We need more companies that understand mobility of workflows (not just how to write apps). When you think about email that is a truly mobile experience, what do you need? Consider that you are working on your desktop. At that point, email has complete functionality. When you move to a web application, you lose a bit of the functionality and when you move to a simplified web experience, you lose it a little bit more. However, the essence of the capabilities and the user experience is still there. Going to mobile versus tablet, with the small screen space and the big screen spaces, the email client corporations and companies that make these do a good job of understanding what individuals need when they are walking, running or sitting at a computer.
Most of the electronic health vendors out there, about 600 plus of them, do not understand what the individual mobility needs are and even if they did, they do not have personnel who could do something about real mobility (versus tossing together some simple smartphone apps) at this time.
However, companies like yourself that are in this space explaining to people that a mobile app does not make mobility and clarifying that an enterprise solution allows you to break off certain workflows and change user experiences depending on what kind of devices you’re launching, is what makes all the difference in the world.
Right now, it is a problem that some infrastructure tools don’t exist. It is sometimes a user experience problem that people just don’t get the fact that a mobile app doesn’t mean that the screen on the desktop shows up on an iPad or mobile. It’s really a lack of understanding and a lack of knowledge. I wish more companies would do exactly what you are asking for, but it may take us a little while because of the user design and experience capabilities that are required.
Chris: In every bit of technology that I’ve ever been involved in, there have been times when we sat down and thought of a technology solution. In this case, mobile app and native mobile app immersive experience makes absolute sense. Who do you think is going to drive this so that we have a better, more intuitive, more immersive, more real time and easier user experience but still have the security? Would it be the practitioner that’s going to drive that? Would it be the EHR systems that are implementing these capabilities or somebody else? Who do you think would be going to help drive that from a demand perspective to produce a market that’s worth going after?
Shahid: Yeah, terrific question. It would be nice for the EHR vendors to do this because they know the workflows pretty well from a purely technical point of view. We, in the industry, need to start to understand that healthcare is so big and so important that it cannot be left to the healthcare IT industry to solve. I say this, being both in the government as well as in health IT and combined with the medical device space. What folks do in health IT and in the medical device industry is pretty good for those particular areas which I call “retrospective document management” or managing patient records, etc. as opposed to actually enhancing and managing care.
If we are going to view it from the perspective of making sure that everything that is done to a patient is tracked and recorded so that the patient or their insurance company can be billed for it, then that would be a traditional IT company’s view. Electronic Health Record (EHR) or Electronic Medical Record (EMR) companies are focused on documentation for tracking bills and record management. However, if we are going to view it from the perspective of improving the care of patients, improving the actual outcomes of healthcare in general for our patients, then that would have to be in the hands of the clinicians.
