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 aspect of it: like which physician is best suited for the given patient? Tweaking this may have cascading effects downstream in the service experience and actual outcome. Years ago, Zocdoc impressed me with their...
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...
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 expenses in an friendly online dashboard. The aggregated data and management tools can help manage health care costs and perhaps be used for finding the right medical plan and services for an individual or...
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 access to references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. PubMed now has over 21 million citations going back to 1966, and continues to add a staggering amount (about 500,000 new...
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 some. So it was only a matter of time before we saw a network of networks. Something that went beyond a online community with singular focus. Alliance Health offers services to create health-related social...
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 come in different flavors: from the frighteningly common free text to loosely categorized documents to well structured messages. The less structure it has, more hard it becomes for a machine to understand the real meaning (semantics)...
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 in the world. They started with three conditions - migraine, endometriosis, and vulvodynia but now count more than 400 on their radar. There are plenty of precedents to social networking websites for patients, so nothing new from...
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 in some electronic manner, the next logical question becomes 'what do we do with this data?'. There are an increasing number of startups recently that attempt to answer that specific question. 360Fresh uses data-mining...
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 perhaps natural for him to apply it to medicine. The result is Archimedes Model- a mathematical simulation of the human physiology and how it interacts with healthcare interventions. At the heart of the model are a set of ordinary...
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 is that there is a relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people have flu symptoms. Think of it as a virtual public health surveillance proxy. If you are not convinced that...