Health Business Blog

Health Payment Systems (HPS) helps consumers understand and pay their bills. In this interview, HPS CEO Jay Fulkerson answered my questions about the origins of the company and what they are trying to achieve.

What challenges are you trying to address?

As a technology company, we look for ways to close existing gaps or delays by streamlining the healthcare payment and billing process and connecting its various components. The current payment system is convoluted, confusing and wasteful. We need to rethink it from the ground up if we’re serious about doing the very best for healthcare consumers. We hope to bring an increased understanding of the process and simplification for the patients and providers, as well as empowerment for consumers.  Data shows patient satisfaction with their provider decreases 10 percent from the time of discharge to after receipt of the bill. We’d like to see that turn around—where the payment process is another opportunity to affirm the strength of that provider’s brand and mission

What is the Super EoB and why was it developed?

The Super EOB was developed after one of HPS’ founders, James Brindley, underwent treatment for cancer and saw the bills begin to mount.  After a full recovery, Jim gathered his stack of paperwork, met with his neighbor who was in the healthcare field and said, “There’s got to be a better way to make sense of all of this.” After two years of research and planning, they incorporated Health Payment Systems. Sometimes patients need to simply focus on getting well, and the overwhelming medical bills and EOBs do not help.

The Super EOB benefits three entities:

• Providers receive a single electronic payment from HPS for both the benefit plan and patient portions of a bill
• Employers save money because HPS passes along savings it secures from providers
• Families receive one monthly statement, the Super EOB, which includes healthcare services from all HPS providers, for all family members.

It’s really a win-win-win for all involved.

What kind of feedback are you getting from patients?

We know that patients can easily understand what they owe, where to submit payment and by what due date. A process like this saves time, trees and money, plus patients understand it better and don’t have as many questions for employers.

In a recent focus group, we asked employees of a local county government what they thought about the advances in claims technology and the ability to receive something like a Super EOB. Participants liked that information for all family members was on the same page, and that they could make one payment for everything on the statement

Who are your customers? What is your business model?

Our customers range from small employers to large, self-funded companies.  We have a large portion of municipalities and school districts, as well as healthcare providers. As a healthcare technology company, our business model is aimed at taking waste out of the claims administration process, while making the healthcare payment experience easier for consumers to understand. Our provider network includes more than 6,500 healthcare practitioners in Wisconsin. We enroll more than 75,000 patient members and have 40 employees.

What impact is ACA implementation having?

The ACA was created to provide affordable healthcare to everyone. In order to do so, steps need to be taken to make healthcare more affordable.  Removing waste from the payment of health care services is our primary business, and is one factor that will help make healthcare more affordable.  There is no better time for employers to embrace the single payment technology offered by HPS.

Why did you develop the YouTube video? What do people think of it?

To tell our story better, we put together a short, animated YouTube video that demonstrates just how much paper the average family receives related to healthcare billing.

It’s a fun, easy-to-understand explanation of the current state of healthcare paperwork from the patient’s perspective. HPS actually has a stack of EOBs and bills that we counted to get to the numbers mentioned in the video. We have some pretty fascinating data that I’m not sure anyone else on the claims or provider side has researched before.

The response to the video has been positive.  It has helped HPS tell our story, as well as allowed our employees to share with their family and friends to help them understand what they do at work.

What’s next?  How else are you hoping to improve patient experience?

We have been out starting the conversation—meeting with providers and employers to see what their changing needs are and how we can help address them.  We need to shift our idea of competition in order to work together toward better value for patients and communities. That said, we would love to partner with a local provider about launching a Payment Value Stream. It would allow us to examine each step in the current process to see where we can remove waste and create value. From a lean perspective, this is an area of care not many people have looked at, and we think it’ll give us great insights. We continue to work at incorporating the voice of the customer and transparent performance data into our approach.  Finally, we are working on a consolidated billing product, will soon be rolling out a more robust patient portal and are looking at additional ways to empower consumers.

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Bio: Jay Fulkerson joined Health Payment Systems (HPS) in 2011 and serves as the president and CEO of HPS. Previous to his role at HPS, Fulkerson served as chief executive officer of Touchpoint Health Plan in northeast Wisconsin. Following the acquisition of Touchpoint by United Healthcare, he served as chief executive officer for Wisconsin and then as regional chief executive officer for United Healthcare’s Midwest Region.

Interview conducted by David E. Williams of the Health Business Group.

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The business and operational needs of health plans are changing so quickly that it’s no wonder they’re running into information technology challenges. At the same time plans are by their nature are conservative about changing how they operate and swapping out old systems for new ones.

In this podcast interview, Joe Marabito, CEO of ikaSystems lays out the complexities of the health plan IT world, describes how health reform is providing new opportunities for administrative innovation, and speculates about the role Accountable Care Organizations will play in transforming the payer world.

ika provides a variety of next-generation IT infrastructure to health plans and so has a front row view of the changes.

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By David E. Williams of the Health Business Group.

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David Williams interviews ikaSystems CEO Joe Marabito [ 19:54 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hospitals have many devices collecting data on patients, but until recently information from those devices has not been routinely integrated nor stored in electronic medical records. In this interview, Stuart Long, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer of Capsule explains the benefits of medical device integration and how it works in a hospital.

Why is medical device connectivity important, and what benefits does it bring to the patient?

Rapidly becoming a priority for many hospitals, biomedical device connectivity to the hospital network—or medical device integration (MDI)– enables medical devices to transfer patient data from the point-of-care over the network into an electronic medical record (EMR) system or other charting systems. Device integration delivers patient data to clinicians in near real time so that information supporting patient care decisions is delivered timely and accurately.  Without MDI, patient data, particularly vital signs, is transcribed on paper charts and the recording is duplicated by manually having to key the data into the patient’s electronic record. MDI helps assure data accuracy by eliminating manual transcription errors while relieving caregivers from burdensome manual tasks, enabling more quality time with patients.  The bottom line is increased patient safety and care.

Why is it important to automate the collection of patient data (i.e. vital signs) and how does this improve the quality of data entering the EMR?

End-to-end automation of patient data collection ensures accuracy and precision.  Full automation removes potential error points along the way as device information is sent to the EMR or other systems.  For example, as I mentioned before that many caregivers read data from a device, manually record it and then input it into the electronic system.  From an administrative standpoint, the need for absolute accuracy of data is greater than ever before.  In addition, having data in electronic format is essential to ensure the full realization of a complete electronic record, which enables data exchange with other hospital IT systems and access to this information hospital-wide. Again, from a regulatory and reimbursement standpoint, the importance of this electronic format is increasing as Meaningful Use (MU) guidelines become more defined.

What happens to patient data as it moves throughout the hospital? How is that data being used?

As patient data is collected through electronic means, it is aggregated from software or hardware, analyzed by the connectivity software, and translated into a format appropriate for the hospital IT system receiving the information.  Various hospital departments—whether the ED, OR, ICU or med-surg–may output device data in disparate formats, often completely proprietary formats.  That data then must be translated into a standard format for the EMR and perhaps reinterpreted once again for compatibility with specialized departmental IT systems.  As each new department inputs information, the data is normalized as required and translated for the needs of specific hospital IT systems.  In that way, device information can follow the patient through the hospital, wherever it is needed.

What are some of the differences across care units in the hospital? How does that impact the technology being used?

Workflow varies greatly among various care units—the ED, OR, med-surg and step-down, for example, and also varies by hospital.  Med-surg units often have many beds with a limited number of devices shared among them on mobile carts.  Intensive Care, by contrast, may rely on a greater number of devices, which are fixed in location and associated with a particular bed. A quality MDI system seeks to reduce the complexity of its technology by supporting the existing workflow already in place in a particular setting.  Capsule has different hardware and software solutions to support various settings and workflow requirements. Some are wall-mounted units that accept fixed-position devices and are already associated with a specific bed for continuous data collection. Another solution would be a mobile device interface for equipment with no fixed location, which must be associated with the individual patient for periodic data collection.  Data must be validated, and in some settings, a nurse requires flexibility about the timeframe care patients may require immediate attention before caregivers have time to accept data.

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Interview conducted by David E. Williams of the Health Business Group.

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Patients are often confused by the medical bills they receive from providers and have difficulty matching them up with the so-called Explanation of Benefits (EOB) forms they get from health plans. The result: frustration, wasted time and bills that don’t get paid. This problem befuddles not just to the ignorant or feeble-minded; I freely confess that it afflicts me as well.

In this podcast interview, Simplee co-founder and CEO Tomer Shoval explains how his company’s medical wallet and self-service payment platform help patients understand and pay their bills and help providers collect payments faster and at a lower cost.  Shoval has a background in e-commerce (he’s ex-eBay) and that experience shows through in Simplee’s approach.

By David E. Williams of the Health Business Group.

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David Williams interviews Simplee CEO Tomer Shoval [ 17:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Like most people, I was never a fan of the old-fashioned hand dryers in public bathrooms. Unless you had 10 minutes to stand around, the machines never got your hands dry. I used paper towels whenever they were offered.

In recent years more powerful hand dryers have been popping up and now fewer bathrooms offer paper towels.

Of the new dryers, my personal favorite is the Dyson airblade. It’s powerful, quiet and has a clever design.

But I’m not so fond of the Excel Xlerator. Sure it’s powerful, but it’s also incredibly noisy. I have sensitive ears, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that when I’m exposed to a loud sound I cover my ears with my hands. But of course if I’m drying my hands I can’t use them to protect from the noise.

The Xlerator is loud enough that I suspect it’s a threat to hearing. At the very least it’s so annoying that I bet some people skip hand washing to avoid using it. My gym has one of these beasts and after being bothered by it for a while I decided to research the noise level.

I found a paper on the subject by Jeffrey Fullerton and Gladys Unger from the acoustical consulting firm Acentech. Sure enough, the Xlerator is a real noisemaker. Apparently the company has also developed a noise reduction nozzle, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in operation.

I followed up with the authors, who told me that OSHA does not find the level of noise generated by the Xlerator to be a danger to hearing. It’s not loud enough to cause immediate hearing loss and since it’s used for only about 15 seconds at a time it’s not likely to cause permanent damage.

They did advise me to put my hands a foot or so below the nozzle rather than a couple of inches, because hands in the airstream is a major factor in the noise level. 

So today I gave it a shot. If anyone was watching me they probably wondered why I was stooping down to use the dryer. But it actually worked. By keeping my hands lower the noise level was cut to an acceptable level. It took a little longer to dry my hands, but it wasn’t bad.

By David E. Williams of the Health Business Group 

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A front-page Boston Globe article on a neurosurgeon suing a caregiver for a harsh blog post  is exciting but unrepresentative of the overall state of online doctor reviews. However it caused me to take another look at online physician ratings from the perspective of someone trying to find a doctor. Conclusion: we are still in the early days and there is plenty of opportunity for better, more useful information. It’s still difficult to use the sites for real decision making.

First I tried searching HealthGrades, Yelp, Angie’s List and Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP) for information on something I really care about. I typed in the name of a medical specialist at a local academic medical center who is caring for a family member with a serious illness. This doctor has been in practice for 20 years but only one site I looked at (HealthGrades) had any reviews, and those two were not detailed. I then looked for other specialists and found that there are typically very few reviews available. It’s unusual to find more than five reviews for a given specialist on any one site, although I’m sure there are some exceptions. MHQP doesn’t include specialists.

Next I turned to primary care. The information is better –MHQP in particular stands out on data quality– but there is still a lot to be desired. I searched for my physician, Dr. Johanna Klein of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Washington Square Group. Here’s what I found:

Healthgrades — a listing with a lot of publicly available information (address, phone, insurance, date of graduation) plus seven patient experience surveys showing that people generally like her

Angie’s List — which I paid $11 to join– has a confusing search function. I found Dr. Klein but no reviews for her. There were 16 reviews for the broader medical group, though, enough to get a general idea of the practice and some specific doctors within it. One of the reviews is harsh “I seriously question if she has actual medical training…” but most are pretty sober, boring and don’t sway me one way or the other. This site was the most disappointing overall and I don’t recommend subscribing.

Yelp –is the liveliest of the sites, at least in its reviews of this practice, and also incorporates some of the most innovative social media features. There are 7 reviews, 3 of which give 5 stars, 3 with 1 star and 1 with 2 stars. In addition to the rating most have a significant amount of text –quite a bit more than Angie’s List. Reviews are sorted by “Yelp Sort” as a default and can also be sorted by date, rating, Elites (a Yelp designation for evangelists) and Facebook friends. The Yelp sort takes into account various factors –like user votes and recency– to list the most helpful reviews first. Each reviewer has her or her first name, last initial, town and photo displayed, along with the number of Yelp friends, number of reviews posted and how many times they have “checked in” at the location. Clicking on the reviewer’s name provides a profile of the person, ratings of the usefulness of the person’s reviews, and a distribution of the person’s ratings. The distribution of ratings is interesting because it gets to a key concern physicians have about ratings: are they just posted by people with negative experiences?

The Yelp sort did an excellent job of ranking the ratings. The first review is by a person with multiple chronic illnesses who’s seen a specific doctor at the practice for 10 years and gave 5 stars. She had many specific things to report about her doctor and clearly had plenty of basis for her comments. Four people had rated the review helpful, and it showed that she had checked in twice on Yelp while at the practice (compared to none for the others).

The next two reviewers gave low ratings: 2 stars and 1 star. These reviewers have written more than 150 reviews each –awarding 4 or 5 stars in the vast majority of cases– so this is a helpful credibility builder for me.

The last 2 reviews –1 star each– are written by people with no Yelp friends and only a few reviews. The negative ratings are based on specific anecdotes and even though one has six “useful” votes it is still at the bottom, where I think it deserves to be.

Overall the reviews rung true to me based on my own experience.

MHQP is much more scientifically rigorous than the rest of the sites, and its data forms the basis for Consumer Reports’ recent report on physician quality in Massachusetts. Data on clinical quality comes from health plan data and patient experience is derived from a statewide survey. In patient experience there are 90 responses for the Washington Square Group. Results are also displayed as one to four stars, but here the stars have a statistical basis: e.g., 4 stars means an office did better than 85 percent of others in the survey, 1 star means it did worse than 85 percent of the offices. MHQP also enables a side-by-side comparison of different offices, which is a nifty feature.

Despite the harshness of some of the Yelp reviews of my practice the picture painted by the MHQP results are –if anything– worse. There are quite a few categories with 1 star (e.g., How well doctors give preventive care and advice) and few with 4. And yet 71 percent of the Washington Square Group’s respondents say they would “definitely” recommend their doctor and 19 percent say “probably.” Because of its statistical rigor the MHQP site is bereft of qualitative comments that could shed light on the findings, and results are reported at the level of the group rather than for individual physicians. And of course MHQP is only available in Massachusetts, although certain other states and regions have similar resources.

I looked at these websites when I picked my primary care physician. They didn’t have much influence on me then and wouldn’t today. In the end the number one issue was finding a specific physician I liked –and as mentioned there is essentially nothing documented on my doctor. Instead I relied on my previous doctor’s recommendation after eliminating a few other potential choices. Location was also important and I wanted someone within the Beth Israel system because I like the hospital and my records are on the PatientSite portal. I do have some concerns about the overall customer service of the practice and some of the low MHQP ratings, but figure if I watch out for myself that these things won’t affect me.

In an ideal world the rigor of MHQP ratings would be extended to the individual physician level –at least for certain measures– and to medical and surgical specialists. Physicians or practice manager would also have a way to reply to the ratings and reviews at least in a general way. If some of the Yelp approach could be applied to add texture to the data through user commentary then we’d really have something.

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By David E. Williams of the Health Business Group.

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Earlier this month at the HIMSS conference in New Orleans I sat down with Phil Fasano, SVP and CIO of Kaiser Permanente to discuss his new book, Transforming Health Care: The Financial Impact of Technology, Electronic Tools and Data Mining.

We discussed how the health care industry can use information technology to make health care more affordable, convenient and accessible. Fasano believes health IT can help completely transform the relationship between patients and providers.

Fasano looks forward to an era where a patient’s medical record is available wherever he or she seeks care, where empowered consumers use mobile devices to access customized, personalized information that they can understand and use.

Fasano was encouraged at HIMSS to see a greater emphasis on connectivity than in the past.

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Interviewed conducted by David E. Williams of the Health Business Group.

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David Williams interviews Kaiser CIO Phil Fasano [ 11:33 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From FierceHealth IT (Stroke patient makes gains in speech, physical therapy with robot)

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst are touting success in the case of a robot that delivered speech and physical therapy to a 72-year-old male stroke patient.

“It’s clear from our study … that a personal humanoid robot can help people recover by delivering therapy such as word-retrieval games and arm movement tasks in an enjoyable and engaging way,” speech language pathologist and study leader Yu-kyong Choe said in an announcement.

While the child-sized robot might not be the ideal therapist, it could help ease the shortage of workers, especially in rural areas. 

“A personal robot could save billions of dollars in elder care while letting people stay in their own homes and communities,” the authors wrote in a study published in the journal Aphasiology.

To me it’s a no brainer to use robots for rehab. Take the phrase “arm movement” tasks. Robots can be much better than human therapists at doing boring, repetitive arm movement tasks over long periods of time. And of course if the robot can be the patient’s home it makes access all the easier.

In 10 years we’ll look back at these early results and it will be totally obvious the direction things were moving.

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This is the transcript of my recent podcast with J.P. Fingado of API Healthcare.

David Williams:  This is David E. Williams from the Health Business Group.  I’m speaking today with J.P. Fingado, President and CEO of API Healthcare.  We are at HIMSS in New Orleans.

What problem does API address?

J.P. Fingado: We’re trying to solve several problems.  The first is around quality of care, so we seek to put the right people at the right place at the right time to achieve the best possible outcome for the patient.

The second piece is helping hospitals control their cost and optimize the use of labor.  So if we actually optimize across everybody in the hospital, across all their facilities through the continuum of care, we’re saving the hospitals millions of dollars through the deployment of their staff on an annual basis.

There’s a third piece that’s also very important, which is improving that satisfaction of their entire workforce. Allowing them to have more control over their schedules, over their interaction with their human resource system leads to happier employees, which in return, increases productivity.

Williams:  Here at HIMSS there’s certainly a lot of discussion about electronic health records and health information exchange. Meanwhile you have a couple of things that sound like variants on those.  You’ve got not an EHR but an EER and not a health information exchange but a healthcare workforce information exchange.  Can you describe what those concepts are and how they fit in to the goals that you’re trying to achieve?

Fingado: The electronic employee record is a single repository of everything about every single health worker in an institution.  We’re actually tracking before they even come on board.  We’ll start the data collection at the recruiting phase to understanding the competencies and the scenarios and the environments that workers have been in prior to joining an organization.

Once they come then we’re tracking all their growth inside of an organization.  We’re tracking where they work inside of a hospital, the time that’s being tracked, all their HR information, all their training, all their performance reviews.  We ultimately go to full succession planning.

Putting these millions of data points into a single record allows the hospital to effectively deploy those people and put the best people on the field at any point in time.

The other piece that we brought to market from an innovation standpoint is the healthcare workforce information exchange. We take all these records –imagine in a hospital two or three thousand people and the millions of data points– and we optimize that across the continuum of care and share the information across every facility inside of a hospital.

We’ve got a hospital customer, for example, Advocate Health Care, which over 200 locations in their network with tens of thousands of people that we help them optimize.

Williams:  Interestingly, you seem to be combining clinical information about patients in the hospital with this EER concept. If a client is using your system, how much of a difference can it make for the patients that are in the hospital?  Is it just a minor or incremental improvement or do you see something that’s more dramatic. And if so, how could you measure that?

Fingado: So scheduling a nurse is not like scheduling a waitress.  You can not just give every nurse three patients and call it a day.  There’s a huge benefit when you can match up the needs of the patient to the expertise of the nurse.  So think about it. If you are in the ICU and there was one nurse that had treated 50 patients with the exact ailment and another nurse that treated one, which nurse do you want?

It’s pretty obvious.  So when you start to do that you really drive higher quality across the board, a better outcome for the patient. Now you’re talking about huge results for the organization.  With reform, reimbursements are going to get tied to quality.  Poor quality will drop reimbursements.

So now we’re not only saving the money on the expense side, we’re actually increasing the revenue of the organization, now making it a healthier environment, which in turn helps patients as well.

Williams:  You’ve been describing the tracking of nurses and others from the time they are hired into the organization and maybe even beforehand. But a lot of these health care organizations are a little more complex than that. A lot of them use agencies or other sorts of outside resources.  So how do you address that situation where you have many personnel that are not actually employees of the hospital?

Fingado:  That’s a unique thing that we do that nobody else in the industry does. We don’t think in terms of employees.  When you look at a hospital you’ve got the full-time employees and part-time employees, but you have volunteers, you have contractors and you have contingent workers.

When we put in the system we’re putting in the system for all the health care workers in an institution.  If somebody calls in sick a nurse manager or a manager of any department can look at all the available resources in their department, they could look in the float pools, they could across the entire organization.

But with our systems they can also look at any contingent staffing companies that are in their preferred network and it will show them just the resources that fit the need based on licenses, competencies, performance ratings, as well as cost.  And for the first time, a manager can make an instantaneous decision about picking the right resource, not just their full-time employees but anybody that can provide the highest level of care to the patient.

Williams:  I want to ask a broader policy question that relates to what you’re doing. We hear about the shortage of nurses and in particular about baby boomer nurses that are going to retire, but at the same time we also hear that nurses graduating from nursing school are actually having a hard time getting started in the profession.

So you could see a situation where you’ve got a lot of inexperienced nurses who don’t get experience and then a lot of nurses that eventually retire. You also have some people who will come in and out of the workforce. It all seems very dysfunctional. Does what you’re doing contribute to getting nurses into the funnel and helping them to get experience?

Help me understand this combination of a nursing shortage overall coupled with the difficulty a new nurse has getting hired.

Fingado:  A very astute observation.  So that’s actually a big reason why we’re seeing a lot of demand for the systems. Hospitals are bringing a lot of the nurses in who don’t have a lot of experience and what they can do as part of the system is match those nurses with the experienced nurses, put them in scenarios where they can really learn and get up to speed quicker, and then over time starting to move them to more independent roles where they’re learning and training on different types of patients going forward.

It’s a huge issue and one reason why hospital administrations are starting to make a big technology investment in workforce management. They recognize that there’s going to be a big shift in the workforce over the next decade.

Williams: I’ve been speaking today with J.P. Fingado, President and CEO of API Healthcare.  We’re at HIMSS in New Orleans.  J.P., thank you very much for your time.

Fingado:  David, thank you and I hope you have a great rest of the show.

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Online doctor/patient relationships is the new frontier in social media. A report earlier this year discussed how medical boards would respond to different sorts of potentially inappropriate activity on social media. I asked Jeff Tangney, CEO of a professional online network for physicians called Doximity, to discuss the topic with me and to describe how Doximity fits in.

How widespread of a social media challenge are medical boards dealing with? Are there a lot of instances of doctors using social media inappropriately or is it relatively rare? 

Every profession adheres to a code of ethical behavior, but medicine carries an extra responsibility of safeguarding sensitive content, protecting patients and following privacy laws. Thus, the spotlight is cast on patient privacy violations conducted over social media, such as here and here. These instances are rare though, and state medical boards are now sensitive to these scenarios so that they can more quickly intervene. The “challenge” for physicians and medical boards is identifiying when, how and where social media technologies should be used to improve care delivery. Social media’s asynchronous and far-reaching properties are great tools for communication, continuous education and engagement beyond the 15-minute clinical appointment or physician phone call, and there are many physicians out there who will say that it’s had a very positive impact on their own practices.

What kinds of problems are typical?

Most problems can be traced back to HIPAA violations, such as improper de-identification of patient information or non-secure communication mediums.

Once the inappropriate behavior is pointed out, do the Gen Y doctors agree that it’s actually a problem, or do they disagree?

Tech-savvy Generation Y rode the first waves of social media as it crashed ashore, and in our experience most agree that embracing new efficient technologies can be done in a way that enhances and upholds the profession. Many young physicians choose to keep a Facebook profile, but they use privacy settings and know not to let it cross into their clinical practice, instead using tools like Doximity for professional conduct.

How have the norms changed over time?

The shift from in-person to online has been a slower one for the medical industry as a whole, but both patients and providers have grown to realize the real-time benefits of the right online or mobile technologies in information acquisition and secure communication. The greatest change in norm is increased familiarity and thus increased embrace.

How do patients feel about doctors’ online social networking behavior?

As patients ourselves, knowing that our physicians can have access to a national network of clinical experts right from their smartphone with a tool like Doximity is a technology milestone that we’re certain they should embrace.

What are the alternatives to general social networking sites? What are the pros and cons of using them? 

General social networking sites, while offering a large userbase, and not tailored for a specific industry like medicine, making it difficulty to find the right people to share with. Additionally, they often allow anonymity, which does not build a prerequisite level of trust for health conversations. Doximity is designed exclusively for health professionals, and each user’s identity is verified, thereby enabling an unprecedented level of collaboration around patient care.

Some well known sites, like Sermo, have fizzled. Why? 

Social media is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Doximity is the first secure network designed as a productivity tool by doctors, for doctors. Thus, even physicians that are too busy or too wary of common social media still choose to save time using Doximity’s national provider directory, mobile fax and secure messaging features.

How do you expect social networks for physicians to evolve over the next 5 years? Do you envision a role for doctor/patient interaction as well?

In the US healthcare system, patients on average see 19 different doctors in their lifetime, in the context of an industry approaching 20% of US GDP. It is clear that an interoperable, secure medical internet is critical, and Doximity’s growing platform and partners can streamline workflow and communication across the many participants in the system.

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Interview conducted by David E. Williams of the Health Business Group.

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