Healthcare De Novo

A couple or three generations ago, healthcare was personal. At least, it was perceived as personal. You had your personal healthcare professional -- called "your family doctor" -- who made house calls, knew your medical history by heart, and had treated you and your family for generations. He (back then, doctors were invariably males) made an effort to be easily accessible.

As time went on the "personal" disappeared from healthcare. Perhaps it was the rapid development and deployment of novel medical technologies during the 20th Century increasing the cost of running a doctor's office, so doctors had to expand their practices just to keep even. Perhaps we became hypochondriacs, consulting physicians so often that they couldn't get out of the office. I don't really know why. History of healthcare business trends is not my area of expertise.

What I do know is that a new generation of clinical technology is poised to change the way doctors run their offices, and, perhaps, put "personal" back in healthcare. For example, Tuesday (3/10) two emergency medicine physicians, Peter Hudson, M.D., and Wayne Guerra, M.D. introduced a new iPhone app called iTriage to provide consumers with actionable healthcare information. iTriage helps consumers evaluate their symptoms, lists potential diagnoses, and provides locations for treatment.

Consumers can access iTriage's expansive library of medical symptoms, diseases, and procedures to immediately see initial diagnostic options and get recommendations on the appropriate level of service required. iTriage integrates these results with geolocation technology to provide users with specific information on the most relevant nearby treatment facilities.

Users can tap into a national directory of emergency departments, urgent care facilities, retail clinics, and pharmacies through the app's proprietary healthcare-focused search engine. In addition to location-specific data for mapping purposes, consumers can get detailed information on these facilities including enhanced descriptions of capabilities and areas of specialization, links to appropriate web sites, hours of operation and contact information. Quality reports from HealthGrades on hospitals and physicians can be downloaded and emailed directly to users' iPhones. Marketed thorugh the developers' company, Healthagen, iTriage is currently available in the Apple App Store for $0.99.

In a similar development, on Wednesday (3/11) crisis information management technology vendor ESi released WebEOC for Hospitals, a crisis information management system designed to manage and communicate health information and hospital resources in real time.

"WebEOC for Hospitals gives hospital administrators and emergency managers real-time situational awareness of available resources," says ESi Director of Health Services William Glisson.

In a third development, also announced Tuesday, CAE, a provider of simulation and modeling technologies and integrated training solutions for civil aviation industry and national defense forces around the world announced signing contracts and alliances with Canadian organizations Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences in Toronto, the Universite de Montreal, and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. Under the agreements, the entities will develop simulation-based healthcare training systems.

"The aviation simulation-based training model is becoming universally recognized as one of the effective ways to prepare healthcare professionals to care for patients and respond to critical situations while reducing the overall risk to patients," said Robert E. Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer of CAE. "CAE has already applied its technology and capabilities developed for the civil aviation and military markets to public safety and emergency response. Healthcare simulation is a natural extension of this know-how. By partnering with experts in the healthcare field, we will leverage our knowledge, experience and best practices in simulation-based aviation training to work with healthcare experts to deliver innovative education, technologies and service solutions in order to improve the safety and efficiency of the healthcare industry."

Whether these Healthcare de novo initiatives will help reduce healthcare costs while improving both service and clinical outcomes remains to be seen. Recent history is not encouraging. Healthcare costs over the past 50 years or so has increased more rapidly than just about any other measure of social activity. It certainly has increased faster than life expectancies!