Note: I had stopped writing posts in 2017. Started again in late-2024, mostly for AI.
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 of the prime candidates for being done externalized - done right by a handful of players, and utilized by everyone else. Unlike the recent upstarts though, Amion has been around for 15 years. You can read the full story here. And unlike vanity...
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...
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 100 most frequently billed discharges for FY 2011. These represent almost 7 million discharges or 60 percent of total Medicare IPPS discharges. The Total Payment amount includes the MS-DRG amount, bill total...
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. It is used to generate a patient's bill. As required by the Payers' Bill of Rights, each hospital in California is required to submit a copy of its chargemaster, a list of average charges for 25 common outpatient...
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...