By Dr. Peter Alperin, vice president of product, Doximity.
It’s 2020 and doctors are doing house calls again. No, we didn’t step back in time; instead, we’ve moved forward. Rather than a doctor knocking on your home with a stethoscope and wooden tongue depressor in tow, today’s house calls require no face-to-face appointments, only a smartphone with an xfinity internet connection. Telemedicine has arrived.
Telemedicine has fast become an important part of our new-normal, owing to its convenience, as well as the growing need to provide continuity of care to patients with chronic conditions in the face of a global pandemic. Moving forward, there will be a significant number of patients where it will not make sense to have them physically come into a doctor’s office when they can get the same level of care by simply doing a video visit with their physician. This, in part, accounts for the meteoric rise of telehealth.
Moreover, public health researchers have long understood that healthcare outcomes are different across various ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Now, many in the medical community are starting to realize that the broad adoption of telemedicine across the system could be a great “equalizer.” This is particularly true for communities that have historically struggled to access care –remote rural or underserved urban communities. There’s great hope that telemedicine could be one development that helps bridge a persistent divide in outcomes, so long as accessing it is easy and inexpensive for patients.
Despite the many positives, most patients have yet to have their first telemedicine visit. And it’s understandable that some may view telemedicine as a challenge, due to either their lack of confidence with technology or not feeling that they have the resources to connect with their doctor remotely. These concerns are valid but the telemedicine options available today make it a simple and reliable option for the broadest possible number of patients.
As a practicing internist, I’ve conducted many telehealth visits, so I’ve seen the potential for telemedicine directly in my own medical practice. I’ve also had the privilege of helping patients with the basics of getting started with their first telehealth appointment.
Here are five things you can do as a patient to help prepare for your first virtual visit with your doctor:
The technology that has made you stagnant and lazy is the same technology that will help you get back in shape. Today we’ll be learning about the five most innovative health apps that you must use in 2020.
If you have some amazing healthcare app ideas, leave that in the comments.
There exists an old proverb, “Health is the true wealth of a man.” We’ve heard it countless times from our teachers, parents, and our doctor, so much that now we have forgotten the meaning of it. But to remind us of the importance of health comes the very same source that people blame these days for ruining it; smartphones. Thus, healthcare software becomes an integral part of your daily routine.
Just as E=MC2 was not created by Einstein to build an atomic bomb, it was for the growth of humans and not for their destruction. Similarly, smartphones were built for the ease and growth of humanity, but several people have a notion that smartphones are the issue.
The real reason is that they are only looking for such people that have engrossed themselves in the mobile world and lost track of their health. But, you can’t blame a piece of technology for the decisions that you make about your health.
So to prove all those ignorant people wrong, we are here with the list of five most innovative health apps of 2020.
ClotMD
The name of the app itself gives an idea of what the app is related to. This healthcare app idea is concentrated on a niche audience. The ClotMD app connects patients needing anticoagulation medication with their healthcare providers and allows them to communicate in real-time via the medical app.
Besides the means of being the contact source between the patients and the medication providers, there are several other features that the healthcare app offers, such as:
Manage INR Levels
Dosing Calculations
Testing Schedules
Consists of a built-in diet library
Able to manage different dosage levels and schedules
Track your results and share the history with any healthcare professional
Offers real-time alerts regarding the testing schedule and other appointments
Doximity
By using this Doximity healthcare application, users get access to the largest medical professional network, which consists of more than 70% of physicians as members. This healthcare mobile app was developed by the same team that built Epocrates, another marvelous medical app for mobiles.
With Doximity, you can search for doctors with a wide range of filters like location, hospital affiliation, experience, clinical interests, publication, specialty, or language.
Some of the key features of the Doximity app are:
Access to the largest directory of Medical Professionals
Users can send their HIPAA-compliant faxes securely from anywhere
Personalized Medical News & Articles
Annotate your Healthcare Documents Directly in the App
ACT.md
ACT.md is an exceptional healthcare application that offers several tools to allow healthcare service providers to view the complete information of a patient’s requirements and manage them accordingly.
With Act.md, medical professionals can serve each patient with different parameters according to their individual needs and work simultaneously with other medical experts across the healthcare sector.
Guest post by Cassie Phillips, an online security blogger, who writes about the best Internet privacy apps.
Cassie Phillips
App technology is revolutionizing the world. The sudden rise to popularity of the smartphone and tablet has put more power in our hands and more information at our fingertips than ever before. This has opened up a world of opportunities in many different fields, and medicine is no exception to that rule.
For health professionals, the vast quantity of ever-changing knowledge required to do the job properly has always been one of the most trying elements of the work. Now, there are many apps available that allow quick and easy access to a wealth of information at the push of a button. Here are just seven of the many offered.
Medscape
Designed and brought to you by the creators of WebMD, this app has been hailed as one of the best for reference and diagnosis assistance. Available for free download for both Android and iOS, it is an incredible tool with many features including drug identification and information, in depth patient care tutorials, disease and condition referencing and up-to-date medical education courses. This app is a vital medical resource for medical students and professionals alike and has a huge part to play in the electronic modernization of healthcare.
3D4 Medical
This clever piece of software allows you to explore anatomy like never before. With intricate on-screen models of all parts and elements of human anatomy, this is a valuable tool that gives healthcare professionals a chance to take a look inside the body. It’s completely anatomically accurate and uses impressive 3D technology.
Alongside this, it has features to customize body parts and add labels, which makes it a perfect assistant for keeping track of cases. It also offers tutorials and introductory anatomy lessons, which are great for medical students or anyone wanting to refresh their knowledge.
ReferralMD
When working in healthcare, it’s not just the patients that you have to worry about. All treatments come at a cost and as much as many of us would like that not to be the case, it’s a fact that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Trying to balance treatment costs can be a nightmare but ReferralMD is a great app that cuts your budget dramatically through one simple idea—optimizing referral communication. By moving all referrals to this app, a vast amount of money is saved through paper and fax machine expenses. It also ensures immediate processing of the request, which avoids handling costs.
Doximity is the largest medical network with one in three U.S. physicians as members. Physicians use Doximity to instantly connect with other healthcare professionals, securely collaborate on patient treatment, grow their practices and discover new career opportunities.
Its vision is a future where medical communication is effortless — fast, simple, seamless and secure. Its mission is to “help physicians transcend the fragmented U.S. healthcare system and succeed in the care for their patients.”
Doximity was founded by Jeff Tangney, co-founder and former COO of Epocrates (EPOC), and launched in March 2011. Based in Silicon Valley, it’s backed by Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures (now Canvas Fund), Draper Fisher Jurvetson, T. Rowe Price and Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
Here, Alexander Blau, MD, vice president of physician marketing and medical director for Doximity — responsible for marketing and user acquisition teams oversees the development of clinical programs, including a socially curated medical literature filter and case-based discussion forums, manages the aggregation, analysis and product integration of diverse healthcare data in charting the first-ever nationwide clinical expertise map — discusses the company, its future and what he’s seeing from his perch.
Give us the short story on what you do and how you came to health IT?
My background is as an emergency physician. During my training, I was drawn to the latest in mobile health technology and eventually built my own app for medical interpretation. From that moment, I knew I was hooked on health tech. Three years ago, I joined Doximity to join a larger team to develop yet more tools that help doctors practice medicine every day.
Tell me about Doxmity. There’s been some press lately about how it’s really innovating the space. What are you doing that makes for such success? Care to share the secret sauce?
Doximity is the first health tech company really built for physicians — as opposed to hospital administrators, billing departments, etc. In just three years, we’ve grown to be the largest network of verified physicians in the US, thanks to our focus on what doctors truly need from technology. Our focus on doctors is the secret sauce.
What are some of the misconceptions you face? Obstacles you must overcome?
There’s a misconception that physicians aren’t technology savvy, which is absolutely not true. Doctors have been among the earliest adopters of all kinds of communication technologies starting with pagers and the first smart phones. When it comes to social media, doctors are necessarily skeptical about privacy and HIPAA compliance. The great thing is that Doximity is specifically built to address physician privacy requirements and enable them to communicate professionally on the mobile devices they rely on.
By Paresh Sagar, CEO, 
