Tag Archives: physician

Making the case for the cloud to GPs (or physicians)

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Liked this piece by Rosemarie Nelson dealing with the potential for Physicians to deploy EHR solutions in the cloud.

When you think about it you would think it must make a lot of sense.  A doctor running a busy practice does not want to be worrying about capacity planning, firewalls, patch management, backups, etc.  Yet her/his EHR solution is critical to the practice.

Naturally there will be the usual concerns re security/ confidentiality of patient data.  But why would a Physician be better at this that a specialist cloud operator?

Rosemarie Nelson, in the context of the US, provides some indicative pricing.  And there are obvious attractions in the opex v. capex model for any Physician running a practice.

 

Show me the money

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I think Ken Terry at FierceHealthIT has got it just about right.  Physicians are busy people – looking to get paid for their work.  For now it would not appear that social media offers sufficient  upside commercially nor clinically.  There is no compelling reason for physicians to spend significant amounts of time interacting with patients or potential patients.

I think this is changing and will continue to change.  We will see patients with very detailed health records and detailed information on the performance of physicians looking for a different service.  This may require a new commercial model.  Perhaps it will also impact the clinical care model – with more remote service, before and after a visit to the physician.

But for now I would expect to see busy physicians staying busy and not spending a great deal of time interacting with patients online.

 

 

Making social media work in healthcare

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Very interesting report just publised by PwC: ‘Social media “likes” healthcare, From marketing to social business‘.  Can be downloaded from their site.

Embracing social media must make sense for healthcare operators for any number of reasons:

  • The users/ buyers of healthcare are using social media on a daily basis
  • Patients are using social media to discuss/ research conditions
  • Patients are participating in sites where they record their conditions/ treatments/ assessments of operators/ physicians
  • Social media offer another way to develop more complete profiles of patients e.g. over longer period of time
  • Social media offer platform for greater collaboration between physicians, healthcare providers and patients

There is an expectation in the buying community that the suppliers will participate in social media.

The report includes some excellent examples of operators (hospitals and insurers) and patients using social media.  www.patientslikeme.com is a great example on the patient side.

The hospitals who ‘get it’ now realise that social media is not something to be looked after by marketing or IT.  Social business/ social interaction is now part of day to day operations for a modern operator.