Kathleen Norris Park
The Journal Record

“My time is just as valuable as this doctor’s,” roared Agi Lurtz’s ailing, 80-year-old father. “And I’m not waiting for him another minute.”

Lurtz hushed her dad and ushered him out of the waiting room, “siding with the enemy, wasn’t I?” she said.

Then she went home and started searching for a way to eliminate the ubiquitous, labor-intensive clipboard full of questions, some way to save patients, caregivers and physicians time and errors.

She couldn’t find one, so she created one.

OnlineMedSource Inc. is a Web-based, interactive service that eliminates filling out medical forms more than once and allows doctors and patients instant access to those records.

Started in 1999 with funds “out of my hip pocket,” she said – something less than $3,000 – OnlineMedSource Inc. went live online in 2003. Gross sales have increased 289.5 percent from 2006 to May 2007.

Doctors who subscribe to her service can add to patients’ histories and prescription information and be ready to answer questions that the patient has posed online and might otherwise forget or be too embarrassed to ask in person.

Lurtz said nearly 50 percent of all patients call back after an appointment to ask another question. The time the doctor and his staff must give to this process – taking the message, finding the chart again, asking the doctor the question and calling the patient back with the answer, which could take several tries – adds up. Even if everything goes perfectly the first time, it averages about 20 minutes for each instance – expensive time for a physician.

“We have virtually eliminated that problem because the patient has two possible ways to communicate with the doctor,” Lurtz said. “The patient can either enter the question on the form for a later answer or contact the doctor electronically through a secure server. It looks like e-mail, but it isn’t. And the doctor replies the same way.”

“The physician saves an unbelievable amount of money,” Lurtz said. “Our service saves not only phone time but mail costs and employee costs, as well. In his first year, one doctor we did an ROI (return on investment) on – using very conservative figures – saved $54,800.” And it only cost him the first year’s subscription fee, less than $5000. That was one doctor with one nurse, one receptionist and one office manager, seeing 25 patients a day.

The savings continue as long as the physician stays on the service, even increasing because the cost goes down to less than $1,000 the second year.

“Our initial goal was to benefit everyone – the patient, the physician and his or her staff and the caregiver – and I think we’ve done that,” Lurtz said.

Her own 10 years as her father’s caregiver, always carrying “a shopping bag full” of his pill bottles to doctors’ offices and fearing she’d forget to list a critical medication on those repetitious forms, drove her to search for a better way.

“Many people today are in what I call the ‘sandwich generation,’” Lurtz said. “They are caregivers for aging parents, responsible for their own health care and that of their families – and some are even raising grandchildren. Imagine what keeping track of all those health records means for them.”

The service is free for the patient, who creates a user name and password and can go into his medical form as often as he likes. He can change, print and send forms electronically, as can anyone he designates – caregiver, relative and of course, his physician, who must pay to subscribe.

“The physician’s cost for the service the first year is only $4,995, and that covers everything, including all the production, hosting, security, forms and Web site,” Lurtz said. “The second and subsequent years are $995 – far cry from the $100,000 plus that the others charge.”

Lurtz’s service is Web-based and doesn’t require additional hardware or what she calls the “very complicated procedures” that other online forms services require.

Both patient and doctor know the information is secure, Lurtz said. Her company has had no problems, no issues of security or confidentiality. She hires an Internet security company to try to hack into the service about three times a year, which it always fails to do.

The patient can also create and print an emergency medical card that has only his name, certain medical information and medications – no other information that someone could steal – especially if the patient was injured and unable to speak. This emergency medical card, about the size of business card, shows a pass code. The pass code allows and emergency technician of an ambulance attendant to log on to the onboard computer and quickly read the patient’s medical conditions, allergies and medications.

If the patient is unconscious and his card shows he is a diabetic, the attendant can alert the hospital to be ready for that situation and save time. The pass code on the emergency card is not the patient’s password that accesses his secure records. OnlineMedsource Inc. operates out of the E-Tech business incubator at 710 Asp Ave. in Norman.