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Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

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Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#71

Post by analog31 »

oomkiller wrote: post #27

Unfortunately the problem is much greater than engineers not understanding doctors and other clinical staff, in my experience. For startups that want to sell to health systems and similar-sized/larger entities (really this is the minimum size that can work for most startups, practice sales usually have more friction than value), you unfortunately have to focus on the buyer, which is very rarely someone who is "in the…

I'm sure I'm being naieve, but could we just get rid of billing altogether if we nationalize the health care system? I have to recount an anecdote. My mom was hiking in a foreign country, and got injured. She hobbled to the next town, and found a clinic. They treated her and were ready to let her go. She said:

Q: Okay, how do I pay?

A: You don't pay for health care.

Q: I'm American. I'm not part of your health care system.

A: That's all well and good, but we have no way of knowing how much to charge you, how to take your money, or where to send it. Have a nice vacation.

The clinic probably maintained some accounting records, but they simply had no billing system.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#72

Post by danieltillett »

I have often wondered if it would be better to just hire professional data entry people to follow the doctor around and enter all the information into the system. Does it really make sense paying someone $500K a year to peck and tap into a EHR?

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#74

Post by pkaye »

m0zg wrote: post #67
samstave wrote: post #63

I am biased, but I spent almost half a decade building/designing systems for Healthcare. I had direct interaction with the users, the vendors and the actual go-live planning for a number of facilities. Healthcare has a lot of issues, EPIC was a stone-walling garden, Siemens wanted to steal stuff, OpenVista was a non starter, Philips talked a big talk but never followed through, Not everyone was truly HL7 compliant, U…

I think eventually we'll have to sidestep most of this fraud entirely by enabling self-serve early diagnostics and cranking up the doctor-replacing technologies to the max. Machines are good at recognizing patterns in non-adversarial environments not starved for compute. There's every possibility that they could do diagnostics better than a human could. Treatment will be up to human doctors for the foreseeable future…

I think IBM Watson salted the earth more than Theranos.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#75

Post by ams6110 »

analog31 wrote: post #71
oomkiller wrote: post #27

Unfortunately the problem is much greater than engineers not understanding doctors and other clinical staff, in my experience. For startups that want to sell to health systems and similar-sized/larger entities (really this is the minimum size that can work for most startups, practice sales usually have more friction than value), you unfortunately have to focus on the buyer, which is very rarely someone who is "in the…

I'm sure I'm being naieve, but could we just get rid of billing altogether if we nationalize the health care system? I have to recount an anecdote. My mom was hiking in a foreign country, and got injured. She hobbled to the next town, and found a clinic. They treated her and were ready to let her go. She said: Q: Okay, how do I pay? A: You don't pay for health care. Q: I'm American. I'm not part of your health care s…

Somebody will be paying, and will want adequate and auditable documentation about what they are paying for. The potential for fraud is too great. Medicare and states all have to watch for fraud in their claim payments.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#76

Post by LeonB »

My neighbor’s son is a doctor who needed some software written. He learned to write the software and now runs a software business (in addition to being a doctor). I guess it was easier than trying to bring developers in. Ive seen the same thing with a pilot who learned programming to write an incident management system for airlines. Only once the software was successful did he seek advice from ‘professionals’. Learning to code is not the deepest skill around.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#77

Post by megablast »

oomkiller wrote: post #27

Unfortunately the problem is much greater than engineers not understanding doctors and other clinical staff, in my experience. For startups that want to sell to health systems and similar-sized/larger entities (really this is the minimum size that can work for most startups, practice sales usually have more friction than value), you unfortunately have to focus on the buyer, which is very rarely someone who is "in the…

We solved it by having a doctor on our team. In fact, not sure how you could solve any healthcare issues without it.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#78

Post by m0zg »

LeonB wrote: post #76

My neighbor’s son is a doctor who needed some software written. He learned to write the software and now runs a software business (in addition to being a doctor). I guess it was easier than trying to bring developers in. Ive seen the same thing with a pilot who learned programming to write an incident management system for airlines. Only once the software was successful did he seek advice from ‘professionals’. Learni…

>> Learning to code is not the deepest skill around.

Neither is learning to fly a plane. What's prized is the ability to do it in such a way as to not crash. The same applies to software engineering.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#79

Post by mgamache »

I work on a telemedicine product using Google Glass Enterprise and the current version of our product was shaped greatly from feedback provided by one early user (physician). It really focused our use cases and made the product much better. That being said, optimizing the current medical process will only get you so far. It will probably not result in large disruptive positive changes. Those will have to come from outside the current process.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#80

Post by bdamm »

ams6110 wrote: post #75
analog31 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure I'm being naieve, but could we just get rid of billing altogether if we nationalize the health care system? I have to recount an anecdote. My mom was hiking in a foreign country, and got injured. She hobbled to the next town, and found a clinic. They treated her and were ready to let her go. She said: Q: Okay, how do I pay? A: You don't pay for health care. Q: I'm American. I'm not part of your health care s…

Somebody will be paying, and will want adequate and auditable documentation about what they are paying for. The potential for fraud is too great. Medicare and states all have to watch for fraud in their claim payments.

Right, but it’s probably done by auditing resources to treatment records. The actual patient needn’t be involved. And in countries like Canada you may end up with multiple operating agencies that are competing for efficiency, such as Coastal Health vs Providence, even though ultimately it’s the government footing the bill.
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