Microsoft’s Cambridge-based New England Research and Development Center played host to a well-attended conference on Patient-centered IT last week. Thematically, the conference was similar to the one at Babson a few weeks ago: talks centered around the importance of getting clinicians to encourage consumers to take on increased responsibility in managing their own health.

The opening keynote was delivered by Business Process Re-engineering guru, Jim Champy. Based on the success of his New York Times bestseller “Re-engineering the Corporation”, Champy has just come out with a new book called “Re-engineering Healthcare” (free copies of which were given out courtesy of Capstone Partners!). In his book, Champy talks about how technology is transforming the delivery of healthcare so that it is (ultimately) “so efficient that it is affordable to every person – and government”.

Champy’s keynote echoed just these sentiments. He talked about how healthcare processes need to be “re-engineered and re-defined” (primarily using IT) so that they lead to improvements in performance, cost, outcomes, quality and service. The passage of the healthcare reform bill will only underscore the importance of increased efficiency and lower costs, since lower Medicare and Medicaid payments and reimbursements will lead to lower profit margins for hospitals, most of which are already operating on rock-bottom margins. He dismissed the notion that re-engineering was analogous to downsizing; on the contrary the dynamics of the healthcare industry mean there is always space for innovation.

Hamzah

I travelled to Boston earlier this week to attend Babson College’s annual Health and Life Sciences conference. Very well attended by entrepreneurs, investors and industry analysts, the conference’s objective was to assess the delivery of care to patients in light of the existential healthcare debate and ensuing legislation reform. The opening keynote by Matthew Emmens, CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals set the tone for the rest of the conference, with the caveat that the future of healthcare was about “helping people who do not have anything to help them”.

The overarching theme of the conference was that while the use of IT-based solutions was critical in providing quality care, it was important to do it in an environment where the patient has maximum control over his or her own health. The speakers and panellists agreed that creative approaches need to be taken toward engaging patients while concurrently making it easy for clinicians to process and analyze the collected data. This was further echoed by the people I spoke to afterward – one industry expert in particular felt that using mobile devices to engage patients had very “powerful” applications.

Hamzah

Some people have a tough time understanding the workflow for our product, so I created a flow chart to make things a little clearer.

The flowchart is linked from the product page, which has more information about our application, including a video demo and product tour. Check it all out for a clearer picture of our product, then sign up for a free trial and see for how it works for you.

We’ve just launched the consumer facing version of our product, allowing anyone to sign up. The options are all on the pricing page, including a free trial for anyone who just wants to check it out. Other than admin controls, this version has all the same features as our enterprise version, so its a great way for individuals or smaller organizations to improve communications with their clients.

Give it a shot. Even though now you don’t actually have to talk to us to sign up, we’d still love to hear what everyone thinks. So please contact us with thoughts or questions.

We are participating in this year’s Rhode Island Business Plan Competition! Sign up date was today.

First place prize is $15,000 plus $25,750 in consulting, accounting, and legal services.

For more information go here: http://www.ri-bizplan.com/matriarch/default.asp

Nick

Last Tuesday I went to a breakfast seminar in Boston organized by the Mass Technological Leadership Council and hosted by Blue Cross Blue Shield. The seminar, titled: Leveraging new and Emerging Technologies to Enable patient-Centered Primary Care, featured discussion lead: Dr. Allan H. Goroll, MD and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and included three panelists: Dr. Paul Grundy, the Director of Healthcare Transformation at IBM; Dr. Phillip J. Lerner, the Medical Director at Aetna; and Dr. Lisa Dulsky Watkins, MD and Assistant Director of Vermont Blueprint for Health – a branch of Vermont’s Department of Health.

I learned a lot about the current state of primary care in the US and noted some specific complaints. In particular there is an expanding deficit of primary care in our country due to more popular and lucrative specialized practices, and where it does exist it is not ideally utilized. Primary care centers rarely adopt emerging information health technologies due to very limited funds. Dr. Grundy spoke about the success of the Danish system, and how the majority of communication between patients and their providers was asynchronous. Dr. Watkins described her work in Vermont utilizing community health teams and discussed the dire need for shared information to improve communication between caregivers through the web. And lastly Dr. Lerner shared his experience with piloting patient centered medical homes in the US and stressed the value that real time information can play in preventative care.

After the discussion there was a brief question and answer session where I asked about the types of communication media being utilized by modern healthcare programs. The answer, from Dr. Watkins, was “rudimentary,” which she elaborated as email, telephonic, etc. She challenged that it was up to me, representing the modern youth, to discover the future of communication technology in healthcare.

I returned home to Providence with a pocket full of business cards, excited to talk about the things I had learned and the people I had met.

-Nick

Today we launched Panel, our newest product. For now we’re only offering the product through direct sales to organizations, but will launch a consumer version with online sign-up in a few months.

We’ve already been using it in house and here’s a screen shot of our company’s group:

Accelereach

We’ve all figured out different things to track and organize through scheduled text messages. Nate’s been monitoring sets at the gym, Nicks been tracking pullups and swimming sessions, Adam’s been tracking MMA and Muay Thai, and we’ve all been using reminders for company meetings.

We will be marketing this directly to wellness coaches all over the country in the coming months.

We just put up a video demo on our product page to give everyone a better idea of what we’re working on.

It’s a significant improvement over the old static tour we had, so check it out. Its basically a screencast of a typical use of our product, and Nick runs you through most of the basic features.

Hey guys, three of us attended a conference in San Francisco, hosted by the mHealth Initiative last Friday (September 18). A collection of over a dozen of the field’s foremost experts were gathered there to discuss where mHealth is today and to try and predict where it will be tomorrow.

After an introduction by President, Claudia Tessier, internationally recognized mHealth expert C. Peter Waegemann took the floor and began discussion of how participatory health is rapidly changing due to advances in communication technologies. He claimed that the mobile phone will change the modern world more than previous milestone technologies such as the personal computer, the automobile, and even fire.

Following a brief intermission MD Richard M. Peters Jr., President of Rocket Technology Labs unveiled a technology his firm had been developing. He believes that too many communication platforms are cluttering the modern desktop and hoped to soon release a solution capable of multichannel communication through social networks such as facebook, twitter, gchat, etc. As a former emergency room physician he recognizes the value in faster less cluttered communication and strongly believes a near future convergence of communication channels will change the face of the modern desktop.

Next was Nardo Manaloto, Manager, and Solution Consultant of Kaiser Permanente. He brought news of a recent study done by Kaiser testing Text Message (SMS) reminders. This study revealed that of tens of thousands of reminder  recipients, no more than 4% choose to opt out. This statistic was qualified by the fact that some people simply did
not know how to, but is significant none the less. The survey was done over all age groups and proved the power of SMS, despite its 160 character limitation.

After lunch MD Peter Chira from Stanford University School of Medicine introduced the group to ODLs (Observations of Daily Living). As a pediatrician he sees the value in promoting self care in teens and is developing an online platform to research how spreading disease awareness can aid in the manageability of it. He says that teens don’t view their personal medical information as a secret, rather, by publicizing it they are able to realize that their ailments are just a
small part of who they are. In fact, he says, teens generally categorize their wellbeing by their mood, not their health. By tracking live data that the teens generate in their day to day lives Chira believes doctors will be able to better understand their patient’s and therefore issue better care.

Formerly mentioned C. Peter Waegemann then took control of the discussion and briefly interviewed several of the groups around the room, us included. Each group had had a unique experience as mHealth developers. One person had lead a team bringing mHealth to the third world where mobile phones are more common than bank accounts, and minutes are used as currency! Another had developed a patented and medically recognized way to send secure SMS. Using the developers present Waegemann proposed the question: what is next? This lead directly into Cisco’s presentation.

Ash Shehata of Cisco Systems summarized  the previous presentations with a question and an answer, “Which one of these solutions is correct? All of them.” His presentation then took the audience on a journey through one of Cisco’s latest medical ventures: a sort of doctor in a box. Patients enter a room where an assistant awaits and interact with a doctor through a high definition screen and near instantaneous communication devices. Doctors are able to conduct
routine procedures with the aid of the assistant remotely.
-Nick

This week we’re featured in Mass High Tech’s startup watch as one of “Five you should follow”. Here’s the link

Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology is a weekly publication covering business news of the New England high tech industry. It is the largest regional technology publication in the country. Accelereach has previously been featured in Mass High Tech as part of their article on the Betaspring demo day.