Meet The Craneware Group experts: Praveen Kare
Praveen Kare joined Craneware in 2018 as a software development manager following six years at McKesson building high-performing clearinghouse exchange platforms and payer claim validation systems.
As vice president of product development for The Craneware Group, he oversees a global team of engineers spread across three time zones who work closely with Product Management to hatch ideas for new solutions and develop software to help customer solve problems.
Kare has over 18 years of experience in information systems and technologies varying from mainframes to open source. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication engineering and an Executive MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School with a focus on healthcare and finance. Kare is based in Craneware’s U.S. headquarters in Atlanta.
What does the acquisition of Agilum and its CRCA P&T platform mean for the Craneware Group’s product portfolio? How does CRCA enhance Craneware’s product offerings?
Agilum and its CRCA P&T platform is strategically a great acquisition for Craneware Group. It helps us provide distinct but complimentary solutions to what Craneware has in Trisus Pharmacy Financial Management, which focuses on helping our customers gain financial insights into their reimbursements and margins at the medication level. On the other hand, CRCA P&T utilizes massive data assets collected through various sources and longitudinal patient records to perform population and benchmark analysis on medications and procedures that enable our customers to make evidence-based decisions that improve patient outcomes while reducing cost of care.
This acquisition enables us to streamline data acquisition processes, reducing the burden on customer IT departments and providing them an option to extract more intelligence and analytics for the data they provide, compared to before. Combined data assets also enhance our benchmarking and comparative analytics.
A lot of the issues that Craneware’s products help with — revenue cycle management, drug remittance transparency, intelligence on formulary management and pricing drugs — aren’t really new challenges. Is it just that there hasn’t been a good way to tackle them until now, or is it something else?
These are not new challenges for our customers, true, but traditional answers to these problems have been point solutions that catered only to individual departments. Our attempt is to create a platform where solutions can talk to each other and break down the silos between different provider departments. Powering this Trisus platform with the volume and extent of data assets that we have enables us to paint a true and more accurate picture around cost of care and margins for our customers, which was not possible before with isolated applications that catered to specific issues.
How do you see Craneware products transforming the business of healthcare, now and five or 10 years down the line?
Currently, most healthcare organizations struggle to understand a true sense of the cost of care and their margins. This struggle is due to siloed departments within their organization and a lack of overarching information systems to bridge the gaps efficiently and make data transparent, clear, and actionable. Also, many organizations are still not focusing on making systems efficient to maximize the margins, as the term ‘business’ still carries a negative connotation in healthcare. Unfortunately, unless organizations can generate healthy margins for their business, they won’t be able to reinvest dollars back into their communities and patient care.
Craneware aims to transform the business of heath care by providing a platform of solutions powered by extensive data that will allow healthcare organizations to comprehend their financial data easily, make decisions that increase operational and financial performance, and even facilitate transformation of their organizational structures and processes, leading to high-quality patient care and better outcomes for all.
Is it difficult to reconcile the different technologies that underpin the platforms from the various brands?
As with any large-scale merger and acquisition, there is always early-stage challenges around reconciling systems, tools, platforms, and technologies. To begin with, familiarity of these platforms and technologies via information exchange and training will need to be ramped up across the organization. With plenty of integration tools and frameworks that are technology agnostic at our disposal, reconciling platforms is not difficult anymore — it just takes time and effort. We will aim to implement integration in a phased approach with a short-term emphasis on integrating areas that will lead to seamless customer experience.
