MedCity News, April 16, 2015, by Chris Seper
Many of the big announcements at HIMSS conferences are bow-wrapped products ready to hit the market: the IBM blockbuster is a prime example. But what’s more intriguing are the many companies, big and small, rolling out brand new ideas that are taking their first swing as solutions to the big problems in healthcare.
These offerings are often more rough drafts than finished products. For these companies, HIMSS, instead of a place to close deals, becomes the launching pad for these concepts that will be adjusted, retooled, copied by others and re-launched until they become something healthcare can really use to become better, faster and cheaper.
I fell in love with a few of these concepts walking the show floor. Here are some of my favorite half-baked ideas from HIMSS15.
GCH Platform
Green Circle Health’s GCH Platform is the definition of the wonderful half-baked ideas at HIMSS: a dynamic, imagination-capturing yet flawed attempt to deliver a lasting personal health record. Yet you can truly see people carrying a more polished GCH Platform through their lives like their 401(k) or e-mail addresses.
The platform accepts data as is. It will, preferably, digest health records and provide analytics. It also ingests information from wearables. But it will also accept PDFs and image files like jpg and store those, too. What matters is having the information gathered together.
GCH is also elegant in the way it connects family members to view one another’s records, while also providing a nice interface for practitioners and other caregivers.
It still requires patients to do a bit too much typing, though. It needs to adopt a Delectable approach to basic health data: let patients take pictures of their Walgreens blood-pressure results, for example, and – poof! – translate that information into GCH. There’s also the question of how to let this snazzy record live beyond any employer, payer or provider. In concept, an employer would pay no more than $25 per year per family to provide the service. Would a family carry on that cost? Or could they get it for free?
But you know this product has merit because if you talk with the Green Circle’s founder you find yourself having yes-and conversations and exploring how this could work instead of why it won’t.
“We need to get out of Apple Newton and get to the iPod stage,” said Dinesh Sheth, a healthcare outsider who is CEO and founder of GCH.
Read more at http://medcitynews.com/2015/04/half-baked-ideas-himss-real-shot-changing-healthcare-better/