Page 99 - Innovation Delaware 2021

KENNY ECK
the newly unincarcerated from the prison system to the outside world.
That market has four key components: prisons, which
Eck considers potential partners; returning citizens, whom he considers beneficiaries; governments, which don’t have the funding to pay Patient Sortal; and private Medicaid coverage providers, which control the cash because so many returning citizens are financially needy.
A government protocol covers the printing of medical records, which costs $2 a page for the first few pages, with
the price going down with quantity. All of Patient Sortal’s work is digital.
Eck has also worked with the University of Delaware
(UD) on navigating behavioral health services and proposing
a system for students to share information between UD and other providers, as well as the New Castle County Police, on managing documents between case managers and the behavioral health unit.
With prisons essentially locked down to control coronavirus and all his contracts on hold, Eck has lately devoted more energy to finding future business. Queries to 13 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons yielded eight systems that want his services, he says, though Delaware itself is not yet on the list.
The Delaware Department of Correction’s nine facilities release about 2,300 people a year. The department relies upon the Delaware Health Information Network, a public-private partnership that in 2007 became the nation’s first statewide health information management system. Eck feels that DHIN
is too hard to navigate and is too limited by serving only Delaware health care providers.
Without any income until prisons reopen, he began paying for operations out of pocket, rather than taking on external investment to maintain equity.
Thomas Stretch, a nurse with a full-time job in health care information technology, is serving
as the chief growth officer, with the promise to be paid later, because he sees the opportunity in Eck’s concept. Patient Sortal also has three business advisors overseeing company operations.
“We plan to persevere because we have tested several markets, identified patient touch points, and created a market within a unique transition of care that nobody else is managing,” Eck says. —Ken Mammarella
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