Doctors Have Been Slow to Apply the Internet, but Some OC Firms Are Trying to Change That
As the co-founder of his own web-based business, Irvine doctor Dennis Lee has as much Internet savvy as any up-and-coming dot-com entrepreneur. So why does he have to wait 15 minutes on the phone to make an appointment for his father,with another doctor in his own office?
“We’re still mired in old, old systems,” says Lee, a practicing gastroenterologist and co-founder of MedicineNet.com, a 4-year-old web site hub featuring articles written by doctors, an online pharmacy and other information.
Breakthrough technologies have transformed the treatment of everything from nearsightedness to cancer, but when it comes to things like billing and record keeping, the medical industry can be downright archaic.
Not that some Orange County companies aren’t trying to change the situation.
Everyone from healthcare portal sites to online pharmacies are vying to leverage the Internet to cut costs, improve customer service and bring the medical industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Due to a mountain of government regulations and nagging concerns about patient privacy, the medical profession has been far slower than other industries in adopting the Internet or other digital advances.
“Doctors in general are conservative; we’re very busy seeing patients and preoccupied adapting to changes in the regulatory and insurance environments,” Lee said.
Lee’s venture is one of several attempts by OC startups to generate money by making high-end medical information accessible to the masses. He says his site and others like it are slowly changing the way the medical industry does business.
“If you think about it, medicine is really an information industry,” he says. “We generate billions of pieces of information, whether it’s how a procedure was done on a patient to biopsy results. The question is how can we share the information efficiently? The Internet is the answer.”
Few agree more than Lee Greene, co-founder of uScope.com, a company that allows doctors and patients to get second opinions on tests by sending pictures and standardized analysis of specimens over the Internet and connecting doctors with robotic microscopes hundreds of miles away. Doing the same things the old-fashioned way usually required mounds of paperwork, the expense of overnight shipping and, most importantly, precious time. The idea sprouted when Greene, an Internet consultant, met Anne Light, chairman of OC’s Empire Pathology Medical Group.
“The Internet presents a great opportunity to decrease costs,” says Greene, who estimates that telepathology services such as uScope can shave 40% off the cost of a typical procedure. In an era of managed care and concerns about mounting healthcare costs, that savings becomes especially crucial, Greene says.
The company also hopes to capture a piece of the not-so-exotic e-commerce market by providing medical news and selling medical equipment.
Alteer Corp., Irvine, is working on the customer-service side of the industry with a system that manages the workflow of medical offices and stores paper documents electronically. The system, which promises to cut 20% out of typical administrative costs, routes patient e-mail to the appropriate staff member, allows one-click access to patient records and allows doctors to order prescriptions online.
“Physicians are going to have to adopt the technology and the Internet,” says Charlie Hearn, the company’s chief executive. “The cascading effect of the finances within healthcare start with the physician’s encounter with the patient.”
Still, even Hearn acknowledges the reality that most medical offices will use paper for years. The company’s system can integrate plain old telephones and fax machines and offers the system as an application service provider (ASP) type of service, managing the computer and software on its own facilities and allowing the doctors to access the system remotely over high-speed data connections. As more doctors begin to see the systems as a cost-cutting method rather than a huge upfront capital investment, medical practices will catch up with other industries in how they leverage technology, Hearn says.
“There will be radical changes over the next three to four years,” he says.
The TriZetto Group is a Newport Beach startup that also offers ASP-type services for the medical industry. While other industries are adopting the ASP model, officals with the company it seems especially suited to medicine.
But not everyone is so sure the industry will embrace the Internet any time soon.
David Anast, editor, publisher and CEO of the Costa Mesa-based Biomedical Industry Newsletter, says consumers shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for the type of online services that have become standard in other industries.
“An average Joe Citizen is not going to be able to check his medical records online. That just won’t happen any time soon,” he says. “It’s a very dangerous area as far as potential screw-ups are concerned.”
While he believes the medical field will see a lot of Internet-related activity,particularly in traditional medical firms buying up Internet companies to boost their technological savvy, not to mention their stocks,he doubts it will result in dramatic changes. And many of the acquisitions will have difficulty merging the cultures of decades-old medical companies with Internet upstarts.
“That’s one major negative that companies all too often ignore,or ignore on purpose,” Anast says. n
