Note: I had stopped writing posts in 2017. Started again in late-2024, mostly for AI.
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 page is an ongoing list of some of these rudimentary themes and buzzwords. Sometimes they are valid concepts that point to a viable new pattern. Sometimes they are marketing messages propagated through...
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 fades away. Buzzwords like RHIO, NHIN, PHR, Chronic Disease Management, etc. were all touted as game changing at one point or other in the past. Now it's more about patient engagement, HIE, Analytics, Care Collaboration. One stands out...
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 ill-informed consumer is guaranteed to be frustrated with the complexity and impersonal nature of the given opaque system. The national prize for opaque system has been consistently won by healthcare ever...
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 tempting to ignore. Let's first talk about what Box does, and then dissect it's applicability to healthcare. Box is a cloud storage, file-share-and-sync company. It claims more than 8 million users and has taken about $284M...
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) productivity app that lets users manage their interaction before, during and after hospital stays. I think that is a great niche. Except for hypochondriacs, no one likes hospital stays. Most of the anxiety related to a hospital stay...
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 Record (PHR) created for them, without dealing with multiple bricks-and-mortar medical offices. I've endorsed the validity of services offering such 'last mile' value propositions before. Note MotherKnows for getting...
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 vendors are trying to do everything, and ending up with sub-optimal solutions across the board. Luckily for them, most clients are either unaware or choose to overlook the grotesque in the IT solutions presented. Which is why, I...
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 affecting outcomes and cost. Par8o was founded by the same guys who started Sermo (the online physician community that had the distinct honor of being the first review on Multiplyd 🙂 ). It's a referral...
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 and digitized care delivery within organizations. How time changes perspective. Now EHRs are somewhat commodity and local, intra-organization workflow digitization is a bit passé. The buzz now are inter-organization workflows and health...
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 claim to do. Alongside that increasingly infertile landscape are green shoots of some startups doing few things, and doing them right. I've harped in the past on scheduling being a ripe area for...