Herald: Solving Data Overload for Healthcare Providers
Rough Draft Ventures is excited to support Brad Diephuis, Matt Fujisawa, Andrew Hillis, and Craig Monsen of Herald as they change the way healthcare providers receive data.
Currently, providers face the daunting task of continuously monitoring multiple data sources within the electronic record. Providers thus resort to manually “pulling” data periodically to check for changes or new information. Shockingly, this process takes 12% of physician time, which is the same amount of time physicians spend seeing patients face-to-face. Moreover, it often results in missed updates and delays to patient care. This inefficiency has been identified as a major contributor to the 200,000 deaths due to medical errors every year.
Herald allows providers to build protocols that specify exactly when and how they want to be notified about critical patient data. Through integration with the hospital electronic medical record, Herald monitors for changes in the specific lab values or patient data being tracked via these protocols. Thus, the manual “pulls” can then be replaced with convenient “push” notifications via pagers, text messages, or emails. Clinicians can customize these protocols, for example, adjusting frequency or thresholds for alertings.
To better illustrate, consider a few example use cases. A general surgeon can receive an email if her patient has been readmitted less than 30 days post discharge. A hospitalist can get a notification if the troponin level of any patient is rising, indicating a possible heart attack. Or a neurologist can get paged as soon as results from a CT scan arrive. These protocols not only allow for saved time and effort, but also significantly better patient care.
And not only can clinicians create their own protocols, they can source from commonly used protocols based on their specialty, region, or colleagues, and then further customize to their needs. This use of crowdsourcing can give clinicians a wide source of basic protocols to get started on the platform, further increasing the efficiency of data analysis for healthcare providers.
