Name Change Marks City Company’s Evolution
Mar. 12–An Oklahoma City-based company that offers “evidence-based” medicine for both doctors and patients has changed its name and cut formal ties to its parent company, officials said Friday.
The company known as ePPO LLC has changed its name to MedEncentive LLC and is now a free-standing company. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of CompOne Services Ltd., an Oklahoma City-based physicians practice management company.
The evolution of ePPO to MedEncentive was spurred by confusion wrought by the old name, said Jeff Greene, MedEncentive’s co-founder and chief executive officer.
“Our company is not a PPO or a health plan or an insurance company,” Greene said. “We offer products that help PPOs and health plans provide better and more affordable health care.”
MedEncentive takes a unique approach to improving health care and lowering costs by offering Internet-based “information therapy” to patients and rewarding patients for using it and doctors for prescribing it.
“Information delivered at the right dose at the right time is a very powerful medicine,” Greene said.
Less than a year old, MedEncentive’s “information therapy” is still being validated in test markets that include the cities of Duncan and Durant, as well as the employee base of CompOne.
Greene offered results in Duncan as evidence of the effectiveness of its information therapy. In year-over-year comparisons, the city has seen its health care costs drop as much as 30 percent since signing on last summer, he said.
Donna Howell, Duncan’s personnel director, said the city indeed has saved money using MedEncentive’s information therapy. But she couldn’t attribute it all to the program.
“We made some changes in our plan, too,” Howell said. “We raised deductibles and raised the co-pay for prescriptions. I don’t have a breakdown of where the savings have come from.”
Generally, the city’s 200 employees, 40 retirees and their families have accepted the incentive to go to the Internet and follow treatment prescribed specifically for their conditions. Some have resisted simply because of the technology involved, she said.
MedEncentive rewards doctors with higher payments if they prescribe information therapy. Patients can earn rebates — in Duncan it’s $25 per visit up to $100 annually per person — by logging on and following the guidelines.
“This helps make us all a little more honest and a little more accountable, and we think that’s one of the reasons the cost has gone down,” Greene said.
Co-founders along with Greene were Dr. Susan Chambers, president of the Central Oklahoma Physicians Alliance, and Dr. David Parke, chief executive officer of the Dean A. McGee Eye Institute.
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