Note: I had stopped writing posts in 2017. Started again in late-2024, mostly for AI.
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...
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 love (like Basis), there are perhaps five other being incubated (like Node). It's an embryonic market, and one that is tackling complex health problems with commoditized sensor technology. Every smart inventor in a garage seems to...
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 a primary care physician (PCPs) refers a patient to a specialist or for services performed outside the PCP's office (diagnostic tests, outpatient surgery, etc.). If a referral is deemed medically warranted, the PCP decides at...
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, instructions on next steps, etc. Ideally, the key takeaways are given to the patient as printed handouts, prescription instructions. But as most of us who have been a patient would know that printed medical...
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 break the silos of isolated EHRs, and enable sharing based on geography (think HIEs) or affiliation (think ACOs) Consumer Engagement - If the official record is electronic, how to make it accessible to patients and open to contribution of...
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 been written. In fact, the problem is so real that entrenched luddites have spawned a cottage industry of 'Medical Scribes' - hired hands who do nothing but take physician's narrative and punch the keys on the keyboard to get it...
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 the local cable provider laying the actual copper wire to your doorstep or the company that makes a better mouse/keyboard to control any given software, the constraint brings a dose of reality to digital value propositions....
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 underlying concept of creating aggregated, curated and organized channels for personalized content consumption in a magazine like format has never been so viable. It hasn't taken entrepreneurs long to recognize...