"Welcome to our company blog. Within these blog posts, we hope to share our insights on clinical quality management, the patient-centered medical home, chronic disease management in primary care, evidence-based medicine, and the use of technology in ambulatory care settings."

- David Morin, CEO and Donald Nease Jr., MD, Chief Medical Officer

When we launched Cielo MedSolutions (www.cielomedsolutions.com) in ’05, we took a long, hard look at the healthcare IT space and realized the following: 1. that the country’s 360,000 primary care physicians were suffering… they were underpaid and overworked; 2. that commercial electronic medical record (EMR) or electronic health record (EHR) software wasn’t the entire answer for making those primary care clinicians’ lives better, partly because this software tended to be designed around the needs and the workflow of hospitals and inpatient medical care (as opposed to ambulatory care), and partly because it tended to record billing data (as opposed to clinical data) in the patient record; and, 3. that existing commercial software tended to be so expensive that the return-on-investment just wasn’t there for primary care providers. As we scoured the market at the time, we were fortunate to find some existing web-based software –- an example of what we’ve come to call a “clinical quality management” application –- developed by leading clinical researchers at the University of Michigan’s Medical School by the Family Medicine Professors Don Nease, Mike Klinkman and Lee Green. They’d developed and already proven out this software, with the help of NIH grant funding, and were already field-deploying it to manage over 140,000 patient encounters per year in their geographically-dispersed clinics. What we liked about what we saw with the UM software was that it was built around the needs –- and around the workflow –- of primary care clinicians, and actually helped each physician do a better job of keeping track of the myriad details associated with chronic disease management for her or his thousands of patients, both on the day of a patient visit as well as by facilitating proactive patient outreach. So, to make a long story long... we ended up exclusively licensing this technology from the University of Michigan (http://cielomedsolutions.com/news-pr-cms-march2006.asp). But -- and we think this is much more important in the final analysis -- we've ended up forming deep personal and professional friendships with the key medical researchers involved. Today, we have the privilege of calling Dr. Don Nease our Chief Medical Officer at Cielo, and Drs. Klinkman and Green both energetically serve on our Medical Advisory Board where they continue to challenge our thinking and provide thought leadership (http://cielomedsolutions.com/about-advisory.asp). On the application software side of things, we've rapidly evolved and augmented the technology we licensed from UM, and the result today is known as Cielo Clinic, a commercial SaaS (software-as-a-service) application for clinical quality management in ambulatory care settings. Jim Price Chairman & Cofounder Cielo MedSolutions