Earlier Writing (2008-2017)
Older notes on health IT and the digital health industry, before AI changed the conversation.
2017
Service industries like consulting, hospitality, restaurants or the local car mechanic, are judged on experience. Healthcare folks would like to think that it’s all about outcomes but no one would argue...
Virta burst on to the digital health scene recently boasting a $37M funding round and a tech-heavyweight CEO Sami Inkinen who previously co-founded Trulia, the online real-estate platform. Virta...
Switzerland-based MindMaze created news early 2016 when it raised a $100 million round of funding at a pre-money valuation of a Billion dollars. It is creating virtual reality products...
The service transaction between a patient and physician has always been looked at closely from a billing perspective. Relatively few attempts have been made to enhance the match-making...
The idea is certainly not new. Using VR immersion as a part of mental health treatment has been a subject of academic research and debate for a couple...
CoverMyMeds is a company in a brilliant niche. ePA – Electronic Prior Authorizations. Usually a doctor’s prescription reaches pharmacy, which informs patient when to pick it up. If...
Nuna has the right mix of all the tailwinds a startup can ask for: talented team, big funding cushion, valuable data and huge market. Founder Jini Kim was...
2015
New ideas surface every day in Healthcare IT, but not all have a clear way to generate revenue. Viable business models are not a necessity to launch an...
2014
The United States Health Information Knowledgebase (USHIK) is an on-line, publicly accessible registry and repository of healthcare related data, metadata, and standards. USHIK is funded and directed by...
2013
Amion stands for the question every physician asks at one point or other in their residency – “Am I on?”. As I’ve pointed out before, scheduling is one...
Considering the embryonic stage of Healthcare IT overall, it’s no surprise that there are multiple loosely-defined phrases are being used to describe emerging trends, products and services. This...
Most of the time, Health IT spawns artificial concepts – born as a result of relentless media hype, each reaches a precocious peak of publicity and then quickly...
One the joys of working in an opaque system is that there are endless opportunities for curators. “Handpicked“, “Invite-only“, “Top 0.x%” slogans carry emotional value because the perennially...
It’s not often that non-healthcare startups make it to the review list at Multiplyd. But the recent news about cloud storage mega-startup Box moving into healthcare is too...
This is what hospitals charge for common inpatient services. It covers more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals that receive Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) payments for the top...
Overview: A hospital charge description master, also known as a chargemaster or CDM, contains the prices of all services, goods, and procedures for which a separate charge exists....
I know nothing more about Careticker than what their spartan website says. But the first time I read it, something clicked. Careticker is a sort of personal (health)...
Zweena Health provides a service to collect real-world paper medical records, digitize them and enter it into a Healthvault account. That way users can have a Personal Health...
Scheduling is starting to become a great example when I talk to others about what is wrong with the current mainstream healthcare IT market. In short, the mainstream...
2012
As I’ve pointed out before, referrals is a complicated workflow in healthcare. But it’s important nevertheless because it affects transition points in a patients care continuum, in turn...
When EHRs started showing up on the mainstream industry radar a couple of decades ago, everyone focused on how they helped get rid of the archaic paper records...
In the standard healthcare IT media landscape, increasingly all I find are the ruinous signs of bloated, overcomplicated conventional healthcare IT systems struggling to do everything that they...
The personal wearable-sensor devices trickle that started with FitBit around 2008 is now starting to look like a flash flood. For every one offering that has got media...
In healthcare, ‘referral’ is used when a provider from one clinical domain directs a patient to a provider in another clinical domain. Most prominent use case is when...
Among other things in healthcare, the care transition process is also broken. For example, outpatient care usually ends with the provider summarizing for the patient their medical issue,...
The phase of digitizing medical records is passing by, giving way to the next set of tasks. The three most prominent challenges now are: Exchange – how to...
There is no denying that the usability of current EHRs sucks. More pointedly, the data entry is really excruciating. Blogs have been devoted to the rants, articles have...
The last mile problem exists everywhere. Systems may get digitized, products and services may evolve to perfection, but the last link to individual is key. Whether it is...
Tablet publishing is a nascent domain. Consider that Flipboard, arguably the runaway success story, was in stealth mode mid-2010 and had started getting serious traction a year later....
The County Health Rankings measure the health of nearly all counties in the nation and rank them within states. The Rankings are compiled using county-level measures from a variety of national...
Consumer tools that help deal with healthcare system complexity are unquestionably needed. A recent niche has focused on dealing with healthcare bills. Simplee helps it’s users track medical...
A startup that helps you access and retain your medical records (to which you are entitled) from providers. Another proof of how impenetrable and complex our healthcare system...
2011
In March 2009, Apple hosted an event to introduce the iPhone OS 3.0 software. What I really found interesting back then was a prototype showcased with Lifescan (a...
Sleep monitoring related offerings started surfacing in the consumer market couple of years ago. More recently EASYWAKEme, another European startup, has thrown it’s hat in the ring. While...
Specializations in care delivery are a natural evolution but they have the side effect of increasingly partitioning processes and, in turn, increasing cost and complexity of coordination. When...
Overview: DailyMed provides high quality information about marketed drugs. This information includes FDA labels (package inserts). The National Library of Medicine (NLM) provides this as a public service....
Scientific and medical research has seen explosive growth in the past few decades. Since 1996, the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) has maintained PubMed, a free portal providing...
Socrata is the leading developer and provider of Open Data Services, a category of cloud-based Web 2.0 solutions that enable federal, state, and local governments to dramatically improve...
There have been plenty of success stories of online networks that help aggregate individuals with a common interest in a health condition. PatientsLikeMe, MedHelp, DailyStrength, Sermo to name...
With regulatory push for EHR adoption, there is an impending avalanche of healthcare data coming in the next few years. Some believe it’s already here. But data can...
On the continuum of healthcare IT solutions, there are two distant ends. One extreme can be thought of as the complex, medical-grade enterprise EHR systems that cater to...
It’s fantastic when a popular technology from another industry is leveraged to solve a lingering problem in healthcare. Location-based Services (LBS) have been around in the telecom industry...
Accounting for only 7.2% employment in healthcare, Home Healthcare is perhaps one of the lesser known and advertised sub-markets in the industry. It serves patients who prefer to...
The concept of sensor-based connected devices that help consumers manage a healthy lifestyle is certainly gaining traction. Consider FitBit, Zeo, DirectLife, miCoach, BodyMedia, GreenGoose as examples. It was...
The wireless remote health monitoring market is white hot these days. Seems like a lot of creative folks are looking at the increasing ability of connected devices, sensors...
People with type 1 diabetes need to take insulin in a similar way their pancreas would produce if it were normal. Older therapy used to be multiple daily...
Docmein is an online appointment scheduling service focused on private practices. The value proposition is that providers and patients can both use this online service to request and...
The long tail of rare medical conditions has mostly been an unexplored market. Office of Rare Disease Research at NIH defines a disease or disorder as rare when...
Overview: Kidsdata.org offers more than 300 indicators on the health and well being of children in communities across California. The website, launched in 2004, is a project of...
Currently there are a number of hardware-based solutions in the market that aim to help the patient take the right medication at the right time. The conventional options...
Patient Monitoring is one of the mature, established markets in healthcare industry. A promising trend in that is the emerging ‘Remote Patient Monitoring’ (RPM) paradigm. (If you don’t...
2010
Twitter seems to have legitimized the value behind aggregating real-time conversations from a large group of participants. Ironically though, even as twitter continues to find it’s own business...
Overview: The National Provider Identifier (NPI) was adopted as the standard unique health identifier for health care providers to carry out a requirement in the Health Insurance Portability...
In July 1999, Jason and Charlotte Maude started Isabel Healthcare after their then 3 year old daughter Isabel was nearly fatally misdiagnosed during a hospital stay. They involved...
Doximity is a mobile-based social network for physicians. It brings back memories of Sermo, which was my first review, written more than two years ago. Doximity was started...
Neurologic examinations are unique in medicine. Unlike other fields of medicine in which one can touch (surgery, orthopedics) or see the disease (eg, dermatology, ophthalmology), neurologic conditions often...
Overview: Medicare-certified institutional providers are required to submit an annual cost report to a Fiscal Intermediary (FI). The cost report contains provider information such as facility characteristics, utilization...
Overview: A standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients’ perspectives on hospital care Contains 18 patient perspectives on care and patient rating items that encompass...
Jitterbug Wireless is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) founded in 2006. They offer simplified mobile hardware and service targeted towards baby boomers, with the value proposition being...
Overview: County-level indicators of health Covers 3,141 US counties Approx 200 elements Launched in 2000, in hiatus 2004-2006, but working since then Source link Elements: [freemind]/wp-content/uploads/mindmaps/CHSI.mm[/freemind]
Overview: A national survey about the provision and use of ambulatory medical care services in the United States Findings are based on a sample of visits to non-federal...
Overview: SAMHSA was established in 1992 to target substance abuse and mental health services The Office of Applied Studies (OAS) is an Office within SAMHSA- it is the...
Overview: Model-based estimates of health insurance coverage for states and all counties in US In July 2005, SAHIE released the first nation-wide set of county-level estimates on uninsured...
Overview: Information on health risk behaviors, preventive health practices, and health care access primarily related to chronic disease and injury Claimed to be world’s largest, on-going telephone health...
MeYou Health is a ‘well-being company’, in their own words. Their offerings help users engage in a healthy lifestyle, using their social network support. If you are like...
As I’ve written before, medication adherence is an undeniably critical problem for the healthcare system. Most startups in this area have taken the approach of finding novel ways...
Drug safety surveillance (more formally, pharmacovigilence) is a serious and complex issue. Once a drug is FDA-approved and on the market, it needs to be constantly monitored for...
Asthmapolis is brainchild of David Van Sickle a researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The basic idea is to equip inhalers with a GPS tag to determine when and...
VisualDx is healthcare’s answer to the visual search trend led by companies like search-cube.com, like.com etc. VisualDx helps identify dental and medical diseases by letting providers search for...
Toumaz technology is a spin-off from Imperial College of London , and they make what is probably the only ultra low-power silicon chip targeted for healthcare applications. In...
Palpitations, dizziness, and fainting can often be symptoms of underlying heart disease. The key to the correctly diagnosing them is reliable documentation of the underlying cardiac rhythm when...
In the last few years, bar code scanning with smartphones has become much more robust and dependable functionality. Predictably enough, it’s main application has been in real-time comparison...
iTriage is a mobile app that helps users understand, prioritize their acute health-related symptoms and seek appropriate and close-by care. Its service is also available on the web...
Lately everything I find interesting has something to do with mobile platform. “mHealth” is the buzzword for it. Seems like most of new patient-oriented healthcare IT ideas have...
More products designed around actigraphy keep surfacing. aXbo is a ‘Sleep Phase Alarm Clock’ by an Austrian company. The basic idea is to differentiate sleep phases (light, deep,...
Of all the consumer healthcare device ideas, this may be the most ingenious one. In August 2009, Massachusetts-based Vitality announced availability of GlowCaps– a web-enabled $99 cap for...
Now I’m finding so many ideas being tested or marketed in the actigraphy space, that I’m inclined to make a tag for related posts (did). gDitty comes out...
Text4baby is a service that delivers periodic text messages to expecting mothers reminding them of basic healthcare needs. It’s a free mobile information service designed to promote healthy...
I’ll admit right away that this post is more about the trend, and not the product itself. Withings is a french start-up that introduced a wi-fi enabled weight...
Zume Life is a San Jose start-up that is planning to develop its own dedicated device to allow individuals to keep track of and manage their own care...
I wrote about Proactive Sleep a while back and wondered how it would be to combine a sensor to automatically record sleep pattern. Well, Zeo gets one step...
Around 1989, Steven Schueler started working on a computer program that could perform symptom triage. The intent was to create something that patients could use to safely decide...
Another vital-sensing hardware with integrated service to keep you healthy. miCoach from Addias helps users create a custom workout plan and track progress with real-time feedback and audio...
Royal Philips International seems to be placing its bets on some innovative healthcare IT markets. Here are some that I’ve noticed in the past couple of years: VISICU...
Here is a half-baked idea that adds another data point to my rant about how keeping a record of health-related activities is useful, and how web 2.0 technologies...
NLM may not be known for Health 2.0 efforts, but this one surely qualifies for one. Pillbox.nlm.nih.gov is a fantastic tool that lets users identify medications by the...
In their own words ‘Psych Central is the Internet’s largest and oldest independent mental health social network’. From what I can find, it seems to be true. They...
Usually I’m wary of putting time into big-budget health portals, but San Francisco based Healthline deserves a mention. They have a portfolio of healthcare search, navigation and content...
2009
In general, I really like the idea of using personal mobile computing devices in treating/preventing chronic conditions. As devices and sensors get smarter and cheaper, it’s logical that...
RememberItNow is an online medication reminder service. Once you enter the pill information (what, when) it can send email/text reminder messages at the right time. Also included are...
CareFlash has an interesting take on social networking for patients. It lets you create a private, secure website to inform and update your family/friends about your medical condition-...
CureTogether was started in July 2008 as a way for patients to aggregate their anonymous medical data into an open-source database that can be used by any researcher...
Nothing new here. Ozmosis is based on the now-old concept of physician networking website, with features like knowledge exchange, journal club, cases, alerts, news etc. Looking at dataopedia,...
Vitals is a physician search and rating destination. The fact that we need such tools is indisputable, although there are a plethora of sites that claim to have...
ZocDoc is a free service that allows patients to book Doctor appointments online in New York City. It started in September 2007 as a service to help people...
The US healthcare system has spent decades digitizing clinical documentation and records. Now that most of the data generated during a patient visit is capable of being stored...
While we wait for President Obama’s public plan, the 46 million uninsured Americans need some options. Healdeal aims to bring the free market model to healthcare as one...
Practice Fusion is a web-based EMR & practice management system that is targeted towards private practices. SaaS-based EMRs are not new, but what sets Practice Fusion apart is...
David M. Eddy, MD, PhD is a legend when it comes to Evidence-Based Medicine. He coined the term in 1980s, actually. Being exceptionally skilled in mathematics, it was...
While the conventionalists argue otherwise, there is some truth to the fact that plenty of health conditions can be taken care of without actually seeing the patient in-person....
PharmaSurveyor is a free service that analyzes your medications to point out potential drug interaction and side-effect risks. It was founded in 2006 by Linda and Erick Von...
Online communities are nothing new to healthcare. What seems to be the trend is increasing vertical focus. Oncocentric (also called MedTrust Online) was launched in January 2009 as...
As I mentioned previously, the hype of personalized medicine is breeding a new industry-direct to consumer (DTC) Genetic Testing. These companies offer to test, analyze and store your...
Consumerism is on the rise in healthcare, and MyMedLab brings that trend to the Lab testing space. With their service users can self-order wellness lab exams online and...
Simply put, icyou is the Youtube of health-related videos. It launched around September 2007 by BenefitFocus, a Charleston (SC) based healthcare benefits software provider. The name icyou stands...
Good ideas are always simple. I’m really optimistic about the emerging simple tools that let consumers manage, monitor or understand their health issues better. ZeaLOG is a simple...
Medpedia is an attempt to apply crowdsourcing concept to medical knowledge, just like Wikipedia. It launched in beta mid-February this year, with some big names backing it (Harvard,...
Polka‘s mission is to make your up-to-date basic health information available to you all the time, on the web or your iPhone. They claim that their ‘secure aggregation...
Primary care is a frustrating experience for most patients as well as physicians. Patients find the experience inconvenient, borderline impersonal and hardly get access to any of their...
I found out about SeniorEducators during a trip to the bay area last year. They are a startup trying to help seniors make the most out of their...
Healthcare applications of Twitter keep surfacing everyday. Qwitter (not to be confused with another application by the same name that tracks people who stop following you on twitter)...
Pittsburgh-based BodyMedia makes personal monitoring devices that can help consumers keep track of their physical activity and nutrition. Their products and accessories contain innovative sensors that measure physiological...
TrialX.org is an fantastic example of how the web enables linking specific demand with relevant supply. The services matches users (patients, affected individuals) to ongoing clinical trials using...
Not much can be said about the whole healthcare social networking phenomenon now. There are plenty of sites out there, enough to make me almost give up trying...
LifeShirt is a wearable ‘smart fabric‘ that can be used to remotely monitor multiple vital signs. It is made by VivoMetrics, a Ventura, CA based startup founded in...
Consumer-Driven Healthcare (CDHC) may not have arrived yet, but startups have been sprouting around it for a while. Carol.com is the brainchild of Tony Miller (founder of Definity...
There are plenty of medical conditions that necessitate dietary changes (Celiac’s, Diabetes, etc.) and it’s a hassle for the affected individual and/or primary caregiver to manage cooking with...
Online communities are perhaps the cornerstone of web these days, and I’m begining to find so many of them related to health that I’m slowly running out of...
Your doctor may not think of it that way, but some advertisers feel that the time you spend in the waiting room is important. Phreesia offers ‘PhreesiaPad’: a...
AskDrWiki is an online repository for medial information modeled after Wikipedia. The project was started in early 2007 by four physicians looking for a quick way to share...
Since my last rant was around twitter, I thought I’ll follow up with another one around same topic. First notable thing about FoodFeed is that its not really...
Google.org’s flutrend is an attempt to model flu activity across US based on the search terms that Google.com users enter around flu symptoms, treatment etc. The underlying premise...
OrganizedWisdom describes itself as the first human-powered, doctor-guided search service for health. What the site promises to provide are noise-free, simple but organized search pages that list relevant...
Healthmap is a perfect example of what technology can do to advance healthcare information. It aggregates online media reports to enable infectious disease intelligence on a global level....
SugarStats is a hawaii-based startup inspired by one diabetics’ unfulfilled need to manage his disease data better. Marston Alfred (the site’s creator) found the online diabetes management solutions...
Fitbit is a startup trying to leverage the rising wellness trend- they manufacture a small device that you can wear throughout the day to find out how much...
I’m not a fan of direct to consumer genetic testing, but that market is hard to ingore now. deCODEme (excellent name choice, btw) will analyze your genetic information,...
WebDiet is an online weight management tool that can help its users eat smarter and healthier. Its a service that proactively sends location-based, customized meal suggestions directly to...
2008
Another social networking take on healthcare- this one has a platform approach for multiple communities exclusively for providers and professionals in the life sciences and healthcare industry. Within3...
On 25th November 2008, the US Surgeon General announced a major upgrade to their Family History Tool. It’s a part of the a national public health campaign, called...
Another consumer-oriented concept. This one is specifically for patients on multiple medications who are curious to find out how they interact and what side-effects are related to which....
Pain is a subjective symptom that is often hard to correctly diagnose and treat on long-term basis. It’s the focus of ReliefInsite– an online web diary for patients...
Ever since Google and Microsoft jumped into it, the PHR (Personal Health Record) space has become red hot. So while PHRs try to move from hype phase to...
SimulConsult is a diagnostic decision support system started by Dr.Michael Segal. It covers 1,800 diseases that have at least one neurological finding in them. SimulConsult has an interesting...
SpineConnect is a knowledge networking site for spine surgeons to collaborate and support each other on difficult cases. It is the first offering from Syndicom, an online services...
Physician Connect is a new community area on Medscape that allows physicians to securely engage online with other physicians in discussions on clinical as well as non-clinical topics...
Medstory is a health information search engine that went into a public beta in mid 2006. In feb 2007, it was acquired by Microsoft. Their interface is pretty...
With a play on google’s name, MEDgle offers symptom based health information search. The idea is to ’empower patients in their discussions with physicians’, by making relevant content...
MyDailyApple is the consumer oriented website started in 2006 by Praxeon, a life sciences company focusing on semantic search for healthcare information. It brings together medical news, research,...
Curbside.MD is a search engine for finding evidence based clinical information. The idea is to type in the search need as a natural language question that a clinician...
Vimo is a consumer portal focused on comparison shopping for healthcare needs. Founded in 2005, Vimo provides a platform for users to research, review, compare and price the...
PatientsLikeMe is a social networking site that enables patients to share information around disease conditions. It was started in 2004 by concerned family members of an individual with...
Sermo is a free online community restricted to verified US physicians. It was founded in 2006 by Daniel Palestrant. Although its not the only one in this niche,...