Anatomy of a Breakthrough:

Chris Craft was cruising down I-84 in Connecticut when his eureka moment hit.

Craft, CEO and founder of ScriptSender, had been ruminating on a pressing problem—one that confronts many CIOs in the imaging industry. How can an outpatient imaging practice foster collaboration with scores of referring physicians—when each has its own disparate IT system? Is there a way to leapfrog over the technology bottlenecks to share vital information quickly and securely?

Craft, then CIO of a large radiology practice in New England, was fixated on the issue for good reason. His best customer, a leading hospital system, had changed their IT platform, causing referrals to his practice to plummet. “Day by day, down it went. I was watching the analytics,” he said. “After only three months, we were down significant revenue. At that pace, we’d be out millions before the end of the year.”

The hospital’s new technology made it difficult for the referring physicians on site to get orders out of the system and sent to any outpatient imaging centers. “Physicians have very limited time and have no interest in wasting it by clicking through menus and submenus. Their focus is on patient care,” said Craft. “We had to make it as easy for them as possible.”

But getting those separate systems to sync up is expensive and time-consuming. It can take months for dedicated I.T. specialists to get an HL7 integration to work, and then it’s time to start over with the next referrer’s system. Few imaging providers are robust enough to spend resources—financial or technical—on HL7 set-ups, let alone on continued maintenance.

But how? “It kept eating at me,” said Craft. Then came his insight while driving. “Everything just lined up.”

Right away, Craft wrote the code in his head. It would enable users to print documents securely over the internet, with real data resulting on the other side—data that could be recognized, harnessed, and processed automatically to populate information in the RIS. Two weeks later, ScriptSender was born.

“We had installations the first day,” said Craft. “Everybody loved it. Print and done—the order is sent in one click. From referring physicians to schedulers, it made everyone’s job much easier.”

Orders flooded back into the outpatient imaging practice, but with a twist. Because ScriptSender allows the secure submission of any document, from any application, referring physicians began adding clinical notes, labs, and other documents. Radiologists thus had better data for their reads, and billers had more information to ensure appropriate coding. “We had always wanted lab results, and now we were getting those too,” said Craft. “It was an unexpected benefit, and one that made a lot of sense.”

Craft soon realized that the problem he solved was not unique to his imaging group, to his region, to radiology, or even to healthcare. He said: “Our software removes barriers. The whole point is to share information, and the result is improved patient care.”