IN 2008 Jordan Shlain treated an elderly patient with pneumonia. He was worried about her, so he gave her his mobile number—but she didn’t use it, and ended up in intensive care. This set Dr Shlain thinking about how to follow up with patients; his simple solution was a daily phone call and a spreadsheet to record the data. One day another patient in his San Francisco surgery remarked, “Dude, you need to turn this into software.” He did, and earlier this year Cedars-Sinai Health System, a hospital operator in Los Angeles, adopted a patient-feedback system developed by the firm he set up, Healthloop.
Doctors can use Healthloop to send their patients questions about their condition, by e-mail, text or smartphone app. Its software then works out when intervention by a doctor or nurse is needed. It is efficient and patients like it. These days the idea of finding value in health data is very much in vogue but most attention is being showered on the promise of “big data”, in which giant databases on genomics, population health and treatment are crunched in the hope of discovering medical insights. But there is...
from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1FQ3kni
No comments:
Post a Comment