David, thanks for taking time to talk to us today. How about we start by you sharing with us a little bit of about yourself, your career so far, all the way to being the EVP, Corporate Development at PointClickCare?

David Belback: My current role at PointClickCare is executive vice president of our corporate development team which involves a lot of our strategic partnerships and alliances as well as general manager of our home health division. But going back a little while I have historically been a senior executive in a variety of technology businesses just before joining PointClickCare, I spent some time in the IBM Lotus software group and in 2009 I came across PointClickCare who had developed a great position to innovate in long-term post-acute care with a software; really the first to bring software as a service to this healthcare market and we’re well positioned to innovate in healthcare.

I also found a company with a great customer and employee focused culture, so those two factors really motivated me to join the PointClickCare team.

What’s the most exciting thing that you and your team are working on currently?

David Belback: We’ve got a lot of things going on. The industry is going through a transformation and so we have a number of initiatives. We actually are having our customer summit next week in Orlando Florida; that’s our seventh annual customer summit.

We’re bringing together more than 1,700 customers, partners and employees and there we’re looking to engage in conversations with customers around how we solve some of the industry problems, the reality of changing payment models, value-based care, the reality of narrowing networks and how our customers can deal with that challenge.

At our summit, we’ll be talking about some of the solutions that we’re bringing to help our customers deal with those problems. We will be talking about a partnership we have with COMS interactive to bring evidence-based proactive care management and disease protocols to our customer base. We will be highlighting a skin wound solution that we have that helps our customers to provide better care and reduce clinical risk when it comes to managing wounds in their facilities. We have a new document management solution that helps our customers develop a more efficient and a more accurate admissions process in their facilities and we have an employee engagement and customer satisfaction solution. The number one problem we hear people talk about is how do they attract and retain staff in a world where volume is growing and there is a caregiver shortage pending, and so that’s a solution we think is very important for our customers.

But probably the most exciting thing that we can talk about here at LeadingAge is that we’re introducing an enhanced home health solution, we call it PointClickCare at Home. And that’s something we’re particularly excited about, we’ve served our customers historically with a view that we want them to be able to provide the best care with the best outcomes regardless of care setting and most of our customers either have a home health operation or growing their home health business, as providers are trying to be able to manage patients and residents across the entire continuum of care.

We have brought to market a home health solution that provides our customers with a modern mobile app that allows caregivers to document in the home, that allows fewer documentation errors, better compliance, and therefore better billing. It allows us to help solve customer problems around the quality of documentation as well as to thrive in a world where networks are narrowing and our customers need to compete to be a part of preferred provider networks. So that’s sort of part one of our home health solution.

Part two of our home care solution is equally exciting; it is a remote care solution, so it’s technology that allows individuals to live at home more safely and more effectively. It provides our home health customers with the ability to remotely monitor client activity, adherence to care plans and to make a decision to intervene if the data shows that there’s the potential for an adverse event that may cause a readmission.

So, those two solutions together we refer to as our PointClickCare at Home solutions and we’re pretty excited about those.

There is a lot of change in the healthcare industry, there is a little bit of uncertainty too with the change in administration. What would your advice be to the executives that need to make decisions in times of uncertainty like this?

David Belback: I guess my advice would be to stay market-focused. I think the reality is that [the healthcare] system is going to need technology to drive sort of better outcomes at lower cost, and as long as we’re bringing solutions to market that do that, I think the rest will take care of itself.

I think that the reality is that the babyboom generation is really about to hit senior care and in the long term, as long as we focus on the market drivers, everything else will take care of itself. I think better care at lower costs is an objective that crosses party lines. So regardless of which administration, maybe different methods to get there, but that’s the outcome that the system needs I think.

What is the impact LeadingAge CAST has on your strategies, your investments, and your vision?

David Belback: I think CAST has brought a lot of value to its members. I think maybe notably I’d speak to the work that CAST did in launching the seven-stage EHR adoption model. That’s really a model that helps providers to walk through in a logical manner the implementation of an EHR and really get value from the EHR implementation. So, I think that’s been great.

At PointClickCare, we embrace the model. We built the concepts into the way we build our platform, the way we implement and work with customers and we engage our account management team to work with customers to continue to help them to sort of walk down the path, get better value out of the EHR, greater connectivity so that they can effectively interoperate with hospitals, pharmacies and other settings of care.

How about we close with something that could be an advice to the young generation that is getting into the healthcare industry, that’s probably looking at somebody like you and saying how do I become successful like David?

David Belback: I don’t think I have a silver bullet there, but I guess, I think about two things: one, really focuses on market needs, if you focus on market needs, you’ll develop solutions that customers really care about and that add value; and then I would say focus on building a strong team.

I think none of us can move to the next level, also you have somebody that can do what we were doing the day before and so coaching and mentoring and building leaders for the future, who embrace the same sort of customer- and employee-focused culture, I think that would be the two things I would think would help with anybody’s success.

That’s great advice, David; thank you so much for taking time to share your wonderful insights with us. Really appreciate it, have a wonderful rest of the day.