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Company Interview Excerpt
STAN NOWAK - SILVERLINK COMMUNICATIONS, INC.
Full article published: 8/22/2005    


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TWST: We would like to begin, if you will, with a brief historical sketch of the company and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time.
Mr. Nowak: Thank you very much. Silverlink Communications has been in business for about three and half years and we provide services that enable healthcare companies to deliver interactive personalized regulatorily compliant communications. And what that means practically speaking is healthcare enterprises rely on our interactive communications platform when they need to drive behavior, educate members, or capture data. And we provide them the most cost effective way to do those things. For example, when a managed care company wants to migrate a population from a branded drug to generic equivalent drug, they might reach out to inform those people individually that the drug that they are on has a generic substitute, and they can save a certain number of dollars over a period of the year by switching. And ask the member if they would like to switch at that time or not. And actually drive the behavior of a population to reduce the cost of their prescription drugs. That's one example of what healthcare companies are doing with the help of our services. So, today we serve about 30 companies that are the biggest companies in healthcare in United States and those companies serve about 150 million lives. And we serve those companies in about a 100 different business process areas today. Again the common themes are they need to drive behavior, capture data, or educate members.

TWST: Could you just specify a few of the ways in which you serve them since you said that there are a great many?
Mr. Nowak: Absolutely. When companies have healthcare claims and they are missing data, many of us have received letters from our health plans saying 'we need you to give us better information.', 'have you selected a primary care provider?' or 'do you have alternative coverage for your insurance?' And Silverlink proactively for those customers will call member populations and ask them those questions, receive input from the members and then update the customer's databases so that they can speed the processing of healthcare claims and pay the providers more quickly. Another example is when Merck recalled the drug Vioxx last year. That morning at 8 o'clock or so a release went out over the wires that Merck was about to recall. Four of our customers that day used our platform to contact their members and patients on Vioxx to educate them about the drug recall and provide a course of action for the members So, they were actually educating and driving behavior- 'Would you like us to contact your doctor to talk about switching to an alternative therapy?' Another example would be when members are on prescription drugs and they're taking a prescription drug for a chronic condition. Persistency is a serious problem in the United States with the major therapies having no better than a 50% persistency rate. So, actually one effective way to increase persistency is to use automated interactive dialogs to contact them and say 'according to our records, your prescription for Lipitor is about to run out. Would you like to refill it now?' So, that represents a range of the applications our customers are using us for. Again, there are about 100 business processes that our customers are involving us in. This year one of the major things is driving the behaviors around the Medicare Part D benefit. And that kicks off a whole series of interactions with members.

 

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For more information call (212) 952 7400. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.

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