2 ideas shared by doctors at the 3/7/18 Docs and Hackers meetup
And what you can do to help them improve healthcare in the US
Technology was supposed to improve healthcare. Unfortunately, it has increased physician workload and decreased doctor-patient time at a significant cost to the taxpayer. Docs and Hackers is a group of medical practitioners and technology builders who aim to reverse this trend and accelerate innovation in digital health.
The Docs and Hackers community meets almost every month in either San Francisco, Mountain View or Boston. Every meetup, a few doctors share their ideas with the audience. These can be anything from startups they are working on to side projects that they are excited about. Here are two pitches from the meetup held at Google’s Mountain View campus on March 7th, 2018.
To learn about when we meet next, join the group at http://www.docsandhackers.com.
Christian Rose
Emergency Medicine, Informatics Fellow (LinkedIn)
The pitch
I would like to talk about the role of blockchain in healthcare. There are many broad topics to get into, but initially at least, specifically in managing identity. Every year, physicians manage numerous registrations, licenses, documents, etc. at an average of about 1.5 healthcare centers; all of which takes hours of time and months of delays in allowing physicians to actually work at that hospital. I had completed this months long-process myself in October and was then hit by a car, breaking my femur and thus unable to work — leaving a team of physicians down a man until this laborious process could be completed again. Furthermore, we give our identity to the hospital to share through various secure and insecure methods which they use for billing and patient matching. I’d like physicians to once again own their identity and be able to bring it with them wherever they go.
Of course, there are great health gains to be had from patient identity and record management, but if we can’t solve the laborious and costly process of physician identification (a roughly $5–7 billion per year cost just in administrative fees), then the others are a long way off.
What kind of help are you looking for from the Docs and Hackers community?
Blockchain expertise and engineering skill is still limited as the technology is relatively infant. And much of the landscape is muddied by people attempting to make quick money off of coin offerings or finance-specific forms of blockchain. We would like to build a team to at least first accomplish the goal of physician identity and then an alliance of interested parties to begin to identify the structure and format that this technology will take in the healthcare sector so that its potential may be met with real process improvement.
You can email Christian at christianrosem [at] gmail.com to learn more.
James Wantuck
Hospitalist, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Co Founder at PlushCare (LinkedIn)
The pitch
PlushCare has initially been focused on building a platform for doctors and patients to connect virtually. To date, we have built a video chat platform, dynamic marketplace for booking, real-time insurance eligibility, and a fully functional EMR. In our next phase we plan to build a system for integrating outside data to enable preventative health and care for chronic disease and begin shifting aspects of care to AI.
What kind of help are you looking for from the Docs and Hackers community?
I am looking for talented people to help us achieve our goal making care convenient, transparent, and affordable.
You can email James at jwantuck [at] gmail.com to learn more.
