Mobile health company MD Interconnect is developing a physician communication app to connect outpatient and inpatient networks. It has raised a new round of funding to advance product development and to support the roll out of its app across WakeMed Health & Hospitals System as part of a beta test.
In a phone interview with Co-founders Karen Hohenstein, the CEO, and Dr. David Hoover, the medical adviser and a pediatric surgeon with WakeMed, they talked about what distinguishes it from other companies responding to the rise of pager hate in healthcare.
The friends and family round raised more than the $200,000 listed in the Form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but it is part of a larger fundraise of under $1 million, said Hohenstein.
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Hohenstein said it wanted to address the frustration that physicians feel when they are routed through call centers to find out who is on call at a given time. Its app integrates call center data to make it easier for physicians to know who is on call. It also helps guide primary care physicians as to which physician they should refer the patient to, depending on their network, with an eye to avoiding leakage.
“The fact that [our app] is developed by and for physicians brings a unique perspective and helps with usability,” Hohenstein said.
She noted that instead of a per user per month fee that rival companies tend to charge, MD Interconnect charges a flat fee and annual maintenance fee roughly correlated to the size of the hospital.
In addition to its iPhone and Android apps, there’s also a version for desktops aimed at nurses stations.
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Hoover noted that primary care physicians are frequently unfamiliar with the physicians at a hospital and its app offers a useful way to guide them to the best person to communicate with in a particular specialty. It is intended to be “highly customizable on a practice level and individual level, Hoover said.
Although he acknowledged that it faces competition from several companies responding to the anti-pager trend in healthcare, Hoover contended that market penetration by these companies was not significant because they are not physician friendly enough. From his perspective, rivals simply do not do enough to make physicians lives easier.
He likened it to the integration of electronic health records into healthcare. Although he can see the benefits, such as with population health, on a day-to-day basis, “EHRs have not made our lives easier — it’s more difficult to take care of patients than it used to be,” Hoover said. “If you can’t get doctors to adopt your technology because it doesn’t make their lives easier, they will go back to text messaging or pagers.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4FD4eavOsI
