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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Specializations in care delivery are a natural evolution but they have the side effect of increasingly partitioning processes and, in turn, increasing cost and complexity of coordination. When patient care changes hands, it becomes susceptible to errors and communication failures. 'Transitions of Care' is the broader topic that covers problems that arise when patient moves between different care...
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)...
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...
Twitter seems to have legitimized the value behind aggregating real-time conversations from a large group of participants. Ironically though, even as twitter continues to find it's own business model, startups like TruthOnCall are applying the same fundamental concept to healthcare. Pharma, Media, Government organizations sometimes find themselves in dire need for a quick survey of licensed...