Patient-physician relationship
Bing Health’s new additions make it a legitimate alternative to WebMD and Wikipedia for healthcare
Surely by now you have heard of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Microsoft has been heavily advertising Bing through TV commercials, content deals, and even offering cash back deals via major vendors such as Best Buy, Walmart, and others. A few days ago Microsoft announced an upgrade to its Bing Health experience that medical professionals should definitely take note of – it could change the current landscape of how medical content is accessed and shared with patients.
What makes Bing Health’s experience so valuable is they aggregate data, much like Wikipedia does, but only from legitimate medical sources. Later in this article I’ll go through an example using sarcoidosis as the search term and compare it to Wikipedia and WebMD – then explain how the data can be used with patients.
ZocDoc Lets Patients Find a Doctor and Make an Appointment in One Easy Step – An OpenTable for Doctors
This clever and disruptive web service – and the perfect companion to an electronic health record that includes practice management tools – started in September 2007. Unfortunately I have met very few doctors who have heard of it. This company started by connecting New York dentists with open appointments to unattached patients trying to schedule a checkup, but has since expanded to include primary care, pediatrics dermatology, ophthalmology, ENT, orthopedics and several other specialties in New York City, Washington DC and San Francisco. In this sense, they have followed the model of Yelp, a recommendation provider for local commerce, by building the service one city at a time, instead of launching widely and taking a bigger risk of failing. But as more sophisticated electronic health records proliferate, physicians will definitely want to keep an eye on this service.
The value of the site is easily understood, especially if you have an electronic health record/practice management system. You, the patient, need to see a pediatrician or an orthopedic surgeon. If you search for doctors on-line or in the Yellow Pages (do they still print those?), you will be assaulted with dozens of names and offices in every specialty. After that, you still need to telephone each doctor’s office and request an appointment, preferably at a time that is convenient for you. And then, you get put on hold. ZocDoc changes all of that and for the better.
How the Apple Tablet (iPad) Could Transform the Way Patients Experience Healthcare
As the debut of the iPad fast approaches, speculation about it is reaching a fevered pitch. Scanning the thousands of articles written about the iPad’s potential, one may walk away thinking that Steve Jobs has just cured cancer, ended global warming, and established peace in the Middle East. Some people are even calling Apple’s latest creation the “Jesus tablet.” While the iPad probably falls somewhere short of some of those lofty projections, it has already done what Apple seems to do best – transformed the way we look at an existing market, in this case mobile computing and the tablet. We’ve talked previously about how the iPhone paved the way for the iPad in healthcare. Again, Apple’s entry into this market has signaled a huge shift in the way users will interact with the tablet and, through it, their environment. This new user interface has a great deal of potential to change the way physicians deliver care. But perhaps more importantly, it could also have profound impacts on the way patients experience healthcare.
