XchangeWorx wants to become a provider of health IT solutions across the country in the next five years.
CEO Joel Ryba said he wants to see the for-profit arm of the Albany region’s health information exchange, Hixny, become a higher tier vendor to the health care industry.
“Our biggest loss would be a personal loss that we didn’t turn this into a bigger,” Ryba said. “We want to make it into something that serves the whole country.”
XchangeWorx currently has 17 employees after starting with eight when the business spun off from Hixny in August. Ryba said he’s trying to fill six open positions.
Hixny, which also provides population health services, focuses on serving the region and helping patient information flow between all health care providers here. The nonprofit’s goal is to help coordinate care and reduce health care costs.
XchangeWorx was spun off to commercialize the solutions Hixny created to share information about patients’ medical records between different physician offices, hospitals and other health care providers.
Ryba said other organizations often approached Hixny about the solutions created by the nonprofit, looking for help with their own health IT needs. Because of its structure as a nonprofit and its regional focus, Hixny wasn’t able to commercialize its products without setting up a for-profit subsidiary.
“We had a lot of similar organizations coming to us on a regular basis looking to engage us to help them advance the health information exchange,” he said. By forming a for-profit arm, “we can bring that revenue into the region and also help other areas of the country do good.”
Hixny is still the biggest customer for XchangeWorx, but Ryba said there are several deals in the sales pipeline. He said he expects 50 percent of the company’s business to be in New York and the rest to be primarily in the Northeast.
The company has one product in general release, XW Connect, which serves as a platform that allows different electronic medical record systems to “talk” to each other by converting information to and from various formats. That type of service is essential as health care providers partner to better care for patients and work across the continuum of care.
XchangeWorx also has a product with two components in beta-testing. That product includes a user-facing component to view patient information, securely communicate about their care and identify opportunities for interventions. Its second component aims to identify clinically relevant events or other opportunities for pro-active interventions.
“It cuts the noise down to what the real opportunities to do an intervention are that could have a real impact on outcomes,” Ryba said.
Live deployment of that product began in March for early beta customers. One large client has already signed. Ryba said they started developing the sales pipeline in the last 30 days.
Potential clients include any health care network that needs to share information about a population of patients or is taking on risk to care for a group of patients at a lower cost.
XchangeWorx has been approved to participate in Start-Up New York and projects 23 new jobs will be created in five years. That means the company doesn’t have to pay income, business, corporate or sales taxes for 10 years.
The company is working with the University at Albany as part of the Start-Up NY program and has agreed to offer internships to students. Ryba also said there’s talk of staff teaching some courses at the university.
Date: June 13, 2016