Its 3:00am in the morning and you are
awakened to an aching in your foot. You roll over and try to rub it, but the
touch is unbearable. You tell yourself, “I probably just slept on it wrong” and
try to go back to sleep. After lying in pain for an hour you decide you should
go to the doctor. So you look up your PCP, “does he know any thing about feet,”
you ask yourself as you dig for his number. After a rigorous search for his
number, you give up and go to Google and luckily there is his number on a
provider website. You call and realize, “oh yeah, its only 4:30am, no one is
there,” and you hang up the phone. “There must be a less stressful and
efficient way to do this,” you think to yourself as you turn your search into a
quest for Advil.
Thanks to The Cloud, there is. According to
the New York Times, Practice Fusion, “a company that
offers doctors cloud-based electronic medical records software for managing
relationships with patients” announced on Tuesday a new service called ‘Patient
Fusion.’ Patient Fusion, which harnesses the power of the cloud and turns it on
the healthcare system, allows patients to search for doctors as they would a
good restaurant. From our example above, if you were using Patient Fusion, you
could easily jump on the smartphone of your choice, find your doctor, and
schedule an appointment with him right from your phone. Moreover, you can now
answer your question, “does he know any thing about
feet?” Patient Fusion offers a “Yelp-Like” review of doctors and services
provided, fully equipped with a star rating and comment section.
However, lets say that the doctor had no
available appointments that morning to see your foot, according to Ryan Howard,
chief executive of Practice Fusion, “I can put you in
touch with every other local specialist who is available at that time…you’ll be
able to see patient reviews of the doctor, and if you book with one of them,
that doctor will automatically get your health history from Practice Fusion.”
Moreover, the service is linked to both yours and the doctor’s calendar, which
automatically updates when you book the appointment. This is a great service
because the Healthcare industry is full of waste and inefficiency, especially
when it comes to patient communications and records. Howard hopes to soon turn
Patient Fusion into a social terminal for health, “we could have
real-time information on what drugs are being prescribed…whether you are losing
it because patients are having adverse reactions, or doctors are prescribing
generics.”
