An EHR Designed for Doctors at the Anti-Aging World Congress

I recently attended the Med Tech Impact Expo and Conference in Las Vegas. The event was colocated with the A4M (American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine) World Congress. I was a judge at the Quadruple Impact startup competition that was organized by Medstro where I enjoyed hearing a number of promising startup companies pitch their ideas. They were all pretty early stage, but I couldn’t help but appreciate their passion and creativity.

While not my normal area of expertise, I had to take a trip around the Anti-Aging medicine exhibit hall. There were a large number of pharmaceuticals, neutraceuticals, body toners, etc etc. However, I was of course attracted to the booths that talked about technology.

The first category of company I saw was the practice marketing companies. Most of them were offering the full service soup to nuts offering to these medical practices. It makes a lot of sense for them to target this market since many of the doctors attending the anti-aging conference offer a lot of products and services direct to consumer. So, all of the direct to consumer marketing, SEO, social media, etc can be really effective for these practices. Of course, at this show they mostly send their salespeople, so they didn’t really want to talk with me much since I wasn’t representing a medical practice.

The second category of technology companies I found was the EHR vendors. I think I found 3 of them placed throughout the floor and I stopped and talked with 2 of the companies. Both of them focused solely on this market and so their approach was quite different. They designed the EHR to cater to the doctor and the practice instead of EHR certification and meaningful use regulations.

One of them talked about how they approached the sale of supplies much differently than a traditional EHR might do. In fact, it was an integral part of their system. This made a lot of sense since many of these medical practices have a huge retail sales component.

I did find that each of these EHR was still straddling the billing line. Many of them had practices that still needed to bill insurance companies rather than billing the patient directly for everything. At least one of them admitted that their insurance billing engine wasn’t that great and you could tell that they were a little bit torn on whether they should go all in on the insurance billing side of things or not.

In fact, one of them I talked to was pondering whether to go after EHR certification. I advised them to not do it since it will likely alienate their existing users. Although, I’m sure they’ll look at their addressable market and the potential medical market and be really tempted to not listen to my advice. It’s a powerful thing to say that you have an EHR that’s focused on the doctor and the practice as opposed to regulations. Why would they want to give that up?

I asked to get a full demo of their EHR after the conference. There wasn’t enough time at the event. Once I do, I’ll give you a full report on these hidden EHR. I’ll be interested to see what an EHR that was designed for the doctor and the practice looks like. I’ll let you know what I find.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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