CASE STUDY: GRAVITY DIAGNOSTICS

ID.me Partnership Helps Gravity Diagnostics Expedite Patient Verification

Founded in 1999, MDLand is a leading digital health technology company bringing advanced solutions for healthcare problems. Since its inception, MDLand has worked closely with its physician customers to digitize and modernize practices with a focus on the comprehensive Value-Based Payment (VBP)-ready enterprise EHR, new-generation population health, clinical analytics, and digital health platform to support disease management, patient monitoring, and virtual health. In recent years, MDLand expanded its cloud-based digital health platform to support customers and partners, including physician organizations, payers, and governmental agencies to increase productivity, improve quality, ensure compliance, enhance revenue, and engage patients to improve care and outcomes.

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Challenge

During the Delta variant surge, Gravity Diagnostics stood up 40+ remote testing locations across Kentucky and Indiana. Those locations utilized paper requisitions to start.

Filling out the paper forms typically took between 10 and 15 minutes, said Emilie VanderKolk, the company’s Lead Solution Delivery Architect. At Gravity’s drive-thru facilities, the delay was compounded if there were minors or multiple people in a car requesting lab work because everyone had to fill out the form.

A patient’s focus while completing a paper requisition could be easily distracted by numerous factors. This would sometimes result in patients providing inaccurate information.

“Then we would have to go backward and collect the correct information after the specimen had arrived in the laboratory so we could report it out correctly to our patients,” said Mike Tarwater, Gravity’s Vice President of Information Technology. “Obviously, that caused a delay in delivering results.”

Green Quotation

Just having that responsiveness and an open and honest conversation was beneficial and made the decision easy for me.

Emilie VanderKolk
Lead Solution Delivery Architect, Gravity Diagnostics

Solution

Amanda Eckmann, Gravity’s Vice President of Digital Transformation, remembers when her team looked at the company’s process and realized there had to be a better way. Gravity was designing a new app, she said, and trying to determine the best user experience and the best way to protect patient information.

“As we started to look at it,” she said, “we had that ‘aha’ moment of, ‘Where do you go to make sure you’re implementing the best solution and the best technology to handle those situations?’”

Gravity found the answer with ID.me, which offered secure, federally compliant, omnichannel patient- verification services. ID.me identity verification met Gravity’s need to blend digital and in-person services to save time during registration, reduce errors in delivering results, and comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

People arriving at the lab’s drive-thrus would be presented with a QR code linking to the Gravity mobile site. On that site, people would register for a test and then be directed to a co-branded portal for identity verification through ID.me.

By leveraging the ID.me verification with Multifactor Authentication, Gravity was able to confidently communicate with patients in the Gravity Diagnostics Mobile application regarding their orders and results from the remote locations.

It wasn’t just identity verification that made ID.me stand out among the field of vendors, VanderKolk said. It was the team’s responsiveness to Gravity’s questions and its ability to scale with the lab’s growth.

“When you’re in an industry like healthcare, you don’t have a lot of time for someone to convince you,” she said. “You need to have the information right away. Just having that responsiveness and an open and honest conversation was beneficial and made the decision easy for me.”

The other determining factor for Gravity was the ID.me track record of successful partnerships, Eckmann said. Gravity could have chosen a white-label approach but found value in the ID.me brand of security and privacy.

“There is strength behind that brand,” she said. “Being able to share that partnership was beneficial for us.”

Green Quotation

Just having that responsiveness and an open and honest conversation was beneficial and made the decision easy for me.

Emilie VanderKolk
Lead Solution Delivery Architect, Gravity Diagnostics

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Results

There was a 33-day timeline from the start of integration to the October 27, 2021, launch, and Tarwater said the ID.me team didn’t even blink at the tight schedule.

“From my standpoint as the VP of Information Technology, I look at timelines and progress at a higher level, and we were able to hit all of those on this timeline,” he said. “That’s not always the case with integrations, particularly with a new partner. I was incredibly impressed with the performance of the ID.me team.”

Questions and challenges arise during every integration, but Gravity found it had a partner in ID.me that was always available to provide support, answer questions, and troubleshoot problems. Eckmann said she could call ID.me at 7 p.m. on a Friday to report a problem that had to be fixed by Saturday morning, and the team never wavered.

“The teamwork and the partnership,” she said, “was hands-down one of the best I think I’ve ever experienced.”

That teamwork approach has helped Gravity cut patient time spent registering in half, from 10 to 15 minutes to five to seven. For repeat patients who are already registered, VanderKolk said, that number drops to two to three minutes.

The time savings illustrates the power of the rapidly growing ID.me user network. Lab traffic, particularly at the drive-thrus, runs more smoothly because once people are verified, it’s a simple, fast process to register for repeat visits.

The Gravity team also noticed that many government employees, military personnel, and nurses already had ID.me accounts, which contributed further to quick, secure visits.

“To know that you can get in and get out within 15 to 20 minutes total instead of spending 15 to 20 minutes just getting your forms filled out gives our users a lot of confidence,” VanderKolk said. “The ability to tap into that has definitely gone a long way.”

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Strong Partnership with a Bright Future

When Gravity partnered with ID.me, Tarwater said, he wanted to solve an immediate problem and build toward a long-term strategy to create an enterprise identifier system and shift away from transactional interactions with patients.

Combining validated cell phone numbers and email addresses gave him the confidence to match criteria, pull records together, and create enterprise electronic medical records for patients. It’s an important next step for Gravity, Tarwater said, because lab information systems only track specimens, test against them, and report results.

The ID.me partnership can help open the door to enhanced, broader relationships with patients.

“One of the things we want to do at Gravity is really focus on the patient,” he said, “which means that we’re building out the opportunity to build an electronic medical record as a laboratory and not be focused on just one transaction at a time.”

The possibilities go beyond that strategy. Whether it’s integrating with a new order and services acquisition system or brainstorming new opportunities, Gravity found a long-term partner, Eckmann said.

“That’s one of the best things about the team we have at ID.me,” she said. “Any time we’ve got an idea or if we ask if there’s potential to branch into something new for the partnership, they’re always willing to discuss what that would look like.”

Green Quotation

The teamwork and the partnership was hands- down one of the best I think I’ve ever experienced.”

Amanda Eckmann
Vice President of Digital Transformation, Gravity Diagnostics

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Interested in learning more about the ID.me and Gravity Diagnostics partnership?

Hear Blake Hall, co-founder and CEO of ID.me, and Mike Tarwater, Vice President of Information Technology at Gravity Diagnostics, discuss the changing identity proofing landscape in healthcare.Learn how ID.me patient proofing helped Gravity streamline patient registration and communication.

ID.me simplifies how individuals prove and share their identity online.

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