Skip to main content

Yay. Another Physician Satisfaction Survey.

Business Week magazine profiles a physician who'll leave his stethoscope at home, but regards his iPhone as mission-critical;
"Apple's (AAPL) iPhone has become a critical tool for saving time and improving the quality of the care Diamond provides, particularly when he's with patients, he says. Of 22 applications Diamond has installed on his iPhone, 10 are health related. The most important, he says, is Epocrates Essentials, which lets him quickly check for drug interactions, look up disease symptoms, and find out what lab tests he might need to order. "I don't have everything I need to know memorized," Diamond says. "This makes me look like I do."

"...Diamond's experience shows that using the iPhone in a medical setting doesn't have to be a complicated, expensive proposition. With the exception of Epocrates—which costs $149 a year, or $249 for two years—all of Diamond's medical applications were either free or cost less than $5 to install. Using them saves him about an hour per working day. That's a pretty big savings for a professional who can see four or five patients an hour. "I work until 2 p.m. every day just to cover my overhead costs," he says. "Getting an extra hour is huge."
An extra hour in every work day. How many hospitals can say their elaborate medical staff satisfaction surveys and expensive physician sales teams offer as much benefit? Maybe it's time to stop asking physicians if they're satisfied and just give them what we all want: more time in each day. Inevitably, satisfaction follows.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Simplicity From Complexity

Health care planners typically juggle many different services and businesses, each with unique customers, competitors and prospects.  The complexity can be overwhelming.  So-called portfolio models for assessing industry attractiveness and competitive strength can be a good analytical jumping-off point, including the McKinsey-GE 9-box matrix . (Click on the "Launch Interactive" link.)
Post a Comment
Read more

5 Marketing Megatrends

Coming to a brand near you, from Adam Kleinberg at iMedia Connection, here are " 5 marketing megatrends you can't ignore ." Mass collaboration... Constant connectivity... Globalization... Pervasive distrust in big corporations... A global sense of urgency... #4 is, I think, under-appreciated in health care. Doctors and hospitals like to think of themselves as the last of the white hat-wearing good guys, and maybe they are. But trust is a funny thing - built over decades and lost overnight. Screw it up and watch the laser beam of populist rage move from Wall Street to Medical Avenue.
Post a Comment
Read more