The company generally regarded as one of the originators of the iPad-enabled electronic health record is now adding clinical content from the Mayo Clinic.
Executives from the Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic and drchrono announced on March 28 an exclusive partnership whereby patient-specific education resources would be made available to physicians using drchrono's EHR platform. Through this integration, physicians could pass along material, ranging from digital pamphlets to videos, to their patients for viewing online or via a mobile device.
"This is replacing the wall of pamphlets in the doctor's office and the paper clipboard that you sign up with," said Michael Nusimow, CEO of Mountain View, Calif.-based drchrono, in a recent interview. "It's trusted content, specific to each patient … and the physician can pick and choose" what a patient should see.
"This partnership with the Mayo Clinic creates an even better experience for both doctor and patient that can serve to improve patient outcomes," added Daniel Kivatinos, drchrono's COO and co-founder, in a press release. "By partnering with the research and educational leader in medical care, we're able to provide our doctors with simply the best educational content available for their patients."
Nusimow said the arrangement eliminates the tedious task of recommending or handing out paper pamphlets or videos, which may or may not be viewed by the patient. By assigning digital files or videos, he said, a doctor can manage the educational content and check back later to see if it has been read or viewed – even going so far as to determine whether a video has been viewed in its entirety.
Nusimow and Kivatinos said the integration of patient education resources with the EHR platform will enable physicians to meet core criteria meaningful use requirements. The Mayo Clinic library, which previously had been available only to those who visited one of the Mayo Clinic locations, currently consists of more than 2,600 educational documents and 300 educational videos.
“I’m pleased that Mayo Clinic’s patient education materials, which are normally only available to Mayo patients, now will be available via the Internet to all patients in the United States,” said Steven A. Smith, MD, medical director for patient education at Mayo’s Rochester, Minn., campus, in the press release. “We consider it a priority to invest time and energy to be certain these patient education materials are informative, easy to understand and stand up to the high level of integrity that the Mayo Clinic represents. Doctors distributing these educational documents and videos to their patients can be confident they contain content that will assist them in their delivery of clinical care.”
Once a patient visits a physician and the diagnosis and procedures are outlined, Nusimow said, the drchrono system creates a "smart patient education notification list," which the physician reviews. Once the physician has seen the list – possibly subtracting or adding resources, the material is sent to the patient through his or her EHR platform, known as onpatient. That material can then be viewed anytime and anyplace via an iPad, iPhone or Android device or online.
Those resources, Nusimow pointed out, are often much better than any information a patient might get by surfing the Web.
"There's a lot of noise (and) a lot of contradictory information out there," he said. "Within 10 minutes you could easily find yourself in a really crazy part of the Internet."
