• Expanding a health care software company to a larger health informatics platform that gathers together patient records spread across hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices 

The Minneapolis health care software firm previously known as VisionShare was in “10-year stealth mode,” says Mark Briggs, who became its CEO in May 2010. VisionShare developed a secure, privacy-compliant pipeline for thousands of care providers to share patient and payment information over the Internet with Medicare and Medicaid. In early February, the company was one of two touted by the federal government for leading the way in the electronic transfer of patient records.

Briggs came to VisionShare from CareFx, an Arizona health care informatics company, to take VisionShare in a much bigger direction. In February, the company changed its name to Ability Network to reflect that broader mission.

“Given the size of our network, we see so many fragmented clinical records—visits where caregivers were only provided a piece, or fragment, of a patient’s complete record,” Briggs says. “The network services we deliver to reduce this fragmentation bring more complete information to caregivers and directly improve patient safety and quality of care.”

Ability Network believes this collating capability will enable caregivers to construct efficient care plans, reducing unnecessary costs. With health care reform demanding such efficiencies, the company appears to be well repositioned.