History

To this day, no other state besides New York offers electronic application submission, making Bluemark both a pioneer and innovator in this field. This first project spun the company and led to further work on a national scale.

Following the success of the EASy project, Bluemark began work with the United States Department of Agriculture to modernize the eligibility and enrollment process for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Bluemark developed a national SNAP benefit assessment tool that referred eligible individuals to their individual states to complete program enrollment.

This project solidified Bluemark’s role as a community builder working to develop software solutions that modernized government processes and provided aid to those most in need. This philosophy remains at the heart of Bluemark’s efforts to this day.

Continuing with strategic partnerships, Bluemark began a project with the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) to respond to Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) audits. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had launched the RAC project beginning with a handful of states, including New York, before implementing them across the country.

GNYHA needed a way to provide their members with a tool to assist in responding to these newly created RAC audits, prompting Bluemark to develop and launch GNYHA Tracker. Blueway Tracker, now in its third generation, is still active today and serves as the number one way to defend your health organization against all types of payer audits by powering the management, response and reporting processes.

In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which provided widespread insurance availability to otherwise uninsured patient populations. At Bluemark, this provided the impetus to significantly expand the functionality within the MAPS self-pay patient management platform. MAPS brings together the eligibility and enrollment process for Medicaid, financial assistance and qualified health plan eligibility all on a single platform fully integrated with hospital information systems and a full suite of programs within the enrollment process.

MAPS has since become Bluemark’s flagship product. Since its establishment, MAPS has facilitated the approval of over 500,000 applications impacting 1.25 million people. The average value of each approval is $5,000, meaning it can be conservatively estimated that Bluemark’s financial assistance efforts have generated over $1 billion in reimbursement revenue and community benefit.

After many successful years of MAPS, Bluemark once again identified a need within an underserved, niche community in need of healthcare assistance. The team developed MAPS IQ to connect members in Native American Tribal nations to financial assistance programs, including Medicaid, Tribal Health Programs and Health Insurance Exchanges.

There are approximately 2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives who belong to over 500 federally recognized tribal organizations across the country, many of whom, unfortunately, lack proper health insurance coverage. The mission of the health systems that serve this population is to raise the physical, mental, social, and spiritual health of American Indians and Alaska Natives to the highest level.

As an organization dedicated to benefiting communities, Bluemark’s 2013 partnership with CAP Tulsa, a community based organization that helps young children in lower-income families grow up and achieve economic success, made perfect sense. Bluemark developed an operating platform to manage the enrollment of Head Start children and facilitate community outreach for other benefit program enrollment.

After successfully launching MAPS and MAPS IQ, the team once again turned its attention to the development of tools for the audit management market in partnership with OhioHealth, a family of not-for-profit hospitals and healthcare facilities that has been serving central Ohio since 1891. Blueway Tracker is still used by OhioHealth as an audit management platform equipped to handle all audit types under the Medicare Fee-for-Service program plus Medicaid and commercial payers.

Bluemark continues to innovate within the now Blueway Tracker solution, anticipating changes and updating software in response to new audit types

In 2014, Bluemark became one of only a few companies to go through an 18-month, intensive CMS certification process and become fully certified as a Health Information Handler (HIH) to enable the submission of documents to CMS electronically on behalf of providers. Today Bluemark is one of just 19 companies certified to securely handle both transmission and submission of sensitive electronic documents.

In 2017, Bluemark entered into a partnership with Ensemble Health Partners, an industry-leading revenue cycle services provider. EHP needed a way to reduce the approval cycle and reduce errors in the Medicaid application process. Bluemark was one of a very few partners with the ability to provide the secure exchange of digital information to achieve both these objectives.

To this day, EHP uses the MAPS solution to provide Medicaid and Financial Assistance eligibility and enrollment services for their clients.

In 2019, with a long-established reputation for securely transferring information online, Bluemark released the MAPS-clear patient outreach portal to enhance the existing communication abilities of the MAPS Self-Pay Management Platform. MAPS-clear provides patients with access to a self-service portal that connects them with financial counselors for easier screening, document submission and messaging back and forth with hospital staff.

For many health systems, MAPS-clear has served as a solution to reaching new patient demographics. Patients accustomed to digital communication can now select their preferred means of contact, making them more likely to engage in the financial assistance process.

Into the new decade and beyond, Bluemark continues to identify gaps in the healthcare finance space and create new solutions or tweak existing products. In 2020, Chicago Public Schools began using MAPS for Schools and Community-Based Organizations (CBO). MAPS CBO is an outreach and enrollment platform for Medicaid and SNAP for students and the neighboring communities.

In 2021, the Bluemark team realized the potential and excitement building around microapps, or fine-tuned applications designed to solve smaller, specific problems within the hospital revenue cycle. This discovery led to the release of myesMD.com, a simple and secure method for submitting documents through the esMD portal.

While myesMD.com filled one “hole” in the audit management process, there are a number of microapp ideas that can simplify the revenue cycle process by targeting specific areas with value-added software solutions at a lower cost and time investment. While myesMD.com is Bluemark’s first microapp offering, it surely will not be the last.

Today, Bluemark is busier than ever serving hospitals and health systems navigate audits and self-pay management in the wake of the global pandemic while developing microapp solutions and constantly improving based on a changing market as well as user feedback. Bluemark is, and remains, a people-focused organization working to help those in need and strengthen the communities that need it most.