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After six years of developing its clinical decision support engine, and with recent high profile moves, SafeMed Inc. has hit high gear in its effort to be an industry force.

“As a start-up, we are very comfortable with where we are and where we’re heading,” says Richard Noffsinger, CEO at the company."

Noffsinger, who joined San Diego-based SafeMed in December, formerly headed Microsoft Corp.’s health care division. He then served as president and COO of physician software vendor Amicore Inc., which Microsoft founded in 2001 with IBM Corp. and Pfizer Inc."

SafeMed also recently named John Halamka, M.D., to its board of directors. Halamka is CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and chair of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel."

SafeMed also is one of the charter vendor partners for Google Health, the personal health records software project of Google Inc.

The company’s flagship product, introduced in 2007, is the SafeMed Analysis Engine. It combines reference content from multiple sources with patient-specific data from electronic health records, insurer information systems and PHRs to provide real-time decision support to clinicians and patients.

A drug prescription, for instance, can be checked for appropriateness against a patient’s weight, sex, age, allergies and interactions with other drugs the patient is taking. The software can even check for such details as whether the patient has only one functioning kidney. Prescriptions also can be checked against the patient’s drug formulary, co-pay and dosage guidelines.

Content in the engine comes from First DataBank, MediSpan, RxHub, American College of Radiology, Rand Corp., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Medical Association, among other sources.

“We change unstructured data into computable data,” Noffsinger says. “We’re not creating any data; we just compute on different data sources.”

One early SafeMed client, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, uses the decision support engine to help clinicians identify appropriate diagnostic imaging tests.

Other clients include Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts and electronic health records vendors 4Medica, eClinicalWorks, MDTablet, Medi-EMR, Medsphere, Misys, NextGen and SSIMED.

Noffsinger declines to discuss SafeMed’s financial status, but says the company has the funds to compete for the long haul.

The company initially got by with relatively small investments from individuals. But a 40% equity investment last summer from Hicks Holdings, a Dallas-based private investment firm, put SafeMed on firm financial ground, the CEO contends.

“Hicks gives the company stability and credibility and allows everyone to focus on building and selling the company rather than raising funds,” Noffsinger says.

The CEO says his experience with Microsoft and Amicore, which was introduced with great fanfare but struggled until being sold to Misys in 2006, taught him how to align resources with where the market is, not where you think it is going.

Timelines that work in other industries probably won’t work in health care because the field is so complex, he says. With Amicore, “electronic records adoption was much slower than envisioned,” he acknowledges."

Lesson Learned

The biggest lesson from that era, he says, was learning to align resources “so you’re not pushing up against a wall and spending your money on the wrong things.”

So his focus at SafeMed is to refine marketing and sales programs and hire the right people while aligning growth with its resources. That means adjusting resources to meet certain opportunities—such as the Google partnership—and putting other potential initiatives on a back burner.

For Google, SafeMed “brings a piece of technology that is specific to the patient,” Noffsinger adds. The SafeMed Analysis Engine, for instance, will consider data within a patient’s PHR along with its other data sources when the patient is making queries.

“As one of the premier technology companies in the world, any start-up would feel fortunate to be working with Google,” he notes.

SafeMed’s business model, however, does not rely on whether Google Health ultimately is successful, Noffsinger says. “If it did, that would be reason to give great pause. But we view Google as an excellent partner with the potential to make a mark in health care.”

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