By Sam Waltz
Started in her basement in 2001, today overflowing a small Hockessin office building crammed with nearly 100 employees, Star-Med LLC has its year-end 2015 sights set on emergence into a national healthcare information systems market, says its founder and CEO Diane E. Ferry.
In a world where personal healthcare records are intended to be among the most secure, records still require movement from person-to-person and institution-to-institution.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) must be sent from a facility that holds them, e.g., a hospital where a patient has been treated, to another institution, medical practice, insurance company or, sometimes, even a patient’s attorney for a legal matter.
To maximize the security needed to protect confidentiality, institutions turn to companies like Star-Med as a “front-end provider” to manage the confidential transmission of records.
“Today, there are about four companies in the process of becoming national players in this space,” said Ferry, “and Star-Med is one of the four.”
Star-Assist is the new IP-protected technology that Star-Med is integrating to even upgrade its offering, with plans to phase it in this spring towards a full national roll-out by the fall. The company is doing business now in about five states, with plans to be in many more by year-end.
“Our technology is a web-based solution which allows hospitals and providers a quick and efficient means to manage, track and account for the disclosure of patient health information,” said Ferry, who, earlier in her career, worked as a leader in medical records offices before starting Star-Med.
“We’re here to make certain your needs are being well-met in Delaware, to keep you in Delaware,” Gov. Jack Markell told company employees in a late February visit to its offices. He met with company leaders, toured the offices, and taped his weekly radio address there.
Markell applauded the entrepreneurial fervor of the fast-growing woman-owned business, where he heard Ferry describe its great attention to quality and detail in checking and re-checking records for quality and accuracy before transmitting them with secure encryption.
In fact, both Ferry and her husband, Tom, are well known and long active in Delaware’s healthcare industry, and he retired just a few years ago as CEO of the A.I. Du Pont Hospital for Children, where he had spent his career in healthcare management. ♦
