Doug Dormer formed White Pine Systems in 2006 based on the simple notion that the convenience and value we take for granted from online and mobile technologies in the rest of our lives has tremendous potential to improve health, lower cost, and increase satisfaction for patients, families and providers.  In particular, we focused on two goals:

• We can improve health outcomes and lower cost by breaking down the barriers between physical health, behavioral health and social care to create a truly integrated continuum of care.
• We can improve health outcomes and lower cost by using technology to extend evidence-based practice beyond the walls and hours of the clinic to increase access to care while using staff more efficiently.

From 2013 to 2016, our SPINN patient engagement and care collaboration platform showed tremendous success.  Working with Centerstone of Indiana, one of the largest community-based mental health providers, and others, we started with Addiction and later added employment services, chronic disease management and offender reentry.  Through our client, these were funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Department of Justice and even the Department of Labor.  The results were amazing.  One client saw a reduction in the rate of relapse for people with substance use disorder, lower total cost and even a 50% reduction in the rate of recidivism for people recently released from incarceration.  The results were recognize by various organizations including the NIH.  Here’s a link to a short video prepared for a recognition ceremony held at the White House in 2013.

Through this period, and continuing today, our founder and CEO, Doug Dormer, has served as a mentor and guest lecturer at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) in their graduate program for health informatics.  Each semester, we work with students in the Masters and PhD programs to explore evidence-based practice related to specific health interests which we call “Care Units.”  Working with leading provider organizations as use case communities, we’ve documented EBP for addiction, palliative health, breast cancer, diabetes, traumatic brain injury and offender reentry and others.  We’ve also engaged in primary and secondary research to better understand the relationships between health and social determinants of health such as food and housing insecurity.

While our platform was configurable and incredibly flexible, it was not designed to be configured by our client user/administrators.  Most of the configuration adjustments had to be made by our support team.  This meant that it was relatively costly and cumbersome to react to the frequent changes in practice or reporting that our clients needed. 

We also learned other lessons, namely that the most important characteristic was user experience—how did the user experience translate into intrinsic value that made each user want to use the system?  We also learned that while many organizations say they follow the same evidence-based practice (EBP), the range in how they implement that EBP is huge.  Rarely do two organizations follow the same workflow or use the same tools and techniques even when they follow the same stated EBP.  Thus, a one-size-fits all approach, where we, as the vendor, make decisions about how the workflow should work and build them into the technology which we expect providers will adopt, is a failed approach.  The platform must be flexible and easy enough for users/administrators to change core elements of the workflow without requiring costly consulting or programming services while still helping them adhere to EBP and meet reporting and other compliance requirements.

We knew by 2015 that we had to find a way to make our platform easier for our client user/administrators to configure and modify without costly consulting or programming services.  By 2019, we see the advent of user-configurable applications, like Wix and Square Space for web site design, or SurveyMonkey and Qualtrix for surveys, platforms for applications that previously required costly consulting and programming but are now user friendly, in the hands of users, where the defining user characteristic is industry knowledge not technology expertise.

Following this approach, we began work on the next generation of our patient engagement and care collaboration platform.  Our new patent-pending proVizor Configuration Wizard allows user/administrators to design and configure their own evidence-based patient engagement and care collaboration workflow without the need for costly consulting and programming services.  Our goal is to create a clearing house where organizations can share workflow themes and templates so that new users can start with a configuration that has most if not all of the functions and features already configured.  To meet this need, we are creating the proVizor Marketplace, a clearinghouse where user/administrators can post their proVizor configurations for others to select as their starting point.  Organizations whose proVizor configurations are adopted by others receive a commission from the license revenue thereby reducing the cost of ownership, and possibly create a new revenue source for their expertise.

Beginning in November, we are hosting the proVizor Telehealth Community Project, a collaboration between White Pine, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis, and health and social care providers from across the nation to advance a new model for telehealth to improve health outcomes and lower cost across the continuum of care.  We anticipate that the next version of the proVizor Telehealth Platform will be generally available in mid 2020.