The Official Omedix Blog

So, as President of Omedix, part of my job is basically to promote the merits of integrating the Web with your practice. If I were presenting to a group of 100 doctors and practice managers on “Why Should I Bother with a Website for My Practice?” I would essentially say the following:

• New Patients
• The Yellow Pages costs you how much?
• For many people today, you don’t exist if you’re not on the Web
• Search engines will bring you new patients
• When someone wants to learn more about you by word of mouth, what do they do?
• Boosting Efficiency
• How to hire free labor: make your patients do your data entry with online forms
• Common questions should never be asked again: just put them on your website
• The Patient Experience
• Would you want to talk about bacterial vaginosis in your office cubicle?
• Patients are irritated that they can’t connect with you online
• Secure Messaging CAN be a good thing…when done right
• Patient Education
• An educated patient is a better patient
• Most malpractices suits aren’t because of malpractice but poorly managed expectations
• Why most practice’s patient education solutions basically suck

Here’s the interesting thing about this presentation: It all relates to technology that’s been around for nearly 5 years now. Translating the “benefits focus” into the services that are available for these kinds of things this is all basically just talking about:

• Building a website
• Search Engine Marketing
• Online Forms
• Secure Messaging
• Web-Based Patient Education

But despite being around technology-wise for 5 years, these tools are only in the last few months actually reaching a level of maturity to where they’re easy to use, easy to setup, and affordable for most doctors.

Here’s the other interesting thing about this presentation: I suspect I will be able to give this same presentation 2 years from now in 2010. That’s depressing, but true. Actually, I think I’ll be able to give this same presentation, but I think there will be another group of so-called “Early Adopters” who will listen to a different presentation that goes something like this:

• Being Connected To Your Colleagues
• If you’re not making electronic referrals, you’re not cometitive
• Save time and money by getting online with a Health Record Exchange
• The Power of the Network
• No matter how smart you are, the network is smarter
• How this worked for AthenaHealth
• How this worked for Omedix
• Why patients LOVE this
• How the Network grows revenue and reduces costs while taking less of your time
• How Patients Choose Doctors Today
• The Big Three: Google, WebMD, Find-A-Doctor Sites
• How to Manage Your Online Reputation and Why It’s So Important
• Building your “brand name” as a doctor
• Information Therapy (aka Patient Education)
• Your website does all of this for you
• You should never have to explain the same concept multiple times again
• All informed consent should be documented systematically
• Your clinical outcomes will actually improve (finally, we have data for this)

I’ll be honest. I’m being a little cryptic about some of the above things. If you’re really curious about what I’m talking about just contact me to chat; I love this stuff and would be more than happy to share my thoughts.

But the real takeaway here is how incredibly far we have to go before the “Healthcare IT” industry is even close to reaching its potential.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil authored a controversial essay in 2001 called “The Law of Accelerating Returns”. He basically argues that…

“An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The ‘returns,’ such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially.”

For our industry, that means to me that we are spending a HUGE amount of time laying groundwork right now — interoperable electronic health records, quality data to help consumers make an informed decision when choosing their doctor or hospital, patient portals to give practices an “online front’ to patients, social networks for patients, social networks for providers, developing “The Network” for each niche in the industry, I could go on forever. But once those pieces are in place, they will all start to fold in on each other and create some AMAZING things.

Of course, that kind of stuff is 5 - 15 years out, and in the meantime we all have everyday needs like paying the bills and enjoying our lives that dictate what services will actually sell today.

In the short term at Omedix, we’ll continue selling “web solutions for medical practice”.  We’ve set up an awesome system for consistently delivering high quality websites and it’s a good business. But the really fun stuff is in the pipeline.  It’s an exciting time to be in the industry, but we have so far to go.

Both comments and pings are currently closed.