Technology permeates every facet of our lives, including doctor's visits. Seeing the need for a stronger marriage of technology and health care, Boca Raton entrepreneur Daniel Cane co-founded Modernizing Medicine. The company's Electronic Medical Assistant services cloud-based records to individual practices and is available for iPads. "EMA allows physicians to have a more efficient and personal appointment with a patient," Cane explains. We spoke with Cane about the features of EMA and how technology is changing the patient-doctor relationship.
|Boca Raton entrepreneur Daniel Cane is the co-founder of Modernizing Medicine.|
PBI.com: What are the core functions and features of the Electronic Medical Assistant?
Cane: Modernizing Medicine's Electronic Medical Assistant (EMA) is a cloud-based, specialty-specific electronic medical records system with a massive library of built-in medical content. It adapts to each provider's unique style of practice and is designed to interface with hundreds of different practice management systems.
What guiding philosophies and principles regarding doctor-patient interaction did you take into account when conceiving and designing EMA?
We took two primary principles into account while creating EMA. The first was that we wanted to develop an EMR system that could save physicians time, which would allow them to either potentially see more patients in the same amount of time, or get out of the office earlier and enable them to spend more time with their families. Secondly, we hoped to create a system allowing physicians to focus more on their patients, instead of writing in charts or turning their backs to patients to type into a computer.
Can you describe the features of EMA Outcomes?
EMA includes two unique features that help improve patient results over the long term. EMA Outcomes enables physicians to longitudinally view a timeline of a patient's diseases and treatments; physicians can easily determine if a patient's conditions are improving or declining over time. The second, EMA Grand Rounds, gives physicians instant access to how their peers across the country treat patients just like the one they're seeing. This is useful for treating rare diseases that doctors may not see often, as well as common diseases when the first and second treatments have failed.
How can the use of EMA Outcomes improve a patient's care?
EMA Outcomes tracks how a patient's disease or condition has changed over time. It visualizes a patient's data longitudinally presenting at a glance views of trends, treatments and outcomes. It gives physicians a visual way to quickly assess a patient's current and past diagnosis status, enabling data driven decision making.
|Cane believes that this technology could lead to better doctor-patient relationships.|
How does the program affect patient-doctor interaction from the patient's perspective?
A patient benefits from the physician being able to work faster and interact more. Since the physician doesn't need to spend as much time away from the patient in order to update charts elsewhere, the patient can spend more time asking questions and getting a more thorough understanding of his or her current health.
What do you see as the greatest benefit to incorporating electronic medical record systems into doctor's offices?
It saves doctors time. This enhanced efficiency frees up more time for doctor-to-patient dialogue and improves the quality of their interactions. Ultimately, this increased interaction and more personalized care leads to more effective treatment as patients feel more connected to their providers and better informed about their treatment plans.
How are advances in handheld technology affecting the medical experience for patients?
So many patients have iPhones and iPads, so they are accustomed to the technology. They do their banking, order their movies, etc., using mobile platforms on a daily basis. Health care is behind the times compared with other industries, and it will take some getting used to now that affective applications such as EMA are beginning to change the landscape.