Darby fuels referrals

GREENVILLE, S.C. – Darby has hit the market with a product called Smart Intake that it says “supercharges” an HME provider’s intake team. 

Smart Intake is a tool that scans pages and pages of medical documentation and highlights the data points that providers need, allowing them to click or copy them and transfer them directly to Brightree or another software program. 

“What Smart Intake does is help to accelerate the existing workflow,” said Charlotte Lawson, M.D., CEO and co-founder. “We’re not changing the way they work; we’re just making it faster. It’s a tool that can have an impact on day one.” 

Darby, which recently named long-time provider Gary Sheehan, formerly of AdaptHealth, as a growth advisor, has two providers up and running on Smart Intake and plans to trial a third in this month, as well as onboard others in 2024. The company charges by consumption and offers a discount for members of VGM Group. 

Magic needed 

Darby’s origin story involves Lawson, still a practicing ER doc, trying to navigate virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“When I was working on the ED-at-home team at Medically Home, one challenge we had was getting products and services to the home in a consistent and timely manner,” she said. “When (the existing process) worked, it was magic; when it didn’t, we had to send people back to the hospital. It became apparent that this was going to be a factor in hospital-at-home’s success.” 

Narrowed scope 

Lawson was initially focused on addressing the larger need for better information exchange between clinical teams and third-party vendors for a variety of service lines, not just DME. 

“But we evolved from a marketplace solution to focusing on DME because we had really great relationships with early partners there and, by extension, a good understanding of the pain points,” she said. 

Business logic 

Once Smart Intake turns information from a PDF into structured data, there are a variety of things that can be done with it, Lawson says. 

“Some of this is forward looking and some of this is coming as soon as next month, but there’s the ability to save a downloaded annotated file in preparation for an audit,” she said. “We can also help them store business logic, so they can not only confirm, yes, the information is here, but also get a flag about whether or not (an order) is qualified.” 

Order throughput 

Darby is measuring Smart Intake’s impact based on how many more referrals a provider can process. Lawson says the answer is 25% more. 

“I like to say for every four reps on your team, we allow you to get a fifth one for free,” she said. “We want our customers to be able to accept as much business as comes their way and not have to hire extensively to grow their business.”