Today's New Regulation Could Spark a Health Tech Revolution | Hacker News Reader

Today's New Regulation Could Spark a Health Tech Revolution

blog.picnichealth.com

23 pointsnogaleviner16 comments

Hi Noga. Forgive me, I'm not understanding. How do I get my health records?

I designed and implemented the backend(s) for 5 regional health exchanges, did some front end work on our physicians portal, prototyped the patient portal (shopped around to our clients). I also participated in the competitive NHIN interop effort (we were a sub on the Northrup Grumman team). If you've seen the Mirth stack, my stuff was roughly the same (at the time).

Every participant in our exchange (hospitals, labs, scripts, clinics, insurers) jealously guarded their data, hoping to monetize it.

Maybe the scope of "meaningful use" has expanded, but when it started it was just a dozen or so fields. (The phrase "meaningful use" seemed to be an example of unintentional irony.)

I can't gleen your business model. And unless you have data access / sharing agreements, I don't see how you can get my records. (I'm a few years out of date, so maybe things have changed.)

If you were creating a "white label" patient portal for your customers (e.g. hospitals) to implement, that'd be cool.

If you were kickstarting a lobbying group to empower patients with access to their own data, I'd definitely contribute.

Think mint.com for medical records. Literally. We help patients find their patient portals. We credential them in (just like mint) with username and password, providing a tool that pulls their data out. We normalize it and display in a meaningful way. Then we go back to the hacky solution of automating e-faxing back out to keep other doctors in the loop.

It's definitely nuts that this would be the solution, but I don't think we can wait for HIEs or for someone to get data access/sharing agreements for exactly the reason you state. Every player is jealously guarding their data.

You're right that we don't get the complete record, but whats in there is actually pretty rich.

Mint.com helps me with financial planning and budgeting. What does access to my medical records help me with? As a patient, does access to historical lab values provide me with actionable information or are the latest results, communicated to me by my physician more valuable? Do you use a predictive model to provide the patient with a health forecast (ie. https://archimedesmodel.com/indigo, they have an API)?

I check my Mint.com account regularly, what would drive me to check my Picnic account regularly?

This is a key point; your medical records are fairly opaque without a doctor's interpretation.

Hi Mazimi, I'm Victor and working as an engineer at Picnic this summer.

At first we are targeting patients with chronic illnesses. These patients often see doctors in different systems and are not able to view all of their medical information in one place. Picnic will consolidate their data and provide it in an easy to view fashion.

Focusing on patients with chronic illnesses will also help us give meaning to the data. We have a doctor on the team who is categorizing all of the tests as per different conditions and explaining how certain key tests are relevant to your condition. With the explanation, the tests gain meaning and you can see how your health is faring over time.

In the future, we will want to extend these explanations and information to healthy patients to give everyone insight into their health.

As for archimedesmodel, at this point we are not looking at giving health forecasts. We want Picnic to be a tool that clearly shows data to the patient and allows them to have a more productive conversation with their doctors. In the future we may consider extending the feature set.

My insurer does a terrible job of tracking my deductible (burn rate). And there's no integration with HSA/FSA. And no tracking of my recurring expenses like scripts.

In other words, I would LOVE a healthcare themed mint.com.

I've lost track of many of the different doctors I've seen over the years. Is there any practical way for me to get at that kind of information?

I want to do this. I want to give these guys my e-mail address and some basic info and see all of my health data charted out... But I did that with Google Health and it went the way of the dinosaur. IS there a consensus on this web service among the HN community?

Hey, PicnicHealth founder here. We're probably too new to have any kind of a consensus but would love to chat offline about the company (Noga at picnichealth) It shouldn't be much work for you to get things set up.

I spent a lot of time trying to get straight what went wrong with google health and, while there are lots of theories, I'm got convinced that data availability played a big part. That's what's finally changing.

I'm assuming this is HL7v3, if I remember correctly the transmission is only setting a permission on the patient side to allow the primary care physician to transmit the data to a third party, c.q. another physician.

Bribe to Doctors? It put many independents out of business, selling them long held practices to big conglomerates who could afford the software, computers, and the people necessary to get all their records into the new systems.

Just as with the rest of the ACA, this was all about reward those who paid the politicians through contributions. This meant big pharma, hospital/doctor conglomerates, and insurance companies. It certainly wasn't to help the average consumer or their hometown Doctors.

Came here expecting to read about the Supreme Court decision about the stuff companies can refuse their employees...

Regulation doesn't spark anything. It snuffs thing out. Especially when it is touted as a solution to problem created by previous regulations.

I'll remember that while I'm busy trusting that the food I eat and the medicine I take doesn't kill me.

Funny enough, I trust the same thing of the food I eat when I'm visiting countries with no FDA equivalent. It's almost as if the market disincentivizes selling bad food.

And I'm sure you don't trust the same thing of the drugs you take when you're visiting countries with no FDA equivalent. It's probably because the market incentivizes snake oil and counterfeits.

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