Five Questions With: John Squire

John Squire is the newly appointed president and chief operations officer of Amazing Charts, a North Kingstown-based vendor of electronic health records and electronic medical records.

With 26 years of experience in the software industry, Squire recently joined Amazing Charts after serving as the senior director of Alliances and Cloud Strategy for the Health and Life Science Group at Microsoft. According to Amazing Charts, his hire signals a new focus on data analytics and cloud computing for the company.

Before his time at Microsoft, Squire worked in management roles at IBM, Dassault Systems, Formation Systems and Interleaf. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and computer science from Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa., and an MBA from Harvard.

PBN: How does your experience at Microsoft impact your vision for Amazing Charts?
SQUIRE:
Prior to joining Amazing Charts, I was the senior director of Alliances and Cloud Strategy for the Health and Life Science Group at Microsoft, responsible for the partner ecosystem, including all major electronic health record and electronic medical record solutions and systems integrators. During that time, I worked with many of the large electronic health record companies and saw that they were focused almost exclusively on hospitals and large practices.
With Amazing Charts I saw an opportunity to serve the true champions of today’s healthcare system – the independent small practice clinicians – by providing usable and affordable solutions that make their lives easier. I’ve seen through user testimony that Amazing Charts is improving the efficiency of small practices, making it a company that is doing it right in a space that is unclaimed. I’ve learned that it is important to stick with one thing and do it really well in the software business, and that’s the plan for Amazing Charts.

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PBN: Is Amazing Charts developing any new products currently?
SQUIRE:
We will deliver an integrated practice management and electronic health record solution soon. We will announce the acquisition of this billing and revenue system in the coming weeks. We hope that this full, deep integration will result in more efficient billing, fewer administrative headaches, and faster payments for practices.
Other development initiatives include support for the new ICD-10 coding database and Meaningful Use Stage 2 criteria, which allow clinicians to receive Medicaid/Medicare incentives for using an electronic health record system.
Finally, we are always focusing on creating new interfaces to labs, hospitals, equipment, health information exchanges – whatever a practice needs. As a result we have developed 100 new interfaces over the past year.

PBN: How has cloud computing changed the way physicians use electronic health records to assist patients?
SQUIRE:
The cloud offers physicians many benefits. One of the key tenants of Amazing Charts is affordability, and the cloud has helped physicians to reduce their IT costs, since all that is needed is a baseline PC or laptop when utilizing the cloud.
The cloud also allows for more mobility – physician’s electronic health records are now available to them wherever they are as long as they have connection to the internet.
Additionally, in the case of a catastrophic event, data is protected in the cloud, since it is securely encrypted and backed up both locally and offsite to a second data center.

PBN: In today’s digital age, privacy is a big concern for many, especially when it comes to personal medical information. How is Amazing Charts ensuring that patient information is protected?
SQUIRE:
Ensuring the privacy and security of patient information is a high priority for Amazing Charts. Our cloud solution provides two levels of security: system security, which ensures an encrypted and firewalled network connectivity and a dedicated IP address; and cloud data center security, which employs biometric authentication to all secure areas/doors.
In the same way that entering financial information online has become safer, I think that the use of electronic health records will evolve in a similar way.

PBN: How will the new focus at Amazing Charts on data analytics contribute to practitioners’ continuing medical education?
SQUIRE:
My vision for Amazing Charts is to utilize intelligence to improve medical education and outcomes. One of the reasons I chose to join Amazing Charts was that it had been acquired by Pri-Med, a continuing professional medical education company. The level of integration created through this partnership will allow Amazing Charts to identify specific gaps in clinical care in order to prescriptively provide evidence-based medical information that addresses clinical needs and improves patient outcomes. Ultimately, we can democratize the resources and educational opportunities once available only to clinicians at places like the Mayo Clinic and Mass General, and make them available to clinicians in small independent practices located in medically under-served areas.

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