Staying Out Of Hospitals May Pay OffGary Gonzales is hoping that New Mexico hos-pitals will be willing to pay his company $8,800 a month in order to save tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Gonzales is the founder and CEO of Infinity Home Healthcare, a two-month-old Albuquerque com-pany that is hoping to use telemedicine and home nursing visits to prevent Medicare patients from returning to the hospital within 30 days of their initial discharge.

The company, which is funded in part by the telemedicine firm Net Medical Xpress Solutions Inc., is offering hospitals an $8,800, 30-day package that is designed to keep recently-discharged pa-tients from returning to the hospital. The package includes eight home visits by a nurse to a patient’s home, a doctor’s visit via Net Medical Xpress’s telemedicine platform and any diagnostic tests that the patient needs.

“When a cardiac patient bounces back [is read-mitted to a hospital] it can cost $4000,000 a week. We can save a hospital from $16,00 to $400,000” by preventing those bouncebacks. Gonzales said.

“A one-night hospital stay can cost $13,000.”

Gonzales, a nurse and critical care paramedic, said he got the idea for forming Infinity after meeting Net Medical Xpress CEO Dick Govatski.

“Dick asked me if I was interested in starting a home health care company, and I said, ‘I don’t know what I can do for you; I’m a paramedic and a nurse,’ and he said he had some ideas and would help us with the technology side.”

Govatski said Infinity fits into Net Medical’s busi-ness model by being able to offer home visits by doctors vis the Internet to patients in rural New Mexico. He didn’t disclose how much Net Medical has put into the startup.

“Infinity will sign up patients and they will work with the hospitals,” Govatski said. “Hospitals have a readmission problem and those bouncebacks are costing hospitals thousands and thousands of dollars. They don’t want patients to come back within 30 days and Infinity will have intensive care unit nurses and flight nurses and emergency room nurses and they will go into the homes of a patient and they will go be able to talk to a doctor [via tele-medicine] who can assess the issue with a nurse about how bad the patient might be.”

Gonzales, who most recently worked at the Heart Hospital of New Mexico al Lovelace Medical Center, said Infinity has five nurses and four other staffers and will be looking to add 25 to 50 more employees in the near future if business takes off. The firm is in talks with some insurers and local governments for its services, Gonzales said.

Helping hospitals with their bounceback problem is just one of three lines of services that Infinity has. It offers patients who might be thinking of going to the emergency room a $350 consultation with a primary case doctor and a nurse, and it is also hoping to contract with traditional insurance

companies.

“They can do an X-ray at the house, and the doctor and the nurse visit, and if you need a prescription, that’s all included without a patient having to go to the emergency room,” Gonzales said.

Albuquerque’s two major hospital systems, Lovelace Health Systems and Presbyterian Health-care Services, have various programs to try and keep discharged patients to try and keep recently discharged patients from being readmitted to the hospital. Gonzales said that even with those pro-grams, Infinity has a place in the Market.

“We are not in competition with anybody. As the nation grows, there are new doctors that are being made, but not a lot of them. We don’t have enough health care facilities and are trying to extend doc-tor’s services,” Gonzales said.

New Company Puts Emphasis On In-Home Care

If you need real time cardiac monitoring, an X-ray or EKG at your home, Infinity Home Healthcare says it can do those and other imaging. But the startup firm hasn’t bought the vans and the mobile imaging equipment required to provide those in-home services. Instead In-finity contracts with two mobile imaging services in the Albuquerque that provide those services, said Infinity CEO Gary Gonzales. That will allow the two-month-old firm to focus on the home nurse and telemedicine visits it is offering to New Mexico hospitals and patients.

Gonzales said Infinity’s services to prevent hospital readmissions go beyond what area hospitals, including the Lovelace Health System network of hospitals and Presbyterian Hospital can do to prevent those readmis-sions.

BY DENNIS DOMRZALSKI | ALBUQUERQUE BUSINESS FIRST REPORTER

Gary Gonzales said he got the idea for his new company, Infinity Home Health Care, after talking with Dick Govatski, the CEo of Net Medical Xpress

August 9. 2013 | ALBUQUERQUE BUSINESS FIRST www.albuquerquebusinessfirst.com

© 2013 ALBUQUERQUE BUSINESS FIRST

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