The Garage featured in Orlando Sentinel on March 7th, 2016

The Garage, an Orlando-based Health IT company, is rolling out a new product called Ignite, combining telemedicine with electronic medical records.

"It's not just communication for the heck of it," said Pranam Ben, founder and CEO of The Garage. "While other telemedicine companies have focused on telemedicine as a source of education, we're more transaction-based."

Ben has tied in reimbursements such as Medicare's Chronic Care Management program to Ignite to help physicians create an additional source of income via tele-visits.

"The larger the provider, the bigger the potential," he said.

Simply put, Ignite is a Skype-like experience for health-care. It's cloud-based video, audio and texting and gives doctors 24-hour accessibility to their patients and their medical records. It's compliant with federal privacy laws and allows real-time communication between doctors and patients.

"If you look at how consumers are driving the change in health-care, you'll see that they want to have better and deeper access to their information," said Ben.

Ben said that the company has signed contracts with several health-care organizations to use Ignite, including a lactation consultant in Jacksonville and a pediatric group.

Although telemedicine has been around for decades, it has started gaining traction only lately because more states and insurance companies are starting to pay for it. In Florida, a telemedicine bill has been lingering in the houses for several years.

This session, the Senate revamped House Bill 7087 and sent a pared down version back to the House, focusing mostly on creating a task force on telehealth.

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