
Medisas (YC W13), A Company That Saves People's Lives - jakek
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alextaub/2014/04/24/meet-medisas-the-company-that-saves-peoples-lives/
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hga
How can doing this in purely in "the cloud", "the web", possibly be a good
idea?

Yes, there's a real problem this is solving ... until a shift change happens
at the same time the hospital's Internet connection is down. Surely you could
put a small, generic machine or two running your own software on the
hospital's net that does the local work, or takes over if the Internet
connection is down, etc.

Or do you depend on cell phone tech as a backup for the hospitals? In that
case, the infrastructure at your end had best have some serious redundancy ...
which is fortunately fairly easy and not that expensive to arrange nowadays.

Why I'm obsessing on this detail, besides normally rock solid AT&T have a long
outage that might have covered our entire town or more yesterday? I live in
tornado country, and know how easily services can get knocked out by weather
of all sorts. Here's an extreme case I avoided by luck and preparation:
[http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-
mode-...](http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-
may-22-2011-joplin.html)

~~~
cliveowen
When it come to the sad state of technology in hospitals, any improvement is
better than the current state of things. Sure, this is the kind of software
that would really benefit from redundancy and a waterproof disaster-recovery
plan, but the main thing here is that someone tried and actually managed to
make a dent into a very real problem in the industry. This is a small step in
what I hope will be a near-term future for better healthcare. You have to
start somewhere.

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hga
I don't think I've communicated clearly:

Bad paper handoffs beat no handoffs at all, or I suppose ad hoc last minute
verbal ones, if this system is dead due to a transient communications outage.

Do you disagree with this point?

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webjprgm
Existing electronic health record (EHR) systems already have to deal with
this.

The ones I am most familiar with have on-site data centers, so it's not purely
in "the cloud" but you can have webapps running from on-site servers and call
them "cloud" systems if you want.

The existing systems have ways for printing out important data from a
redundant computer system to hand out paper copies if the user workstations,
network, or servers are down. I don't know what they would do if there was no
electricity anywhere, but I assume hospitals could use their backup generators
for this since medical equipment also needs electricity.

~~~
hga
Hospitals tend to have specially provisioned power from the local electric
company to minimize the change they'll have to use generators, which I assume
are universally in place, although you can't always depend on them, e.g.
Charity Hospital in New Orleans (a place where my mother worked in the '50s)
only suffered a flooded basement during Katrina ... but of course that was
were the generators were.

See my other comment for how this company sure doesn't seem to be telling
hospital IT departments that they've got on side redundancy.

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freehunter
As a Midwesterner, when I hear about medical tech companies saving people's
lives, I immediately think of Epic based out of Madison WI. Is Medisas going
to be going toe-to-toe with Epic? Epic is one of the very few Midwestern
companies that I can liken to what I hear about the silicon valley mindset:
Don't hire anyone over 30, don't ask about work/life balance, and you can't
have the day off because _we 're saving lives, dammit!_

It's really weird knowing and hearing about companies and products you never
knowingly interact with.

~~~
webjprgm
It sounds like Medisas is solving only a single problem while Epic, Cerner,
etc. are larger solutions for the bulk of health record tasks.

I would be more interested to know whether Medisas will integrate with these
existing enterprise systems or be an independent source of information. In
terms of Medisas's long-term plans, could Epic, Cerner, etc. just add this
same feature to their software and wipe out Medisas's market?

~~~
freehunter
Yeah the article talks about Medisas doing one thing, but it's hard for a
successful company to continue doing one thing forever. Eventually, it's
likely they will branch out.

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samstave
We built a similar service in 2009 and applied to YC with it... but it was HL7
agnostic and ran an appliance in the hospital connecting to various EMRs and
other components...

We were too early - this was on the first iphone and touch (pre-ipad)

We were bloked by the big EMRs and various other "too-early" nay-sayers (the
average age of a nurse is quite high, and at the time - they thought there was
no way they coud interact with a screen as small as an iphone)

Here's to hoping that medesis can succeed, and that this ideas time has
come....

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wehadfun
This is a management problem first. A technical problem second. There are
plenty of companies that run 24/7/365 that have people taking over others task
without making the amount of mistakes found in the medical profession.

