For most of us, the doctor we picture in our head is pretty different from the one that HIT vendors sell to. Most of the love goes to big health systems like Kaiser and Mayo that can afford to spend ridonkulous amounts of money on technology. It’s one of those classic self-reinforcing problems too, because these are also the only folks with the cash to send representatives to DC policy conversations. To be clear --- nothing negative at all on those systems --- just a fact that the real world has some built in bias that is easy to forget.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of real online patient engagement. I don’t mean admin portals that help with scheduling and billing --- useful but uninteresting --- I mean tools that allow you to really work with your doctor and her staff; things like:
- Collaboratively monitoring key values like blood pressure, weight or glucose measured at home … to be sure they’re staying under control;
- Exchanging secure messages to avoid unnecessary and inconvenient office visits;
- Sharing information about other care you’ve received from specialists or while travelling;
- … and so on.
Trusted primary care relationships are where this stuff should happen --- but the technology has been frankly beyond the reach of most smaller (or even mid-sized) practices that are underwater just trying to think about getting set up with an EHR. Such a bummer.
Until now! Our friends at Get Real Health have just launched a self-service, fully online marketplace for their InstantPHR product --- at dramatically better pricing than the market has seen to date. Just log on, pick some colors, provide a credit card and you’re off to the races.
Not only do you get an incredibly feature-rich portal (totally integrated with HealthVault of course!) … Get Real has also put together a metric ton of marketing materials to help you get your patients signed up: posters, flyers, fridge magnets, you name it. As somebody who has seen a lot of success AND failure in this space, it’s impossible to overstate how important that awareness part is.
I hope this offering is incredibly successful --- it feels like a key piece that’s been missing on our journey to making sure everyone has access to the tools we already know work to improve health and lives.
If you’re a doc, go sign up --- and if you’re a patient, call the office and tell them to sign up. Go ahead, do it now --- I’ll wait. Still here? Why? Go sign up. Now would be good. Here's the link again.