Solarity and the lost hours inside a medical record

A hospital can possess a patient’s medical record and still be waiting for the information inside it. The document has arrived. Someone must establish whose it is, what it contains and where it belongs. Arrival is a transport event. Usefulness is an organizational achievement. Solarity has made a business out of the distance between the two.

Electronic records promised a welcome departure from the filing cabinet. But a digital cabinet still needs filing. In a 2021 account reproduced by Solarity, health systems had invested in Epic and Cerner while continuing to receive information on paper and by fax. The incoming material needed classification and routing. Buying the destination had not abolished the journey.

There is a small comedy here, paid for by people with more urgent things to do. A document can travel electronically, reach the correct institution and then wait for a human being to make it useful. The machinery of transmission has done its job. The machinery of attention is still catching up.

01 / The queue was the clue

Jean George, a health information management leader at Atrius Health, faced a growing indexing workload. Solarity’s account of her 2021 interview described inefficient, costly processes and delays that affected access to records and physician satisfaction. At that time, Atrius’s network included 900 physicians, 50 specialties and 36 practices serving more than 740,000 patients. A clerical inconvenience, repeated across that network, becomes an operating problem.

Keck Medicine of USC offers a more intimate measure. In the company’s published summary of Bessie Rivera’s interview, the health information management department had almost eliminated document preparation and had gone two years without hiring temporary staff. Rivera also reported better morale. Those are revealing outcomes because they describe the work people no longer had to arrange around.

At UC San Diego, Dana Victor discussed faster document review, efficiency and lower costs. She also described spending staff time more productively instead of chasing stray forms and errors. Reporting mattered: she could show internal customers how her department was performing. A tidier process had become a process she could explain.

These are vendor-published customer accounts, and their specificity is more useful than treating them as universal promises. They suggest what to investigate: preparation work, turnaround, errors, staffing pressure and visibility. A hospital shopping for automation can start there before becoming entranced by a demonstration.

02 / A translator with a review desk

Solarity’s software performs several separate jobs. Its product materials describe patient matching using extracted identifiers, contextual identification, data abstraction, reporting and integration. Listed EHR connections include Epic, Cerner, Meditech, Allscripts, NextGen and eClinicalWorks. The object is to turn disparate incoming information into something that fits the provider’s existing record and workflow.

Matching is particularly consequential. Reading a name is one task; associating information with the appropriate patient is another. Classifying a lab report is different again from extracting a result and connecting it to an order. In a 2022 interview, CEO Andrew Fehlman described that order-level extraction as data abstraction. Each stage answers a different question about the same incoming material.

Optical character recognition can turn an image into text. Natural language processing can help interpret the text. But a readable document is only an intermediate product. A provider still needs the information correctly associated, organized and delivered. Solarity’s distinction is the combination of those steps with a service team that deals with records the software cannot initially interpret.

The company’s current pitch makes that arrangement explicit: managed clinical data operations, with AI and operational teams sharing the work. It describes human review of exceptions and quality assurance. This makes the review desk part of the product’s economics. Someone still has to handle ambiguity; the engagement determines who that someone is.

“Solarity acts as a universal conduit for patient information.”Andrew Fehlman · 2021 interview

03 / Make friends with the fax

Solarity’s partnerships explain its market position more clearly than a list of rival software companies. It sits between external information and the clinical systems expected to use it. Transmission and interpretation are complementary jobs. The company has built relationships on both sides.

In September 2022, Solarity and OpenText announced a partnership combining digital fax delivery with clinical-data processing. Incoming documents would pass through Solarity before information reached hospital records. The announcement named products including RightFax and Fax2Mail and scheduled an API integration for December that year. The fax was being connected to a more useful downstream process.

A July 2022 strategic referral partnership with Lyniate paired Solarity with the Corepoint and Rhapsody integration engines. The stated aim was to index and deliver both digital and unstructured information into EHRs. Integration supplies connections; interpretation supplies usable content. A connection can be perfectly sound while the receiving organization still has work to do.

Epic’s March 2022 Garden Plot launch included Solarity among its integrated third-party products. Garden Plot offered independent groups hosted and supported access to Epic. Its launch roster is a useful reminder that running an EHR involves an ecosystem of services. The record system is the center of clinical work, but several businesses help keep information moving into it.

04 / An old paperwork business attracts new capital

Solarity emerged from EDCO Health Information Solutions, whose business dates to 1961 in BBB records. In the 2019 acquisition announcement, Solarity was still described as EDCO’s patented indexing software. That history matters: this business had a healthcare document problem to solve before the current enthusiasm for AI supplied a fashionable vocabulary.

BV Investment Partners acquired EDCO in November 2019 and partnered with the existing executive team. The announcement described more than 300 employees and technology that transformed unstructured information into clinically relevant EHR content. The investment was in an established operation with software and services already tied to healthcare workflows.

In June 2024, TA Associates became the lead investor. BV and management retained substantial ownership stakes. TA’s announcement reported adoption at more than 500 hospitals and 6,000 physician offices and said the investment would support organic growth and technology development. Financial terms were undisclosed.

The business model combines healthcare software with ongoing operational services. Its implementation expertise includes analytics, training, project management and technical work. Leadership materials emphasize continuous improvement and collaboration, alongside information security. That is a sensible set of priorities for a business whose output must enter an institution’s existing daily routines.

05 / Put a stopwatch on the handoff

A hospital’s practical alternatives include its own indexing staff, an outsourced processing team, or document-capture software connected to the EHR. The choice depends on which work the organization wants to retain and which results a supplier will take responsibility for. An impressive extraction demonstration addresses only part of that decision.

The first failure described in Fehlman’s 2022 customer example was capacity. An unnamed Honor Roll hospital had added staff but still could not process all its incoming information. He reported a change from days of turnaround and more than 80 full-time-equivalent staff involved to less than 12 hours and fewer than ten. It is a striking vendor-reported example, not a forecast for another hospital.

The transferable lesson is to measure the complete handoff. Start the clock when information arrives. Stop it when the intended clinician can use it. Count preparation steps, corrections and exception reviews along the way. When assessing cost, include integration, retained staff and review work as well as the supplier’s fee. That is an evaluation method, rather than a published Solarity price.

Volume and local configuration matter. An organization with little incoming document work has a different economic case from one maintaining a substantial queue. Patient identifiers, destination rules and difficult-record review need agreement before automation can deliver reliably. These are practical implementation considerations; a larger automation percentage alone does not settle them.

Solarity’s appeal is easiest to understand at the end of that clock. A clinician opens the record, and the outside information is already in the expected place. Someone has received it, understood it, checked it and put it away. The old filing problem has acquired new machinery. The useful part is getting back the hours spent filing.