The next great mHealth innovation might not be an electronic health record platform, but a product that sits outside the box and pulls out the information that clinicians need at the point of care.
As doctors and nurses grapple with legacy EHRs that are too big and clunky, companies like Boston-based QPID Health are coming into the market with tools that gather unstructured data and give it some substance. They're capitalizing on reams of data that are coming into the healthcare enterprise from all angles – EHRs, health information exchanges, even home-based platforms and devices – and looking to make it meaningful.
"Most of the records in an EHR are unstructured," said Mike Doyle, QPID's CEO, who developed the technology over the past nine years in collaboration with the likes of Partners HealthCare, Brigham and Women's and Mass. General Hospital before buying the platform from Partners in 2012.
"A lot of that information in the record won't ever see the light of day, and so the (clinician) is getting an incomplete record when seeing a patient," Doyle added. "We're looking to bring meaning to the point of care."
QPID isn't the first company to come along promising to translate the EHR into a mobile meaningful tool for doctors and nurses, but it is indicative of the next wave of mHealth evolution. Forget collecting data – that's been done, and is being done by thousands of different devices and platforms. In fact, many clinicians are finding that they have far more data than they need, and are wasting time sorting through it to locate the nuggets of value.
It's an issue that's finding some play on Capitol Hill as well. According to Politico, a recent analysis by MedStar's National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare of some 62 EHR vendors certified by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT found that a full 25 percent hadn't tested their product with physicians and 10 percent hadn't tested their product with any clinicians at all. That calls into question whether the ONC is certifying EHRs that clinicians have no use for, and driving down adoption of tools and platforms that actually are working.
Enter the analytics tools that can pore over the entire medical record, find those nuggets and turn them into a pot of gold. That's where mHealth companies are finding their niche, especially as clinicians demand actionable information at the point of care, whether it's in the operating room or out in some remote clinic.
"Think of the vast knowledge that an EHR contains, but it's all noise," said Doyle, whose company recently made news for fashioning an app (called a Q-Guide) that helps ER clinicians determine if a patient has the Ebola virus or is at a higher-than-normal risk of catching it. "We're really focused on mining the record for clinical intelligence that makes a difference."
When the electronic medical record first burst onto the scene so many years ago, Doyle said, it was designed as a financial platform that doctors and nurses could use to provide a clear audit trail for billing. Clinical uses for EHRs came about later, but were forced to wade through a sea of applications – some complementary, some competing – to catch the clinician's attention.
Now those records are going mobile, accessible on smartphones, tablets and laptops as healthcare providers take their work out of the office.
The key to products like QPID is that they're agnostic, able to sit on top of any EHR and pull out the necessary data. They also need to be malleable, so that a clinician or department can program the tool to draw the right data.
Doyle called QPID "a mature product with a chassis that allows for innovation," and he expects to be constantly revising and improving (hence the Ebola app).
That could be the key to any health provider's heart.
