Prescribing eHealth for Your Patients

I recently attended the mHealth Summit in Washington D.C. and it was yet another example that physicians are still missing from key conversations. Last week it was New York eHealth Collaborative Conference, previously Connected Health Symposium in Boston … Health 2.0 in San Francisco. Why aren’t physicians attending these conferences?

The techies and start-up health company founders were discussing their plans for pilot programs where physicians become active prescribers of eHealth resources and mobile health applications for their patients. Why is that an important discussion physicians should be part of?

Think about the countless hours patients spend on managing their conditions outside of the doctors’ offices. In diabetes for example, we’re talking about an average of almost 8,000 hours that physicians can’t account for! Can doctors make an impact on what happens during that time? Yes. Some examples:

• Prescribe your website or blog where you write answers to most common questions that you repeat 20-30 times a day. The time savings alone justify having your own website. How many doctors have their own website?
• Prescribe online patient communities that you yourself reviewed and approve of. Patients will be spending hundreds if not thousands of hours online looking up their conditions, other patients’ experiences and advice on how to improve their quality of life. Why not become a trusted filter and help your patients find great information … rather than misinformation.
• Prescribe Mobile Health Applications for your patients. iPhone and Android applications are being created by the hundreds. You’re able to account for every adverse effect, every time a patient might not be feeling their best, and even accurately record ECG in real time via the iPhone that can be seemlessly transferred directly into the EHR. Do you treat migraines? What if you had the opportunity to monitor effects of treatment plans at the patient’s home, something that is never recorded in real time but rather at the next patient visit. Think of all the critical clinical data that is lost when it is not recorded and forgotten.

With so much stress on accountability, treatment compliance, cost-effectiveness and keeping patients healthy, physicians’ voices have never been more important than right now.

Start planning for 2012 to attend conferences and meetings on innovations in the medical practice. There are many conferences being planned that will not only unveil ways to keep your practice successful, but will earn you CME credits, uncover business opportunities, and earn you recognition for being an innovator when you bring your success stories to the panels.

Two upcoming conferences:

• February 19-21 Physician Strategies Summit
• March 29-30th in New York City – NextGenHealth - plug in code “simon12″ at checkout for a discount.

I’ll update this list of conferences for physicians as soon as I review what’s coming up. There are also conferences planned in each major specialty. Check in with your specialty’s association for details.

Facebook EHR / EMR Schedule

At drchrono we are passionate about teaching our providers how to use social media to advance their new patient acquisition. There are tons of mediums out there that can provide free advertising for your practice including: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Groupon. Every month we are going to fire off one of these blog posts with instructions on how you can use drchrono to take advantage of these opportunities! First one up is creating your own “Scheduling Application” on your Facebook Fan Page! We have a post that you can reference on our knowledge base for more information:

Your Schedule on Facebook = New Patients!

The pictures outlining each step below might look small, but you can click on them to open up in full size

Step One

Go to facebook.com/developers and login with your facebook username and password. (This may require a verification of your account)

Step Two

Press Allow

Step Three

Fill in your basic information. To fill in your logo you can use the drchrono logo page found here: https://drchrono.com/logos/

Step Four:

Fill out the drchrono.com website information.

Step Five:

Fill out the Facebook integration information. *** Make sure to use your own “Canvas Page Name” It can be whatever you want

Step Six:

Submit to the App Directory

Step Seven:

Load up on your fan page.

The Digitization of Medicine

The US healthcare system needs change. There are two waves of change that are making this a reality. First, the government is pushing doctors to go digital, injecting over 19 billion dollars in incentives to doctors push doctors to go digital. Doctors will start receiving this government incentive money starting this Fall. The government is promising each doctor 44k+ in incentive money for using government meaningful use certified EMRs.

The second wave of change pushing doctors to go digital are the new agile age of mobile computing. Doctors are generally use to clip boards in exam rooms and waiting rooms, this will be changing. Apples new iPad is a game changer. Not only is it inexpensive but the battery life is somewhat amazing. The device can stay charged in sleep mode for almost a month! An once turned on can go for days. There are estimates that 4 out of 5 doctors will own iPads by the end of 2011. Doctors are actually early adaptors to iPad technology. They see iPads as a clipboard replacement.

The digitization of medicine is creating lots of opportunity for tech entrepreneurs. There are a new bread of company popping up, healthcare startups. Companies embracing new technologies. Companies not scare to take on the challenges of healthcare. A few examples of this are hardware companies like Halo Monitoring focusing on building new ways to help take care of our elderly. Companies who focus on building stethoscopes and other devices that plug into iPhones for a new generation of tech doctors. Companies that focus on building amazing mobile healthcare solutions like Remedy Systems. Companies like Agile Diagnosis that are giving healthcare professionals accurate and efficient diagnosis. Mobile software focused companies like drchrono, whom focus on building a electronic health record platform with a focus on the iPad EHR. Michael and I the founders of drchrono think this is the right place and right time to be in HealthIT. Even the design team from the famous firefox browser have decided to move into the HealthIT world focusing on a new startup called Massive Health.

Venture capitalist that have never ventured into the healthcare sector are starting to jump into the Health IT game investing large amounts of money. There are even a new bread of accelerator programs modeled somewhat like the Y Combinator program. Accelerator’s in healthcare are poping up across the Country, one example being Rock Health, there are others. Some of these accelerators are being created by Venture Capitalists and others by Insurance companies. The goal of these programs are to see what kinds of new technologies will come out of startup scene and be a part of it if it is successful. Generally Healthcare investments would take large amounts of capital to get off the ground, but the cost to start a healthcare company has drastically gone down.

There are new healthcare conferences and places for hackers to get together and build out great ideas. There are healthcare conferences like Health 2.0, talking about how we can focus more on the patient end and the power of the developer community. There is the new conference called Data 2.0 where people are asking about what do we do with data once we have it.

Some of the smartest minds are now doing healthcare hackatons that are brining together the smartest minds in Silicon Valley, Google even supports this movement hosting hackatons at the GooglePlex.

A story, that may or may not be true but worth mentioning, Steve Jobs when in a hospital saw how bad everything was and thought up the iPad. I heard this story from someone, it might not be true, but interesting!

The world is changing and massive health innovation is happening all around you.

Interview / iPad EHR demo video during Health 2.0

At the health 2.0 conference we did a live demo for Essinova.com showing off how an iPad EHR works in a physicians office. Great fun!

Free iPad for doctors! DrChrono co-founders Daniel Kivatinos and Michael Nusimow show off their slick iPad App to me and Essinova audience. By the way, as you can see from their demo, Michael’s narration and Daniel’s fingers were so well-coordinated I wondered if there were wireless signals between their heads too. -BeiBei Song, Essinova Host

Health 2.0 Conference iPad Winner

We had an interactive raffle at the Health 2.0 conference this Oct 2010 in San Francisco. Lots of people entered to win the free iPad 3G. It was amazing how much a fun game can take off and get people involved.

We gave out two cards with the same number to totally random people from our booth at the conference. The people with matching numbers had to find each other and then they both got to enter the raffle. This was a hard task since there were 1000′s of people at the conference.

A few hours after, Katelyn and Zsa Zsa gave away 100′s of raffle tickets, people started to tweet out their numbers, they then started to post up numbers on the walls and believe it or not someone created a website to post up the iPad raffle numbers to get matches.

This is the wall of number postings we found:

After the whole event, the conference founders Indu and Matthew drew the winner’s ticket from a bowl to see who got the free iPad 3G.

The lucky winner was a savvy Web 2.0 user who used the power of twitter to find his number match. Craig DeLarge tweeted out his number and found the person who had the same number as him. This is Craig’s twitter and his blog.