What appears to be a small office suite in Cedar Park is actually a global company serving nearly 1 million health care professionals around the world.
The company, HealthCare Point, met with White House staff and Vice President Joe Biden on June 3 to discuss the company’s efforts in improving efficiency in the health care industry.
Al O. Pacino, HealthCare Point co-founder and president, said the company presented its product, BlueCloud, in partnership with the Alliance for Clinical Research Excellence and Safety, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing medical researchers together.
“We’re the first global network of health care and clinical professionals,” Pacino said. “Think of Facebook—BlueCloud is a health care social network. It’s set up like a cell phone; there are various applications and a directory of contacts.”
Working with approximately 60,000 organizations, BlueCloud serves as a hub that allows them to communicate and share resources for education, certifications, research and studies. Pacino said many professionals also use it to share resumes and verify credentials.
“Health professionals have to keep up a certain number of trainings to maintain their licenses,” Pacino said. “We don’t own the copyrights to these things, but we offer one place where you can learn it all.”
BlueCloud is free to use for health care professionals and organizations, though some of the trainings and certification programs may have a fee.
Pacino said the idea for the product began in 2003 when he and several other health care professionals began experiencing life as patients.
Pacino was diagnosed with cancer after serving in the U.S. Army as a medic and working as a manager in a pharmaceutical research organization.
“We found that health care research-sharing was very inefficient,” he said. “We wanted a system that would streamline the process of sharing information.”
In their meeting with the White House staff and Biden, ACRES and HealthCare Point discussed collaboration on Biden’s Moonshot initiative to cure cancer.
The initiative focuses on using technology advances to improve the way medical research is conducted.
“Biden’s Moonshot initiative has a theory that we can cure cancer if we combine all the research,” Pacino said. “[White House staff] met with ACRES several weeks ago and then invited us back but said to bring BlueCloud.”
A Cedar Park resident for more than 30 years, Pacino said he is proud to bring the area to national and international attention through his company.
“The cool thing is that we have this small company in Cedar Park that’s being used globally to change the health care research setting,” he said.
In the future, Pacino said he hopes BlueCloud will become a standard for health care industry communication.
“To fix a broken system you have to fix the foundation,” he said. “A lot of organizations are working on creating better standards for technology in health care, and BlueCloud is right in the middle of it.”
