The global medical care system desperately needs a transformation.  One recent solution is to replace in-hospital activities for patients with digital care solutions.  

Because provider-supplied digital health solutions are generally not user-friendly there is an opportunity for external digital health companies.  Early entrants offer external medical advice via telehealth.  Recent players such as Sword Health and Hinge have replaced other in-hospital activities – therapies in particular.  These solutions are generally SaaS-based, some with devices but mostly without.  They exist outside – almost parallel to – the EHRs, offering a growing array of unique services that are already starting to transform healthcare. 

Success comes if the digital product is easily implemented by clinics, if it can be simply onboarded by patients, and it is something that patients want to use.  Equally important, clinicians must have a strong incentive to provide this service to patients.

My company PatientApps has a digital health solution that meets those four conditions.  We have a Digital Care product that quickly improves surgery clinic performance more than any other product.  We accomplish this by replacing most PeriOp and other clinical activities with curated apps, improving them in the process. 

The clinical impact is rapid: telephone calls down 60%, pre and post visits down 45%, reduced length of patient sessions ~30 minutes, more procedures, and much happier staff, surgeons AND patients.  This data is corroborated by the results published by two other international companies in this space.

We now cover about 85% of all significant surgeries and procedures, in multiple languages. Four years of clinical testing with thousands of patients has produced rave reviews.  Most of our authors and users are Harvard Medical School professors - so, we have curated content.

We are in that “sweet spot” where both patient pull and provider push exist.  Having established that bond, our solution can be expanded to contain a myriad of other services: diagnosis, administrative, home-care interaction and care delivery, enhanced symptom triage, and pharmaceutical.  QED, we hope.