April Fool’s Day – Health IT Edition

Most of you know that I love a good April Fool’s day joke. I don’t like those that hurt people, but I love good humor (ask me about the time my wife said she was going into labor and wasn’t). You may remember my past years’ pranks about the #HIT100 Health IT Company, the ONC Reality TV show, and my personal favorite where we announced we’d be selling our own EHR software. Good memories all around.

This year I’ve been busy organizing the Health IT Marketing and PR Conference, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy other people’s work. I’m sure I’ve missed some of the great health IT related April Fool’s day jokes, so let me know of others in the comments.

The big winner for April Fool’s 2016 for me was SnapChart from Twine Health. You’ll particularly enjoy it if you’re a SnapChat user, but it’s a great one either way. This video should demonstrate what I mean:

Well done Twine Health! I think even patient privacy advocates would appreciate SnapChart. “We all know that EHRs suck. Well this EHR only sucks for 7 seconds….BOOM”

Another honorable mention goes to Epic who has a long standing tradition of offering something entertaining on April Fool’s Day:

*Click on the image to see a larger version

Nice work by Epic to keep it topical with reference to Clinton and Sanders. However, the one that takes the cake is Jonathan Bush using MyChart. The only thing that would make me laugh more would be if athenahealth put out a video response from Jonathan Bush. Please?!

Cureatr decided to go old school with a new technology called the Faxenatr:

Cureatr is excited to launch Faxenatr! The next generation in care coordination technology. https://t.co/PBF04oDAFw pic.twitter.com/FfJpIpIYvc

— Cureatr (@Cureatr) April 1, 2016

Howard Green, MD posted this announcement from Alphabet Inc and Google Inc’s company Verily Life Sciences about the UHIT (Universal Health Information Technology).

So many others I could mention outside of health IT. This one from Samsung about a 3D holographic projection was cool:

Equipped with 3D holographic projection, the #TabProS will bring tomorrow’s #collegebasketball games to life. pic.twitter.com/E6Tdh3OVcv

— Samsung Business USA (@SamsungBizUSA) April 1, 2016

Although, when you look at what’s happening with VR, maybe it will be more reality than we realize.

Gmail’s Mic Drop is pretty funny. Well, at least it was until people starting losing their job because of it. The concept of a mic drop on email or social media is pretty interesting though. I wonder if there’s a way you could really implement something like it.

What other April Fool’s day jokes have you seen. It’s Friday. We all need a good laugh.