Thank you for the response - I very much appreciate the advice.
To answer some questions: I definitely want to be involved in the coding and technical aspects of a company. If I had to pick it would be a startup over the lower risk/higher stability of an established business. I would choose software over hardware due to the length of the development/approval cycle and the fact that I very much enjoy the creative process of coding. I'm flexible about location.
I agree that there are a ton of great opportunities in medicine. For the past 18 months I have been on clinical rotations and have quickly realized how poorly the current model of healthcare functions. Far too much time is wasted on tasks that distract from providing better patient care. These pain-points and inefficiencies could be easily addressed with simple software solutions. I truly believe that the talent on HN could change the way medicine is practiced. We could decrease the number of deaths due to mistakes (estimated ~100,000/year) and increase doctor/patient satisfaction.
I find the current enterprise software used in the hospital to be the most frustrating. The modern patient is a data-generating machine, yet we still use outdated programs to manage these patients. It's not customized to the clinical situation. It's ugly. It's unintuitive and difficult to use.
I'm interested in improving healthcare from a tech perspective. Providing better analysis and visualization of data. Creating a collection of tools that make everyone's job in the hospital easier. From my perspective there are a bunch of situations where the solution is an adaptation/translation of an established technology from outside the hospital.
3 examples - (I have a huge list):
1. a twitter/yammer/googlewave-like application that would be patient-centric and keep the whole healthcare team up to date on the management of the patient (a new member to the team could easily be brought up to speed on a patient)
2. a panic status board application for the inpatient consult service (once I call the consult I have absolutely no idea where they are in the proces - sometimes for days)
3. a stackoverflow/wiki on location-specific hospital logistics and information (I can never remember all the details of ordering a rare test/procedure - plus it would accelerate the learning curve for the new residents/staff each year)
ps - as for your assessment of doctor's egos, you're definitely correct (you should see what happens when you put 20 or 30 in a room together).
Your 3 examples are great, but they often end up being huge amounts of consulting -- you need to integrate with the quirks of how the specific practice works, and whatever hardware and existing systems they have already. A lot of this is related to insurance as well.
I think huge conglomerates like Kaiser, which provide insurance and care through a single network, could go a long way to improving healthcare IT. At some point, they become big enough to actually become a device manufacturer, software developer, etc., or at least to allow a single product to take over their entire practice. It would almost make sense to have an IT-focused medical hedge fund which develops a great IT system, then goes around and buys practices in strategic markets to convert to the IT system; sort of like the medical borg.
Mobile interfaces to existing EMRs would be interesting -- either within a hospital, or for consults outside. Being able to quickly check and see where someone is in the process would be great. The problem is this either requires huge amounts of customization to work with existing workflow, or adjusting workflow. Radiology with PACS is really the only case where workflow has been totally changed by IT, and that was mainly to allow perhaps the laziest specialists of all to work from home or the beach.
Comments
Thank you for the response - I very much appreciate the advice.
To answer some questions: I definitely want to be involved in the coding and technical aspects of a company. If I had to pick it would be a startup over the lower risk/higher stability of an established business. I would choose software over hardware due to the length of the development/approval cycle and the fact that I very much enjoy the creative process of coding. I'm flexible about location.
I agree that there are a ton of great opportunities in medicine. For the past 18 months I have been on clinical rotations and have quickly realized how poorly the current model of healthcare functions. Far too much time is wasted on tasks that distract from providing better patient care. These pain-points and inefficiencies could be easily addressed with simple software solutions. I truly believe that the talent on HN could change the way medicine is practiced. We could decrease the number of deaths due to mistakes (estimated ~100,000/year) and increase doctor/patient satisfaction.
I find the current enterprise software used in the hospital to be the most frustrating. The modern patient is a data-generating machine, yet we still use outdated programs to manage these patients. It's not customized to the clinical situation. It's ugly. It's unintuitive and difficult to use.
I'm interested in improving healthcare from a tech perspective. Providing better analysis and visualization of data. Creating a collection of tools that make everyone's job in the hospital easier. From my perspective there are a bunch of situations where the solution is an adaptation/translation of an established technology from outside the hospital.
3 examples - (I have a huge list):
1. a twitter/yammer/googlewave-like application that would be patient-centric and keep the whole healthcare team up to date on the management of the patient (a new member to the team could easily be brought up to speed on a patient)
2. a panic status board application for the inpatient consult service (once I call the consult I have absolutely no idea where they are in the proces - sometimes for days)
3. a stackoverflow/wiki on location-specific hospital logistics and information (I can never remember all the details of ordering a rare test/procedure - plus it would accelerate the learning curve for the new residents/staff each year)
ps - as for your assessment of doctor's egos, you're definitely correct (you should see what happens when you put 20 or 30 in a room together).
Your 3 examples are great, but they often end up being huge amounts of consulting -- you need to integrate with the quirks of how the specific practice works, and whatever hardware and existing systems they have already. A lot of this is related to insurance as well.
I think huge conglomerates like Kaiser, which provide insurance and care through a single network, could go a long way to improving healthcare IT. At some point, they become big enough to actually become a device manufacturer, software developer, etc., or at least to allow a single product to take over their entire practice. It would almost make sense to have an IT-focused medical hedge fund which develops a great IT system, then goes around and buys practices in strategic markets to convert to the IT system; sort of like the medical borg.
Mobile interfaces to existing EMRs would be interesting -- either within a hospital, or for consults outside. Being able to quickly check and see where someone is in the process would be great. The problem is this either requires huge amounts of customization to work with existing workflow, or adjusting workflow. Radiology with PACS is really the only case where workflow has been totally changed by IT, and that was mainly to allow perhaps the laziest specialists of all to work from home or the beach.