Most of us already realize that the mobile platform is the future of how medical data will be accessed, shared and applied.
The timely introduction of smartphones and tablets, after all, goes hand-in-glove with evidence-based medicine (EBM). By making the very latest medical finds accessible through mobile solutions, clinician engagement has doubled, according to multiple studies. Nearly 85 percent of younger clinicians, in fact, are already using iPhones and iPads to access patient and professional data. Today’s technology and the myriad ways of collecting information ensure that patient and general population statistics will play an increasingly important role in providing quality care.
Two new solutions, @Point of Care and Docphin — both in the Startup Health incubator — address this need in their own unique ways to deliver the latest EBM information to clinicians, allowing them to not only access the data but use it to improve patient care in the transition to adopting value-based medicine.
“If the patient is not part of the team they lose interest very quickly,” said Robert Stern, a co-founder of @Point of Care. To that end, the company's cloud-based EBM offering leverages mobile technology to assist in the diagnosis and management of patients by pulling in stats from population samples and content from thought leaders and published journal studies, all of which are aggregated into disease-specific categories for 15 chronic conditions.
Docphin, meanwhile, gathers data from 5,000 journals and, using its in-house-developed algorithms, personalizes its article recommendations based on the journals the physicians follow and the type of patients that the clinicians are seeing (not unlike what Netflix does when it recommends movies based on previous user downloads). It also selects articles that are most cited on the Web. Research data and reports are continuously updated using bots and other tools to find the latest news with alerts sent as appropriate to user preferences.
@Point of Care
Stern explained that it would take approximately 12 hours to read all the content in a particular chronic condition app.
That material is vetted for relevance by an editorial team for each of the disciplines. The teams track current information, which is then reviewed by thought leaders and physicians as to its worthiness for updating. Once a content piece is launched it's date-stamped and put contextually in the right place in the application by organizing the information like chapters in a book. Headings include etiology, diagnosis and treatment, as well as specifics to the particular medical problem.
As a result, material is placed where a practitioner would expect to find it, in the context of the specific medical issue under review. What’s more, if doctors have any questions from a course of treatment @Point of Care can aggregate and highlight significant data in a dashboard that, in turn, clinicians can use to review data sets and understand how they are performing in order to improve outcomes.
The @Point of Care app also allows patients to record results from medical devices they are using as well as personal data on how they are reacting to the current course of treatment. Clinicians can view that patient input by remote download or a Bluetooth transfer between mobile devices when a patient comes into the office for a face-to-face visit. Since patients typically go back only a few days or a week in relating their status, physicians can dig deeper with the patient, months instead of days.
Docphin
Docphin’s user base of hospital administrators and medical students, as well as training and attending physicians, tripled over the last five months after being selected by Apple earlier this year as the best new application for medical professionals. The name of the solution comes from the combination of doctor and an acronym for “Personalized Health Information Network” (While the name might not very captivating, it's certainly better than DocPhil).
The MedStream component of Docphin also personalizes content based on interest, trending articles and highly read articles and even collects sources from mainstream consumer publications. In the case of the latter the app will, for example, send an article appearing in the New York Times and simultaneously locate the research cited in the article and push that to the user as well.
By associating the doctor with partnering institutions, the solution eliminates many time-consuming steps it typically takes to access a journal article. The link creates a single sign-on rather than requiring multiple passwords and drop-down menus before getting to the content.
An enterprise version, Docphin Premium, provides a platform for hospital administrators. Premium gives administrators a view of the level of clinician engagement and compliance and allows for follow up discussions on ways to improve delivery of services.
According to co-founder Sachin Nanavati, Docphin improves healthcare quality by accelerating implementation of an EBM practice.
Gold standard
Studies have found that a significant portion of the $3 trillion spent on healthcare annually is wasteful and unnecessary, and that a great deal of that waste can be avoided by following EBM guidelines, according to Sachin.
“The notion of EBM is the gold standard of how physicians are trained today,” he said.
EBM is only a part of the bigger tableau of value-based medicine, of course. After all, what is the good of all that “evidence” if it remains unused?
Ephraim Schwartz is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vt. Schwartz is a recognized mobile expert and columnist, having spent 15 years as Editor-at-Large for InfoWorld, half of them covering the mobile space. Prior to that he was Editor-in-Chief of Laptop Magazine.
