was working to get genomic data into his hospital’s EHR using InterSystems’ products. In short, the work people were doing with the aid of InterSystems was fascinating, but not immediately relevant to our work here at Foothold. However, there was also a presentation by a RHIO from New York that gained the attention of several hospital executives, all of whom were very interested in the idea of incorporating Behavioral and Mental Health data into their systems.

In short, it was a very productive couple of days where I found myself repeating my favorite mantra: “You want to bend the cost curve in Healthcare, well, my customers are the Benders of the Cost Curve,” and have it make sense to the folks around me.

About Foothold Technology
Foothold Technology offers web-based software for human service providers that lifts the burden of documentation, providing the freedom to focus on their mission. More than 850 agencies nationwide count on Foothold’s AWARDS to manage their services, including Mental Health, Alcohol & Substance Abuse, Developmental Disabilities, Homeless & Housing, Employment & Training, Youth & Family, and more. Having originated from three agencies in 2000, AWARDS is a complete Electronic Health Record that also supports administrative activities, including facilities maintenance, human resources, scheduling and alerts, audit reports, and automated billing. AWARDS is fully interoperable with other federally certified systems and is the only record-keeping system that is certified as both a Behavioral Health EHR and a Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). For more information, visit www.footholdtechnology.com.