DrChrono Blog

Our COO, Daniel Kivatinos, was part of a Health 2.0 last week called “Fixing the Clinical User Experience”. His presentation was focused on a recent integration. While much of our work at drchrono focuses on providing doctors with a seamless EHR experience, we also recognize that patients are in charge of their health in ways never seen before.

Passively receiving health stats and records has become a thing of the past for patients. In fact, going to a doctor’s office seems dated in this new era of ordering services, like groceries, tailors and transportation, when needed. Fitbit kicked off the trend of active health monitoring and what I’m calling, “health-on-demand”…now this space is up for grabs. I’m excited to see a slew of consumer health-on-demand apps coming down the pike.

With no further delay, I present to you a few of our favorite consumer health-on-demand apps and services, many of which were discovered at Health 2.0:

• Heal – need a flu shot or a quick prescription for that nagging pain in your back? Use the Heal app on your iPhone to call a doctor to you home, all for $99 flat. Heal is currently only in a few cities, namely LA and San Francisco, but are growing quickly.
• PeerWell – imagine a virtual meet-up of people with similar health challenges. PeerWell puts a user in a group of individuals with similar demographics (e.g. age, location, health condition). The group receives a series of mini-weekly goals (say 5 minutes of mindfulness for instance) and is encouraged to collaborate on these goals via the app. Peerwell only focuses on mental clarity now, but I can definitely see how this could help people kick habits, lose weight or work through a medical condition.
• onpatient – this is a shameless plug, but we really feel that our Patient Health Records app really allows patients to take their health into their own hands. Patients can sync their Apple Health data straight into their PHR and share that info with their doctor (via the drchrono app). Never before has wearable data become actionable; now your heart rate and number of steps walked actually mean something to your doctor.
• Nurx – coming out in late October, this app will let patients order birth control to their door. The app seems to obtain a prescription as part of the service. Last minute calls to the doctor may be a thing of the past!
• Medwand – this isn’t an app, but is definitely health on-demand. This tool, which recently won an the Launch award at Health 2.0, is a device that enables patients to allow their tele-med doctor to hear their heart and lungs, look at their eyes, ears, nose and throat, and take their pulse and temperature as if they were at the clinic. The device is also coupled with an interface that allows this information to be ported to different doctors.

Health-on-demand apps are in their early stages, but it will be interesting to see this area develop over the next few years. In the meantime, I look forward to spending fewer hours in the waiting room.