Executive Snapshot
Milligan says customers key to Antek’s success
By Denise DiRamio, Managing Editor
Jim Milligan
Professional
President, Antek HealthWare, Laboratory Division of Visionary HealthWare
More than 20 years of healthcare IT experience general manager/senior VP of
Sales, Government Program Division, QuadraMed; previously worked at healthcare
companies Millbrook, McKesson, and Terrano.
Education
BA/BS Ashland University Ashland, OH
Personal
An avid outdoorsman and sports fan;
enjoys spending time with his wife and three children.
An LIS is a powerful tool. With more than
80% of the clinical decision-making information originating from the
laboratory, an effective laboratory information system (LIS) plays a
major role in facilitating better healthcare. Antek HealthWare’s LIS
allows for laboratory automation and interoperability with other
software systems and has the ability to increase throughput and improve
result distribution to the ordering physicians. We offer features that
ensure quality-assurance/quality-control procedures are being properly
managed — which greatly enhance the accuracy of laboratory testing.
Additionally, rapid result distribution allows the ordering physician to
either diagnose and treat a patient or refer a patient to a specialist
in a timelier manner — leading to better patient care. Our outreach
tools and reporting capabilities also can affect the profitability of
the lab.
Continuous product enhancement. Antek’s
organic growth strategy has allowed us to focus on the needs of users in
the clinical lab in order to make enhancements to our flagship product,
LabDAQ LIS. New products and new functionalities allow us to continue to
evolve our primary markets while we look to enter new laboratory
markets. As the adoption of electronic health records increases and the
needs of hospital, clinic, physician office, and reference labs grow and
change, we will continue to develop products with the end-user in mind.
Feedback is fundamental. Antek’s success
is a direct result of feedback from our customers. We conduct regional
user group meetings where we have open forums with customers in order to
further their knowledge of our products and get feedback for future
improvements. We participate in KLAS, a third-party market research
survey, which provides client feedback regarding the sales process,
support, and feature sets. Antek has a number of employees with
laboratory experience — ranging from MTs working the bench to lab
managers for large clinical laboratories, so we have a clear
understanding of the needs of the clinical lab. Additionally, we are
constantly interacting with laboratory professionals to learn how our
LIS is used in the clinical setting.
Integration makes it easy. While the
greatest challenges in the clinical lab revolve around the adoption of
health information technology and software integration/interoperability,
we continue to strive to make our products intuitive and easy to use. We
have dedicated HL7 personnel whose focus is on software integration.
Successful integration allows our clients to realize the greatest
potential return on investment from their LIS. We offer training
sessions for new users, as well as experienced users looking to learn
more, and soon we will offer webinars, too.
Social responsibility. We encourage our
employees to participate in the community, and some of our staff members
return to their alma maters to speak about career opportunities and the
rewards of being a laboratory professional. Antek recently released
LabDAQ LIS Student Simulator to provide CLS programs with a valuable
teaching tool and to prepare students for future job responsibilities.
Antek HealthWare is a "green" company. We have employed a number of
green initiatives designed to reduce waste and increase recycling. Antek
also is a supporter of Clean Air Partners, whose focus is to improve air
quality in the Baltimore/Washington, DC, region.