

Today's New Regulation Could Spark a Health Tech Revolution - nogaleviner
https://blog.picnichealth.com/today%27s-new-regulation-could-spark-a-health-tech-revolution/

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specialist
Hi Noga. Forgive me, I'm not understanding. How do I get my health records?

I designed and implemented the backend(s) for 5 regional health exchanges, did
some front end work on our physicians portal, prototyped the patient portal
(shopped around to our clients). I also participated in the competitive NHIN
interop effort (we were a sub on the Northrup Grumman team). If you've seen
the Mirth stack, my stuff was roughly the same (at the time).

Every participant in our exchange (hospitals, labs, scripts, clinics,
insurers) jealously guarded their data, hoping to monetize it.

Maybe the scope of "meaningful use" has expanded, but when it started it was
just a dozen or so fields. (The phrase "meaningful use" seemed to be an
example of unintentional irony.)

I can't gleen your business model. And unless you have data access / sharing
agreements, I don't see how you can get my records. (I'm a few years out of
date, so maybe things have changed.)

If you were creating a "white label" patient portal for your customers (e.g.
hospitals) to implement, that'd be cool.

If you were kickstarting a lobbying group to empower patients with access to
their own data, I'd definitely contribute.

~~~
nogaleviner
Think mint.com for medical records. Literally. We help patients find their
patient portals. We credential them in (just like mint) with username and
password, providing a tool that pulls their data out. We normalize it and
display in a meaningful way. Then we go back to the hacky solution of
automating e-faxing back out to keep other doctors in the loop.

It's definitely nuts that this would be the solution, but I don't think we can
wait for HIEs or for someone to get data access/sharing agreements for exactly
the reason you state. Every player is jealously guarding their data.

You're right that we don't get the complete record, but whats in there is
actually pretty rich.

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mazimi
Mint.com helps me with financial planning and budgeting. What does access to
my medical records help me with? As a patient, does access to historical lab
values provide me with actionable information or are the latest results,
communicated to me by my physician more valuable? Do you use a predictive
model to provide the patient with a health forecast (ie.
[https://archimedesmodel.com/indigo](https://archimedesmodel.com/indigo), they
have an API)?

I check my Mint.com account regularly, what would drive me to check my Picnic
account regularly?

~~~
vpontis
Hi Mazimi, I'm Victor and working as an engineer at Picnic this summer.

At first we are targeting patients with chronic illnesses. These patients
often see doctors in different systems and are not able to view all of their
medical information in one place. Picnic will consolidate their data and
provide it in an easy to view fashion.

Focusing on patients with chronic illnesses will also help us give meaning to
the data. We have a doctor on the team who is categorizing all of the tests as
per different conditions and explaining how certain key tests are relevant to
your condition. With the explanation, the tests gain meaning and you can see
how your health is faring over time.

In the future, we will want to extend these explanations and information to
healthy patients to give everyone insight into their health.

As for archimedesmodel, at this point we are not looking at giving health
forecasts. We want Picnic to be a tool that clearly shows data to the patient
and allows them to have a more productive conversation with their doctors. In
the future we may consider extending the feature set.

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abstractbill
I've lost track of many of the different doctors I've seen over the years. Is
there any practical way for me to get at that kind of information?

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Einstalbert
I want to do this. I want to give these guys my e-mail address and some basic
info and see all of my health data charted out... But I did that with Google
Health and it went the way of the dinosaur. IS there a consensus on this web
service among the HN community?

~~~
nogaleviner
Hey, PicnicHealth founder here. We're probably too new to have any kind of a
consensus but would love to chat offline about the company (Noga at
picnichealth) It shouldn't be much work for you to get things set up.

I spent a lot of time trying to get straight what went wrong with google
health and, while there are lots of theories, I'm got convinced that data
availability played a big part. That's what's finally changing.

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webhat
I'm assuming this is HL7v3, if I remember correctly the transmission is only
setting a permission on the patient side to allow the primary care physician
to transmit the data to a third party, c.q. another physician.

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Shivetya
Bribe to Doctors? It put many independents out of business, selling them long
held practices to big conglomerates who could afford the software, computers,
and the people necessary to get all their records into the new systems.

Just as with the rest of the ACA, this was all about reward those who paid the
politicians through contributions. This meant big pharma, hospital/doctor
conglomerates, and insurance companies. It certainly wasn't to help the
average consumer or their hometown Doctors.

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pierlux
Came here expecting to read about the Supreme Court decision about the stuff
companies can refuse their employees...

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sunshinerag
Regulation doesn't spark anything. It snuffs thing out. Especially when it is
touted as a solution to problem created by previous regulations.

~~~
pessimizer
I'll remember that while I'm busy trusting that the food I eat and the
medicine I take doesn't kill me.

~~~
wyager
Funny enough, I trust the same thing of the food I eat when I'm visiting
countries with no FDA equivalent. It's almost as if the market disincentivizes
selling bad food.

~~~
pessimizer
And I'm sure you don't trust the same thing of the drugs you take when you're
visiting countries with no FDA equivalent. It's probably because the market
incentivizes snake oil and counterfeits.

