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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
Accounting for only 7.2% employment in healthcare, Home Healthcare is perhaps one of the lesser known and advertised sub-markets in the industry. It serves patients who prefer to stay at home but need ongoing care that cannot easily or effectively be provided solely by family or friends. These providers deliver a wide variety of health care and supportive services like professional nursing,...
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...
ZocDoc is a free service that allows patients to book Doctor appointments online in New York City. It started in September 2007 as a service to help people find and make dentist appointments in NYC, and has now includes other specialties too (like primary care, dermatologist, ENT, ortho, OB/GYN, allergist, podiatrist, etc.) Patients get to use the site for free- looking up physicians that...