Comment by dvdhnt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvdhnt | Hacker News Reader

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Semi-related... I work in wellness and healthcare.

I don't know about you, but I despise filling out the same forms over and over again when seeing new healthcare providers. I'd love to start a service modeled after granular smartphone permissions where

(a) I check in at a new office (scan a code, they scan my code, beacon, something like that)

(b) the office then requests x, y, and z information

(c) a push is sent to my phone where I can review the information and approve or disapprove some or all permissions

(d) a final step of either entering my pin at the office, using my thumbprint on my device, or something else.

The key components would be storing the data encrypted at rest, following HIPAA and then some, having a solid auth protocol (keys, jwts, etc).

I think adoption would be helped because the public are already used to permissions like these when installing apps.

The benefits are a lack of paper trail, no one is going to not shred my SSN, my most up to date data is now available, and instead of hosting N apps/databases, I'm storing 1 and can reduce my maintenance, customer support issues because one for all, all for one.

Edit: edited for readability.

Too much inertia on the provider side for this to catch on and reach critical mass - many septuagenarian sole practitioners out there using paper diaries / files, and larger organisations with some monstrosity written in COBOL (or MUMPS?) that will never change to accommodate this.

I'd suggest something much more low-tech - a website where you can punch in all your details - insurance, allergies, medical history, etc, etc... and then you can print it out (or a subset of it, for different kinds of providers) or generate a PDF that they can copy & paste into their horrible legacy system (an improvement on retyping), or, for those truly at the cutting edge - the kind of electronic transmission you speak of.

I'm probably bias because I've lived in two areas now where healthcare is one of a few, if not the, major industry in the area. They're always trying out new apps and services here.

I am on board with what you're saying; an escape hatch for non- or semi-adopters. Obviously, printing is a way to go, so maybe on the mobile app, the ability to check each piece of information required then export/email to your preferred destination.

It'd also be interesting to look to make money on conversion i/e replacing, or integrating with, the outdated monsters you're talking about.

Maybe we're not even talking about healthcare anymore, maybe just the ability to piece together PII (personally identifiable information) and deliver it to X.

>>>> on another note

This goes into a topic I've seen posts on recently, and something of interest to me, personal indexing; a better way to throw blobs against the wall and have it indexed for me, leading to a personal Google. I mean, that's already coming, really, between Facebook and Google (especially Google Photos) but currently I see nothing about piecing together information I'd like to share on a professional level.

Hmm, Google Drive does a reasonable job of that. It indexes everything (including OCR for images + PDFs), has decent search, and has per-folder permissioning and sharing.

It's actually a pretty good solution for ad-hoc "working together" with someone (a lawyer / architect / whatever) on a project, where you have lots of files you need to share and refer to during the project.

Totally didn't think of that, especially the OCR which is great, having used it before with the mobile app.

I wonder if you could stitch together a workflow as a reseller for Google Apps (no clue what their current name is)?

Either way, good suggestion.

Maybe the problem is we're trying to get the wrong people to pay. Since the pain point is with patients, fix it for them and make them pay. Gets around the industry inertia.

Sell the service to the patients for some smallish fee ($5 per month) and then provide the integrations into the various provider systems for free.

Later on you could scale it up to be an add-on to employee benefits or the health plans.

Insurance card scanning and recognition is available. Costs $999.[1] This has apparently been around for years; there's Windows 98 support. It's been acquired by AcuFill [2]

They also offer identity document verification with facial recognition crosscheck. They want to use this to detect visa overstayers for immediate deportation.[3] That now looks like a market with potential.

[1] http://www.card-reader.com/medical_cards.htm [2] http://www.acuantcorp.com/autofill-software/ [3] http://sandhill.com/article/its-high-time-we-build-border-te...

The military is terrible for this. You are constantly filling out forms that amount to a half page of your basic information, followed by a couple of text fields that form is actually for.

> The military is terrible for this.

Agreed. Especially considering they have an ENTIRE department devoted to personnel along with an office at every single unit level above platoon.

It might not work for the military specifically, but for browser based forms, Lastpass has a form fill feature: https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/fill-form-basics/

I'm sure it's possible to hack together an AHK script[1], combined with Pulover's macro creator[2] to automate virtually anything repetitive on a Windows PC, or use Selenium to automate browser actions[3]. Of course then you run the risk of having to fall into the classic XKCD automation time sink[4].

[1] http://ahkscript.org/

[2] http://www.macrocreator.com/

[3] http://www.seleniumhq.org/

[4] https://xkcd.com/1319/

It's mostly paper.

Can't they just use their dog tags like an ink stamp or something? It is supposed to be enough to ID them right?

France has national healthcare and everyone has a smart card with vital information, and all doctors have the hardware to read it and software to process it. Or at least they did 15 years ago when I was there.

Edit to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Vitale

We just built something like this for the health market. Users can auto-sigin to websites with one of their identities or set it to ask for each visit. Here is a lil demo I made that uses Craiglist as an example: http://tricorder.org/cl When the user goes to your website, say wellness.com/newcustomer, there are javascript APIs to get at your standard data, that brings up a perm dialog and if the user accepts, the data is sent to the website. Send me an email (profile) if you want to talk biz, tho was planning to open source it. Auth is very solid, but its currently android only.

I am working on a patient-driven platform which brings together all key stakeholders with support of a few good partners, and I am currently conducting user interviews for it. I would love to talk with you more about your ideas. To make scheduling painless, I have a link in my LinkedIn profile summary:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rancar2

I would love to hear from anyone else with big ideas relating to or are working on driving outcomes towards holistic wellness with patient-center healthcare, patient data collection/quantified self, and patient-powered research networks. In the bigger picture, I am passionate about making the world a better place through innovation and working on what really matters for humanity.

we're making something similar, currently sitting at ~40k patient users, 200+ health systems adopted -

https://crosschx.com/patients

Here's an observation. HIPAA applies to health care providers, insurance companies, and other entities like that. HIPAA does NOT apply to me when I am in possession of my own personal health records. Not saying such an app should not be secure, but for me to hold my own records is regulatorily simpler than HIPAA.

I'm surprised none of the comments mentioned ZocDoc, which does most of this already. You can fill out forms once, schedule appointments and click to send your info to the office.

agreed providing the same exact 4 pages of info to every doctor's office is insane.

It is but you need to understand why that happens (hint: $$)

When you go to the doctor for a sinus infection, the cost of this is not fixed, even across insurance companies. The other factor is the "level" of service. (ref: http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics...)

The more in-depth the examination and the more time you spend with the patient, the more they can charge. All those forms are "taking family history", etc. and it is free money since you have to do the work. Those are then scanned so they can be used later in an audit.

(Source: I also worked at a start-up that was trying to disrupt out patient medical systems. It's very hard and has lots of roadblocks. btw, of the top 50 EMRs in the US, only 3 have APIs and these are mostly to pull data, not push it back in).

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