GE Healthcare Morsel - Mobile App

Stumbled upon a "cool" healthly mobile application today.  It came up as an Ad link in my Google Email (gmail).  GE Healthcare has newly created a mobile app called Morsel.  Their tagline is "your daily step toward better health."  The purpose is to suggest small things that everyday people can easily do to improve their health.  For example, today's entry is "Try rice or almond milk instead of regular milk".  It gives the user the ability to say that they tried it, so you can see how many other people have done this; great motivator to try it when you know others are doing it.  It is still in it's infancy so not much functionality yet; the other cool feature is that you can suggest a "morsel".  In the recent past, I had mentioned to someone that I think it's hard to get healthy people to adopt to healthcare mobile technologies, but actually, I think I may be turning the corner on this.  I would use this app!

Prescription Safety

We found out from the doctor that my infant has an ear infection again. She seems to always get them so this is our third trip to the pharmacy in the last couple months. The doctor called in the prescription in the morning and I went to pick it up in the evening after work. My infant and I were there together, I was holding her on my hip because she's not walking yet. When we arrived the line was probably ten people deep, something that I've experienced before at this pharmacy. It was about fifteen minutes until we got to the front of the line for pick-up. I think someone should create a vending machine for frequently prescribed low-risk drugs and leave the personal interaction to the more complicated situations.

At the front of the line, I told the cashier my daughter's name and she couldn't find her prescription so then I had to wait for the ONE Pharmacist on duty. Another half an hour later, we find out that her prescription was flagged earlier by the prior Pharmacist on duty because the dosage prescribed by the doctor was double what is recommended. For someone like me who is curious about healthcare process and systems, this was interesting to me. I had not experienced this type of feedback before. The Pharmacist said it would probably be another half hour while she checks with my daughter's doctor. At this point, it was 45 minutes since we arrived to the pharmacy and my daughter was getting impatient so we left and I would come back later.

When I went back later to pick up the prescription, of course I had so many questions. How did the Pharmacist know it was double the dosage? Did the computer tell her that? I did ask the questions and the answer was, they have a manual process where they check the appropriateness for all prescription for children under one years old. They do have a system that checks the appropriateness of some prescriptions, but this did not fall into that category. The Pharmacist did get ahold of the doctor and confirmed the original dosage was incorrect and modified it. I was so happy that they identified this conflict since it wasn't safe for my baby. I was so happy and the Pharmacist too seemed beaming that she could help.

Bringing this post back to Technology. I was surprised that this wasn't caught by any system either at the Physician's end when writing the prescription or at the Pharmacy. Patient safety is critical and risky for health businesses if prescriptions are not appropriate for the patient. I am extremely grateful that through human review this error was found. However, this is a scenario that I think needs to be more protective to patients by the use of technology. We should be integrating tools like prescription screeners to improve patient safety.

21 Days; 7 Seconds

21 Days = The number of days in which if an activity is repeated it will become adopted by the person.
7 Seconds = The amount of time it takes for someone to form a first impression.

Though I haven't validated these to be the common school of thought, it is what an instructor had told us today.

So how does this relate to healthcare?  Well, I recently blogged about lack of user adoption for healthcare applications delivered on web and mobile technology.  So maybe we can try something here.  Let's get in the face of the users for 21 days to remind them about the benefits of these applications and also incent them to use the product for it's intention for 21 days and see if that helps with adoption.  And let's remember in the design of these applications that we have 7 seconds to catch the users' attention where they will decide if they will buy or fly.  So make sure the entry point to the application is one that quickly wow's the users to stick around.

Healthcare Mobile Technology

I went to a conference recently where one of the sessions discussed Healthcare Mobile Technology.  The panel spoke about their visions and excitement of what Mobile Technology can offer to patients and how their healthcare companies have been involved in this space.  The excitement is that we can involve patients in more around their health management and keep them healthy using a device that is already integrated into their daily life, smart cell phones.  One of these companies is Ubiqi Health which is focusing Mobile Technology for the management of migraines. 

I've personally seen Health Insurers spend Millions on putting tools on the Web for patients.  However, what we have seen is that people are not adopting to the Web and the Return of Investment is not realized.  With that said, I apply this too to Mobile Technology.  I believe that people are not totally adopting to using healthcare applications on the Web and Mobile Phones.  I think we need to spend time to fix adoption before spending too much more money on healthcare tools in these platforms.

A couple of mobile and web 2.0 healthcare sites that I want to point out:
http://ubiqihealth.com/
http://www.healthrageous.com/
http://www.patientslikeme.com/

Also, http://health2con.com/ is a great group for following health 2.0.

Healthcare Human Resources Shortage - Right Around the Corner

With Health Care Reform coming down the pike, it makes me think of the magnitude of work that we in the Healthcare Industry are working through right now and the huge amount of work that awaits us.  In addition to keeping our Health Insurance Plans current by slowly updating some of our internal system to realize some efficiencies that new technology provides, we are also faced with many government mandates.  For example, we are looking at 5010 by 2012, ICD-10 by 2013, Health Care Reform varied dates through 2016 and in Massachusetts we are working through Small Business Rate Regulation.  All these efforts are gigantic and the number of human resources alone to get this all done will be many.  There will be an issue in the next couple of years of being able to obtain and secure people to work on all these initiatives.  In the Healthcare industry, when we hire for Healthcare resources, we require prior experience in Healthcare.  We all have a start in healthcare and for me, I had to buy a car, drive 60 miles one way each day and get underpaid in order to get into Healthcare.  I tell people that it's like when we hire a Janitor, we even prefer the one that has worked in Healthcare before.  Though sarcastic, there is some part of truth to this.  So with all the initatives that we must implement in the next couple of years, we will have a hard time in the Healthcare Industry to retain good Human Resources.  My suggestion to solve this issue is that we need to start to look outside of Healthcare and hire talented skills and pair these people up with workers already in Healthcare that can direct, so that we can increase the volume of workers in the Healthcare workforce.