This week at Healthcare 2.0 I watched Dr. Jay Parkinson and software developer Myca unveil version 2 of the Hellohealth platform, the new social media based medical program for doctor-patient interaction. Hellohealth is a comprehensive, web-based patient care platform that allows patients and doctors to communicate through familiar tools like email or IM. Patients can make an appointment, arrange a phone call, request a script refill, or just ask a question via live video conferencing. Independent doctors using Hellohealth can communicate and share information about common patients. Hellohealth might be thought of as Facebook for health.
I had the opportunity to test drive Hellohealth. Built largely for an adult primary care practice, the user interface is intuitive, clean and well thought out by people who’ve actually been there. Care is a la carte – Doctors who adopt Hellohealth set an hourly rate for their time. As a patient, you talk, text, email, visit or actually see your provider. At the end of the month you get a bill.
Should we be impressed with Hellohealth? Good question. After all, is it news when a patient can actually reach her doctor? It is when reaching your plumber is easier. So Hellohealth is news.
But Hellohealth currently represents a fix only for a young, healthy segment of the population willing to pay for simple health needs. Few chronically ill patients, even among the affluent, can afford medicine-by-the minute for the long haul. We should remember too that for many Americans health care isn’t seen as something we purchase. It’s given to us.
I suspect that Hellohealth will fail to gain the traction necessary to be a gamechanger. Its best hope will lie with widespread adoption in small, focused markets where the benefit of tight communication can be showcased with large employers and third party payers. Short of this, or a sudden cataclysmic shift in the way physicians are reimbursed, I suspect Hellohealth will enjoy more fascination with the media than with the real world.
While I’m bearish on its future, I recognize that I need the concept and simplicity of Hellohealth. But I need it executed in a form somehow based closer to reality.
And as I always tell my patients, I love it when I’m wrong.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks DrV! This is exactly what we're trying to do. Focus is the most important part of starting a new business and disrupting entrenched industries. We're very much starting with the young and healthy, much like Facebook has done since 2004. But 5 years later, my parents are friending me and adopting something that was previously only for the young. Start with the simple problems first, learn from them, and then focus on the more complex. That's our ideology.
Getting mired in the stifling healthcare system would only drag us down and make us spend a lot of time, money, and effort to be shut out by an industry who would be more than happy to make us go away.
Thanks again for the post! We love these kinds of discussions.
You raise some interesting points on whether this type of business model will work or not. What becomes even more interesting is when a patient goes from being a healthy patient on HelloHealth to having some sort of chronic/complex condition. It will be interesting to see how they plan to deal with this type of situation.
What's interesting for me about this model is that it reminds me of what's been happening in doctors' offices for years. Those that work in the doctors office don't have to wait hours for the doctor to do a full workup. The doctor does a quick assessment and hands them an antibiotic. Essentially that's what many doctors visits are about. However, when you're working with the person you can cut threw the crap and just get what's actually needed. It seems like online interaction with the doctor is applying this same principle. I wonder how the insurance companies will work with this type of system.
Hellohealth sounds like a wonderful patient tool. Getting patients to use it is an important issue. So many do not have or can't afford a computer. if all our patients had computers and knew how to use it, Hellohealth can make a difference.
My personal experience with just email to my doctors gets me a quicker, better response than phone or fax (yes, I fax my docs, too). It's all about communication.
How do we get all our patients a computer? Start with government issued Hellohealth loaded computers to Medicare, and insurance companies? This could impact the fact that it becomes medical visits that will be paid for by insurers.
Great blog content, Dr. V!
Best,
Dr. Richardson aka drjfpmd
As a patient at Palo Alto Medical Foundation that employs a similar system (managed by sutterhealth.org), I find it a useful tool not only to communicate with my doctors, but also to track test results. While there are clear business model challenges for the adoption of such technology in small medical offices, for larger practices and hospitals this seems like a no-brainer.
I've been frustrated for some time about the reluctance of health pros to use the Internet to improve communications with patients, as if they fear that the tap, once opened, will overwhelm them with patients hungry for attention.
The first thing I did upon discovering the Hellohealth site, after a brief celebration, was to try to find information about Hellohealth and Medicare. Even pointing an advanced search toward the domain found only one incidence of the word — that being a discussion behind the "professionals" firewall of Medicare's projected bankruptcy in 2017.
While it may be in their plans to change this "someday," I get a pronounced feeling that the service is currently far from optimal for those of us already dealing with serious illness.