Best Description of the CareCloud EHR Platform

In a post on EMR and EHR about Social Media and EMRs, Andre Vovan, MD MBA from Mitochon Systems offered an interesting insight into the comparison between EMR and social media.

Social media and EMR are a natural fit. Think about what social media really enables. The ablity to stay connected, following different strings of info/story weaved by connected people. Say for instance you and your friends went to the Grand Canyon, one person took pictures while the other did the cooking, planning, and was responsible for entertainment during the trip. When they try to retell the story to their friends, each will be able to add different aspect of the story and with social network platforms such as facebook, this is possible.

Now take the story above, and insert 2 doctors and change the trip taken to be a patient going from a diagnosis to a surgery and afterwards trying to tell other physician providers on went on. If we design the EHR with this capability, then medicine will be improved.
A social media version of electronic medical records would have EMHR, HIE and PHR as one product not as separate.

I know that this was actually Andre’s initial vision for Mitochon Systems EHR. He wanted to create an EHR that could bring a healthcare community together in this way. I’m sure he’ll keep grinding away until he can achieve that vision. I haven’t looked at the Mitochon Systems EHR recently, so I can’t say how close they are to achieving that dream, but when I read Andre’s description I couldn’t help but remember the demo of the CareCloud EHR platform.

Many of you might remember my previous (some might call scathing) post about the CareCloud EHR and an opposing view by David about the CareCloud EHR. That post and a recent trip to San Francisco made it possible for me to see the CareCloud EHR first hand.

I had a great time meeting with Albert Santalo and Mike Cuesta from CareCloud. That was good considering my previous devil’s advocate post about CareCloud. One thing is absolutely certain, Albert has a vision of what he wants CareCloud to be and he’s dead set on achieving that vision. I like that in a CEO and founder of a company.

When it comes to their EHR, I must admit that it kind of reminded me of a lot of other EHR out there. There were a few EMR subtleties that I noticed in the demo, but I can’t say I saw any real wow features that made it a must have EHR. Maybe a full demo and experience with the EHR would create a rainbow of EMR subtleties that would change my mind, but it was a relatively short demo.

Instead, the wow factor wasn’t in the EHR software, but was instead in the CareCloud platform that powers the EHR, PMS and CareCloud Community of users. The description above about an almost “social network of doctors” and the health stream of a patient seems like an apt description of what CareCloud has created. In fact, the social elements of the platform are integrated throughout all of the CareCloud software which makes for some really interesting possibilities.

The challenge that CareCloud has is that a social network or Care Platform if you prefer is only as good as the people and organizations that use that platform. If two doctors are seeing a patient, then both doctors need to be on the same platform to really see a lot of the benefits of a patient’s health stream.

I imagine this is part of the reason why CareCloud has to provide a solid PMS and EHR solution on top of the CareCloud platform. Doing so will seed the platform with users so that with each PMS/EHR sold the platform becomes that much more valuable.

It’s hard to predict the future. Maybe CareCloud won’t get outside of its Miami base and maybe they won’t reach their vision of a CareCloud platform (Maybe Andre and Mitochon Systems or some other HIT vendor will do it instead). However, I’m willing to predict that whether CareCloud wins the healthcare platform war or not, some company will create a healthcare platform like what CareCloud has started to create that will be too valuable not to participate.

Full Disclosure: Mitochon Systems is an advertiser on this site, but they didn’t know I was going to post Andre’s comment.