How to Digitize Your Practice in 4 Easy Steps – Part 2: Homemade Healthcare

Posted by James Kanka on

Sara is a 28-year-old laboratory assistant at a large pharmaceutical company. She’s a new homeowner, and along with the constant stream of home repairs, she maintains a busy schedule of kickball leagues, pet ownership, dating, and marathon training.

In other words, she’s a very busy woman doing things she loves. So needless to say, she’s always on the lookout for ways to for ways to streamline all the things she likes less – like dental appointments, haircuts, and arranging for a taxi to take her to the airport.

One way she does this is by using apps on her phone to avoid the traditional time consuming ways of doing things…

  • She uses Uber to book trips to the airport (with the simple touch of her screen) instead of calling a dispatcher for a taxi that may or may not show up on time.
  • She uses Everseat to book appointments at her convenience on the same day, instead of having to wait weeks or months with traditional phone booking.
  • She doesn’t have time to run to the dentist, so she uses a specially made camera attached to her phone that is able to take pictures of her teeth. These pictures are then sent to the dentist, who can tell her whether or not she needs to come in for a check up.

Notice the trend? It’s the trend of greater customer convenience, of customers taking more of the service-providing process into their own hands.

Of course healthcare is not immune to these trends. As more and more people gain access to the internet, more and more will be informed of the new tech trends impacting their health care and access to their health care.

In last week’s article, we talked about the explosion of the Internet of Things – the trend towards digitizing devices so that they can utilize the computing and communications power of the internet. It’s this trend that’s driving the trend towards greater customer convenience.

When we can connect just about anything to the internet anywhere we choose, we expect the internet to do all sorts of things.

For the healthcare industry, that means conducting more diagnoses and treatments from the comfort of the patient’s home. It means being able to send reminders to a patient’s refrigerator that they’ve had too many carbs for the day. And it means patients can do post-op on their couches while providers monitor their vitals via a smart phone.

Another trend you’ve probably already seen is people using the Internet to do their own medical research – for better or for worse. But you shouldn’t immediately discount the information they’re bringing you…

First, while it may increase the number of armchair physicians coming to your office with maladies you’ve never even heard of and their equally absurd remedies, it can also provide you with new insights into medicine and medical technology that you may have never thought of before. Or new ways of doing business with them that brings in more money for you.

Second, you can use these experiences to take the time and explain your thoughts on the new information. This will help protect them from a lot of the snake oil remedies that are easy to encounter on the internet.

Thirdly, just by listening to your patient and (at least pretending to) taking their idea seriously you show them that you care about them. A simple lack of bedside manner is enough to drive a patient into the arms of a competitor who will listen – and of course their money goes with them.

So just remember: the trend towards empowered patients isn’t going away anytime soon. The sooner you embrace this, the more quickly you’ll bring your practice into the Digital Century.

That concludes part two in our 4-part Digitize Your Practice series. In Part III of the series, we’ll look into one tech trend that’s finally entering the healthcare industry: the open source development model.

How to Digitize Your Practice in 4 Easy Steps – Part 1: Internet of Things

Posted by James Kanka on

You can’t turn on the news today without being bombarded by images of smart watches. All the name brand electronics companies are throwing their weight into the field – Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and Sony. It’s easy to see that we’re witnessing the rise of the next big device, surpassing smart phones and tablets in their pervasiveness. But smart watches are just the beginning of a greater trend of smart devices invading our homes. Anything and everything that we use in the home is all the sudden becoming digital:

  • Thermostats that sense and learn when you come in and leave, and adjusts the temperature accordingly.
  • Smoke detectors that can send alerts to your phone.
  • Refrigerators that let you know when your food is about to go bad.
  • Washers and dryers that learn what kind of cycles your clothes need.
  • Windows that tint as the sun rises and un-tints as it sets.

As fascinating as these new smart technologies are, they’re still just minor game players in the movement towards what Michael Wolf from Wired labeled as “Internet of Things“:

In this future, the intelligence once locked in our devices now flows into the universe of physical objects. Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phenomenon. Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols. Other observers, paying homage to the stripped-down tech embedded in so many smart devices, are calling it the Sensor Revolution.

While all major industries have been impacted by the advances created by the Sensor Revolution, perhaps none has felt it more than the healthcare industry.

As the internet has (for better or for worse) allowed knowledge that was once within the strict purview of doctors to be accessed by the average person, so too will the internet of things advance this trend of allowing individuals to take more control over their healthcare. And that’s exactly what the majority of tech-savvy Millennials (the generation born between 1980 and 2000) and everyone younger than them are expecting from their healthcare providers.

It’s easy for them to imagine being able to view lab test results on your phone just moments after giving blood. Or use prescription bottles that note when you last opened them, and send a notification to your phone letting you know that you need to take your next dose. Or even getting your prescription on your phone, where you can then send it to your local pharmacy to pick up at your leisure.

But these aren’t just visions anymore – all of them are currently in the works by businesses of all shapes and sizes, from small tech start-ups to giant pharmaceutical companies with billion-dollar market caps. A few other mind-blowing and life-changing ideas are already popping up across the Internet:

  • Insulin pumps that allow doctors to monitor patient insulin levels remotely
  • EKGs that can be worn at home and that alert a doctor when the patient is having irregular heart rhythms
  • X-ray machines that send the image to a smartphone or tablet, which are then accessed by radiologists in different states or countries to review

Or how about this extreme form of the Internet of Things – nanosensors in our body that can transmit data a wearable device which then sends the information straight to your practice:

NanosensorsSo how can your practice embrace the Internet of Things?

First, decide if expanding into the Millennial demographic and the Internet of Things is right for your practice. Many offices won’t have any choice but to embrace changing technology and smart devices. Any practice that fights this trend will become irrelevant. You will also miss out on technology that could make your office run more efficiently and save you time and money.

Second, if you want to bring these technologies into your office, a good place to start is to keep abreast on the latest advancements and trends. Some of my favorite websites are BGR, Re/Code, and Arstechnica.

Next, you’ll have to figure out whether the technology you’re interested can do one of 5 things:

  1. Save you time
  2. Save you money
  3. Bring in more money
  4. Bring in more patients
  5. Increase patient satisfaction

The more of these benefits the technology can bring in, the better. A wearable device is good for increasing patient satisfaction, for example, as it allows them to monitor their own health. But once that device is attached to software that allows the doctor to view the vitals remotely, then the doctor saves himself time (only has to see the patient when irregular vitals are detected) and money (he can spend his resource more efficiently on patients that actually need to be seen).

The next step in bringing smart devices and applications into your office is deciding whether to make or buy them. If your office serves a very particular niche or has a very particular need that attracts little attention from tech developers, then you may have to work with a consultant to create your own device or app.

However if you’re just looking to change general business practices like how you communicate with customers or saving money on appointment bookings, or if you want to implement one of the monitoring devices I mentioned above, then you can get away with buying one of the hundreds of apps and devices coming onto the market everyday.

Lastly, like all good things in life, you have to be aware of government regulations that may limit how you use your smart devices and applications. Many of these technologies utilize private patient information, which means you’ll have to take privacy concerns seriously by complying with federal regulations concerning the private data.

Additionally, because many of these devices and applications are used to diagnose or treat diseases, that means they’ll soon come under the scrutiny of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) if they haven’t done so already. That means that soon some of these technologies may require prescriptions in order for the patient to access them, which may defeat the purpose of using them in the first place. It will affect some technologies more than others, so just be aware that it may be something you have to consider before you purchase your next app or smart device.

That concludes the first part in our 4-part Digitize Your Practice series. In Part 2 of the series, we’ll dive deeper into the trend towards greater patient control over their healthcare, and how you can balance their demand for greater control with your practice’s knowledge and experience.

Yours in tech,

Ken Swearengen