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...
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...
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...
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 confirm appointments without any software to install. Side benefits are timely email reminders and custom pages for patients and practices. It's a bit surprising that healthcare continues to get the onslaught of...
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 it affects fewer than 200,000 people in America. Another non-profit organization, the National Organization for Rare Disorders's database lists more than 6,000 rare disorders that cumulatively affect approximately 25 million Americans....
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 me, that doesn't really tell you what they do. So I decided to find out more. MeYou Health started in 2009, and is funded by Healthways, Inc. Healthways is a 30-year old, publicly traded health services company based in...
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 long/short-term side effects. That process is currently rigid: once observed conclusively, these effects are reported by providers to relevant authorities and disseminated back to all medical community (after some lag...
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 shopping and product information area, giving rise to new services like RedLaser (recently acquired by eBay). ScanAvert is an interesting paid application of the same functionality. It allows users to scan...