A Nashville-based startup company is giving University of Alabama business students the opportunity to work on a program that will streamline immunization forms for incoming students.
Med+Pass Health LLC is a startup company founded in 2014 by UA alumnus Hallett Ogburn, CEO; Jim Wills, president and CFO; and Kevin Bond, adviser alongside students of the UA MIS program. It is an immunization-data collecting technology company that works with health centers to collect and verify health information by digitizing paper-based medical and insurance forms and storing them into a cloud. The company’s focus has mainly been on automating student verification and collecting student immunization forms at university health centers, which was part of the inspiration for working with students to develop the program.
“My uncle and cofounder, Dr. Kevin Bond, who’s a urologist, led me to this problem of redundant medical forms while I was in MBA school. He owned a small urology practice and was telling me how costly checking patients in was, which set me on the course of wanting to solve one of the many problems with data collection and verification in health care,” Ogburn said.
John Maxwell, former director of the UA Student Health Center, provided Ogburn with the idea of working with student health care. Ogburn said that immunization forms particularly stuck out to him because most new students wait until the last minute to send those in, leaving health center employees unable to verify all students before school begins.
Med+Pass began collaborating with the UA MIS program over a year ago.
“Who better to build the product than the students? We want to build with students who will actually be using this product,” Ogburn said. “They have a development program, the Capstone Program, similar to a real world contracting firm, where you donate to a scholarship fund and have a group of students to work on your product.”
Med+Pass has since sponsored three Capstone Projects as part of the Capstone Program, from the initial development of their service to now developing an iOS and Android app for better functionality, access and efficiency for health centers using Med+Pass, which has been the focus of this semester’s work. This app serves as a means to automatically upload documents, keep important information updated and also provide important health alerts to students.
“We got involved in it because Hallett Ogburn reached out. He had knowledge of the program from getting his MBA here,” said Joanne Hale, the faculty sponsor of the project. “Students work with Med+Pass to understand the product requirements, they work with student health centers at various university to find ways to be the most effective and they design and build it with the help of the university and Med+Pass employees.”
One of these students, Ellen Lindsey, a dual MBA and master’s of Enterprise Integration student, served as the project manager for last semester’s collaboration.
“Last semester, our team added more functionality to Med+Pass’s current website,” Lindsey said. “The team developed a PDF generation program that would create an immunization form based on different criteria. This allowed for a unique form to be created for each student. I think Med+Pass has a bright future. They are a company made up of good people with a passion for what they are doing.”
Med+Pass launched its platform successfully at Auburn University Medical Clinic this semester with a five-year contract. All new students are now required to use the program when sending in their immunization, medical and insurance forms.
“It has been a safe place to grow and test our product,” Ogburn said. “We solved a lot of big pain points for them, a lot of problems no one has been focused on.”
He said that during a visit to the clinic one afternoon, employees applauded when they found out they were the founders of the program.
Med+Pass is looking to implement their program in five to 10 more colleges by the end of the semester and 25 by December. They are also hoping to reach the K-12 market in 2016.
Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected to clarify the company’s name. According to Wells, the company is properly called Med+Pass, not MedPass, as was previously stated.
