Building a Culture of Trust in Digital Medicine
With the news of Amazon’s Alexa, most often used via its Echo device, earning HIPAA compliance, voices were immediately polarized. Some were excited for the convenience and learning ability of voice-enabled monitoring and care, others were mortified at the thought.
Our level of trust in the Age of Misinformation and insecurity, and the nearly cavalier nature of data sharing from both individuals and businesses has rightly been shaken. Nearly everyone is second guessing both the quality and quantity of information they share via digital mediums, whether from Apple’s iMessage, Facebook’s Messenger, or Twitter’s newsfeed. Recent information breaches may portend a downturn in a post-Recession technology industry otherwise fueled by companies that leveraged the power of trust to grow virally — Dropbox, Uber, Airbnb — particularly as many giants tiptoe into health care. In fact, over the last year, tabulated by Rock Health below, the public has been less willing to share information with the industry than in prior years.
We value patient and clinician trust, security, and welfare above all else, and we believe any health care company should feel the same. Our data transfer and storage is encrypted and HIPAA-compliant, and we work closely with our partner health system information technology staff to maintain the highest standards of privacy and security prior to launch.
However; we believe that when done well and done right, digital mediums have the potential to channel trust from an incredibly intimate setting, the clinic exam room, to the homes of patients across the globe.
Dr. Clement Bottino, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, serves as a source of inspiration for our mission and our vision for the future of health care. Dr. Bottino sent 2000 text messages to his patients last year, much to their delight. These exchanges ranged from photos of swollen gum to babies taking their first steps to turkey GIFs on Thanksgiving. This puts his patients’ and their family’s minds at ease and reduces unnecessary ED visits. When you ease patients into technology-enabled services, wielded by a hand they know and trust, some of the best experiences in traditional consumer technology can make their way into the practice of health care. Public health researchers at Columbia University found that patients have even been more willing to share medical concerns and frustrations with their phones over people, simply for fear of judgment by the latter and the ironic comfort of confiding in a faceless app.
Perhaps bridging Dr. Bottino’s initiative — increasing the number of touchpoints with his patients to foster transparency and compassion — with software to make this quality of care feasible for clinics everywhere, would strengthen patients’ trust in both our health care system and the people that work on the front lines and behind the scenes every day to do their best for patients.
A new text flashes across my phone: “Simon is screaming.” It’s Saturday, 9:13 p.m. My kids are fast asleep and I’m out with my dog. I open the full message: “Hi Dr. Bottino. Simon is screaming. He has a red bum. What do you recommend? I reply: “Hi, how’s he doing besides the red bum?”
While we can’t quite replicate Dr. Bottino’s commitment and compassion to his patients for all who need it, our team strives to bring the attention, interactivity, and comfort for patients that was previously held in a handful of trailblazing physicians into forward-thinking clinics across the country and the world.
Memora Health is building the operating system for care delivery that implements intelligent, streamlined workflows and revolutionizes the patient experience outside the care setting. We offer a smart end-to-end platform that unifies fragmented health care data to enable providers, payors, and life science companies to automate care delivery operations — from patient communication to documentation to reimbursement. We uniquely use artificial intelligence to digitize existing care delivery workflows, giving clinicians infrastructure that learns from every encounter they have. Memora supports a full suite of virtual care systems from automated patient intake and scheduling to remote monitoring and care pathways to billing and documentation. Memora is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Kevin Durant, Martin Ventures, and several healthcare strategic groups.
Reach out at info@memorahealth.com, we’d love to work together.
