Apps for Docs: innovative delivery models to watch
Our client, Mtutive , has launched a new web based application called OpNote. It has been designed for and by surgeons. OpNote provides a customizeable postoperative surgery report that eliminates dictation and transcription while accelerating the revenue cycle by providing correct procedural codes, quality indicators and immediate sign out. Faster and easier than dictation, OpNote provides a cost reducing solution that accelerates reporting and limits liability due to incomplete documentation.
OpNote is the second product offering created by Mtuitive. Their first application was designed for pathologists while plenty more processes are in the pipeline waiting to be authored on the Mtuitive platform.
One of our initiatives to be researched and evaluated, is understanding how new applications are going to adopted by specific groups of physicians and healthcare staff.
The healthcare marketplace is in flux for a number of reasons. The huge Federal stimulus payments being offered physicians to adopt EMR platforms has energized an entire software/web app category. The Federal and State wide approaches to creating Health Information Exchanges are certain to cause even more change.
However, one of the most surprising trends coming to healthcare is the consumerization of IT. Its simplest definition is that employees/students/ contractors/ and even physicians are bringing the technology tools they are most comfortable using during their personal life into work with them.
Specifically for healthcare, we are seeing the rapid adoption of mobile connected devices like tablets and smart phones as the physicians preferred communication and collaboration tool. This is a new trend that needs to be watched closely. From what we have gathered so far RIM and Apple seem to be the leading mobile device providers for the healthcare vertical.
As an application provider, companies like Mtuitive need to understand how their products are most effectively going to be delivered into the marketplace in order to reach the largest number of customers. The developer platforms attached to these various mobile devices could provide a lucrative new channel directly to the healthcare providers themselves.
These new channels could be extremely important in delivering innovation to highly targeted groups of healthcare providers while disrupting the old guard of traditional health care vendors. In the past, innovation has been slow to come to the healthcare world. Hopefully, this consumerization of IT trend will drive new applications like OpNote swiftly into the hands of those physicians and healthcare decision makers who can most directly and positively impact healthcare.
