Patty Hayward is GM of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Talkdesk. Talkdesk runs the technology for contact centers that helps companies across health care connect and manage their consumers. You’ve probably unknowingly used their technology when you call (or now text or email) your health plan, your provider system or call into one of those numbers on the drug adverts. Patty told me about the business of technology for contact centers, and how the transition is happening between voice to text and for that matter from on-prem to cloud. They’re also deeply integrated with Epic. Pretty interesting view into a not-often-thought-about part of the puzzle.–Matthew Holt
Josh Reischer, Health Note
Health Note takes the patient history from the patient and includes it in the EMR. It’s another piece of the puzzle in trying to fix the patient/physician encounter. Health note also does the basic information for intake that companies like Phreesia does but it also gets the patient to answer questions about their health so that the physician has more time in the encounter to focus on what to do about it. But they also add their history into Epic in a very specific and complex way. CEO Josh Reischer showed me a detailed demo about what the patient and provider experience is. Quite the advance on asking and typing as happens in 95% of visits today!–Matthew Holt
Nabla CoPilot– the new ambient EMR note taker that snagged Permanente
I got up super early on a Sunday (in Vegas no less!) to meet Delphine Groll, COO and Alexandre Lebrun, CEO of Nabla. I have heard directly from doctors a lot about their CoPilot product being adopted as a less expensive version than Nuance or Abridge, and wanted to see what the fuss was about. They gave me a demo of their ambient AI medical note taker and it is very impressive–you’ll see a little bit of my demo and the resulting note in the interview. They were a little shy on Sunday to tell me about their relationship with the Permanente group but between Jay Parkinson and Fierce Healthcare, the beans are well and truly spilled now, and they are apparently soon to be available in every Permanente region. I suspect because of that the integration with Epic that Alexandre mentioned will be full speed ahead!–Matthew Holt
All the Lonely People: Primary Care isn’t a Team Sport Anymore, We’re Only Interacting with Our Computers
BY HANS DUVEFELT
In spite of all the talk these days about health care teams and in spite of more and more physicians working for bigger and bigger healthcare organizations, we are becoming more and more isolated from our colleagues and our support staffs.
Computer work, which is taking more and more time as EMRs get more and more complex, is a lonely activity. We are not just encouraged but pretty much forced to communicate with our nurses and medical assistants through computer messaging. This may provide more evidence of who said or did what at what point in time, but it is both inefficient and dehumanizing.
Why do people who work right next to each other have to communicate electronically? Why can’t my nurse simply ask me a question and then document “Patient asked whether to take aspirin or Tylenol and I told her that Dr. Duvefelt advised up to 2,500 mg acetaminophen/24 hours”. It would be a lot less work for me, even if I have to sign off on the darn thing.
Continue reading…Practicing at the Top of Your License is Not an Option for Primary Care Physicians
BY HANS DUVEFELT
You don’t really need a medical degree to know how to follow an immunization schedule, to recommend a colonoscopy, or order a screening mammogram (as long as, in this country, there is a standing order – in some places, mass screenings are done outside the primary care system).
You also don’t really need a medical degree to enter data into an EMR.
And when you decide to order a test, how many of the EMR “workflow” steps really require your expertise? I mean, borrowing from my iPhone, you could say “order a CBC” and facial recognition could document that you are the ordering physician. Really!
And you don’t really need a medical degree to, as I put it, open and sort the (electronic) mail; an eye doctor’s report comes in and if the patient is a diabetic, I have to forward it to my nurse for logging, and if not a diabetic, just sign off on it. And don’t imagine there is time in our day, evening or weekend to actually read the whole report. Patient A saw their eye doctor – check. Next…
Primary care in this country is pathetically arcane and inefficient. And we have a shortage of primary care physicians, they say. If we could all practice at the top of our license, perhaps not. It’s time to reimagine, reinvent, reinvigorate!
Hans Duvefelt is a physician, author, and writer of “A Country Doctor Writes.”
The Dangers of EMR-Defaulted Prescription Stop Dates
By HANS DUVEFELT
It happens in eClinicalworks, I saw it in Intergy, and I now have to maneuver around it in Epic. Those EMRs, and I suspect many others, insert a stop date on what their programmers think (or have been told) are scary drugs.
In my current system all opioid drug prescriptions fall into this category. For a short term prescription that might perhaps be a good idea but for a longer-term or occasionally needed prescription it creates the risk of medical errors.
In Epic there is a box for duration, which is very practical for a ten day course of antibiotics. If I fill in the number 10 in the duration box, the medication falls off the list after 10 days. This saves me the trouble of periodically cleaning up the list.
Continue reading…How to Talk to Clinicians: Forget Workflows, Just Tell Us How Things Work
BY HANS DUVEFELT
Workflows are all the rage with EMR people. But doctors, NPs and PAs are smart. Nothing burns us out as fast or as completely as being told how to do things instead of why. We are not circus animals.
Let me explain:
If we had no professional education at all, we would have clinical workflows memorized instead of clinical knowledge. For example, two weeks after starting an ACE inhibitor like lisinopril, order a basic metabolic profile. That sounds pretty straightforward, but if you add up all the possible clinical workflows we would need if we didn’t know medicine at all, that would be a huge burden – a massive amount of seemingly random and senseless rules.
Continue reading…I Am a Decision Maker, Not a Bookkeeper
By HANS DUVEFELT
Perhaps it is because I love doctoring so much that I find some of the tools and tasks of my trade so tediously frustrating. I keep wishing the technology I work with wasn’t so painfully inept.
On my 2016 iPhone SE I can authorize a purchase, a download or a money transfer by placing my thumb on the home button.
In my EMR, when I get a message (also called “TASK” – ugh) from the surgical department that reads “patient is due for 5-year repeat colonoscopy and needs [insurance] referral”, things are a lot more complicated, WHICH THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE TO BE! For this routine task, I can’t just click a “yes” or “authorize” button (which I am absolutely sure is a trackable event in the innards of “logs” all EMRs have).
Instead, (as I often lament), I have to go through a slow and cumbersome process of creating a non-billable encounter, finding the diagnostic code for colon cancer screening, clicking on REFERRAL, then SURGEON – COLONOSCOPY, then freetexting “5 year colonoscopy recall”, then choosing where to send this “TASK”, namely the referral coordinator and , finally, getting back to the original request in order to respond “DONE”.
Continue reading…CareAlign, fixing that physician workflow–demo & interview
By MATTHEW HOLT
I recently interviewed Subha Airan-Javia, the CEO of CareAlign. CareAlign is a small company that is working to fix the clinician workflow by creating a tool for all those interstitial gaps that the big EMRs leave, and now get moved to and from paper by the care team. In this interview she tells me a little about the company and shows how the product works. I found it very impressive
Full transcript below
Continue reading…Jonathan Bush Launches Zus with $35M & “Build-Your-Own EMR” Proposition for Health Tech Startups
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Jonathan Bush has “More Disruption Please-d” himself and is back at it with a new company, Zus (get it…like the father of Athena) backed by a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, F-Prime Capital, Maverick Ventures, & Rock Health.
“It’s ‘Build-A-Bear’ for EMR, patient relationship management, CRMs…” says Jonathan, and meant to help digital health startups work around incumbent EMR companies by providing a developer kit of components common to the “middle” of a health tech stack — AND a single shared record backend where all Zus clients can land and access patient data.
The intention is to help digital health startups reduce the time and cost of developing their tech by eliminating the redundant, generic aspects of building a healthcare tech stack in the same way companies like Stripe or Twilio have taken the burden out of writing code to process payments or integrate messaging. Zus intends to be the go-to for code used to make an appointment, create a patient profile, connect to a telehealth platform, etc. And the shared record on the back end? Does that make Zus a next-gen EMR company?? Find out more about Zus’s business model, current client list, and why, exactly, Jonathan believes that NOW is the time that the dream of the shared patient medical record is within reach.
