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Kelly Quigg of IntrinsiQ manages the largest contingent of 90 employees in the company’s downtown operations center.
Kelly Quigg of IntrinsiQ manages the largest contingent of 90 employees in the company’s downtown operations center.

Inside IntrinsiQ: Close-up look at Heer’s commercial tenant

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About six months after announcing its plans to occupy the first floor, the Heer’s building’s commercial tenant is all settled in.

Health care information technology firm IntrinsiQ LLC – a division of the AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group within Fortune 16 parent AmerisourceBergen Corp. (NYSE: ABC) – officially opened in the space Jan. 29.

Technical Support Director Kelly Quigg said some 90 staff members are stretching their legs in the 17,700-square-foot office, including part of the building’s mezzanine.

“We were continuing to hire and looking at how to do double-decker cubicles because we were sitting right on top of each other,” Quigg said of the group’s move from 1701 S. Enterprise Ave. “That’s a slight exaggeration, but things were pretty tight over there.”

The effects of moving IntrinsiQ reached farther than downtown: With the August announcement came plans the company would consolidate offices in Boston, Denver and New Brunswick, N.J., in the Queen City. Also an office in Frisco, Texas, became its corporate headquarters.

Barry Fortner, president of Ion Solutions and IntrinsiQ Specialty Solutions Inc., said the three far-flung offices continue to operate with reduced staff, but Springfield is IntrinsiQ’s operational fulcrum.

State Department of Economic Development spokeswoman Amy Susan said the company qualified for $260,100 in tax incentives through the Missouri Works program. Fortner added IntrinsiQ and consulted the Springfield Partnership for Economic Development on site selection. The ability to recruit new staff from local technical colleges also played a part in the decision, he said.

“They thought the downtown culture lent itself to the type of environment so many tech companies try to achieve,” said Lindsay Haymes, business assistance manager for the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, noting the city of Springfield’s infrastructure development for parking and competitive wages also were factors.

“I can tell you it’s well above the county average wage,” Haymes said, declining to disclose the company’s average salary.

Data from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center show  Greene County’s current average annual wage is $37,996. Missouri’s 2014 average annual wage of $42,790 also was below that of the other IntrinsiQ states where salaries ranged from roughly $50,000 to $54,000, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Product and development
Founded in 2005 and acquired by AmerisourceBergen in September 2011 for $35 million, IntrinsiQ built its brand on IntelliDose, an automated software that assists physicians with management of chemotherapy treatments and workflow. The company is also the maker of urology software UroChart and oncology software Meridian.

Quigg, who heads up the largest contingent of IntrinsiQ’s workforce – roughly 35 support staff – said the products are their own electronic medical record systems but can be interfaced with a clinic’s practice management software to handle patient check-in, billing and appointments. In back office uses, the tools track physician notes, drug costs and dosing along with providing guidelines for treatment recommendations.

CoxHealth System Clinical Director of Pharmacy Temitayo Bakare said while the health care provider uses Cerner Corp. software across its entire system, IntrinsiQ’s technology affects every point of patient care. The applications not only communicate with records but also as a system of safety checks for each staff member who uses it and on the pharmacy end can be critical in capturing revenue.

“Some chemotherapy drugs are $15,000 to $30,000 per dose, and if you don’t capture that appropriately you won’t be in business for too long,” Bakare said, noting such systems also track lifetime dosage levels for patients using certain drugs to make sure they are not exceeded.

With roughly 6,000 specialty providers using IntrinsiQ software, Fortner said the Springfield office houses sales, implementation, client relations, finance, consulting and contracting divisions in addition to support and development.

“The size of the Heer’s campus allows us to expand and grow our capacity there,” Fortner said, adding the company has room for another 20 employees downtown and plans to have 130 total in Springfield, including remote staff. “Having an operations center point is critical to anchor those kinds of numbers”

Business purpose
Last June, Chesterbrook, Pa.-based AmerisourceBergen moved up 12 spaces on the annual Fortune 500 list to No. 16 and three months later ended its fiscal year with $136 billion in revenue – up 13.7 percent from 2014 – according to a company news release. Sandwiched between the likes of Verizon and Fannie Mae, AmerisourceBergen gained ground on one of its primary competitors in the drug distribution and group purchasing organization market, No. 11 McKesson Corp.

Fortner said AB has spent roughly $1 billion in recent years to optimize its supply chain of seven AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group companies, which develop and support software for specialty health care practices.

Declining to disclose sales of IntrinsiQ’s products, Fortner said with its acquisition the company expanded into the urology field. Now, the focus is to capture more of the community, or outpatient, oncology clinic market. “Technology is a continual investment,” Fortner said. “We have to continue to build our base while meeting regulatory requirements, and now there are value-based payments that we have to respond to. There is no end state.”

The organization of IntrinsiQ’s new offices is a step toward a more collaborative environment between software support staff as well as development, quality assurance and project management teams. Each cubicle houses two- or four-person support teams. Three workrooms are dedicated to whiteboards, computers, large monitors and mobile desks so developers can rearrange the room into configurations best suited to the product at hand.

Comparing top-down blueprints of the Enterprise Avenue office against the Heer’s building, Quigg notes the difference represents a shift from what she called a waterfall to an agile methodology.

“It’s guided more by the business purpose,” she said, noting the teams are known to quickly react to software updates from changes by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “We can release products quarterly on a more feasible cycle.

“We can also develop in two-week sprints – which isn’t the ideal situation – if there was a hot fix we needed to do.”

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