Computer battles doctor's clipboard
Published Monday May 25th, 2009
Idea Machine helps automate check-in at offices, hospitals
OTTAWA - - A former Carleton University liberal arts student's simple idea is creating jobs in Ottawa and working to get North American doctors to throw their clipboards in the trash.
The company, called Phreesia Inc., produces a clipboard-sized tablet-computer (dubbed the Phreesia Pad) with a built-in health card reader to automate the check-in process at doctors' offices and hospitals. Using it frees up staff members to attend to patients rather than data entry tasks.
While the company, which is headquartered in New York, has no Canadian sales yet, more than 5,000 physicians in the U.S. are using Phreesia's technology. The company expects that number to hit 10,000 by the end of 2009.
"There was a real need in the health-care industry to change the way people checked in," said Chaim Indig, Phreesia's chief executive. "Our biggest competitor is the clipboard. We are fighting it tooth and nail everyday."
To help with the company's expansion plans, Phreesia will nearly double its Ottawa workforce to 100 employees by the end of this year. It employs 49 people at its New York City site, which was picked as head office to be closer to Phreesia's investors and primary client base.
The company's Ottawa operation deals with everything from research and development to sales and technical support.
Indig is originally from Edmonton. He dropped out of Carleton's liberal arts program three credits shy of a degree to co-found Phreesia in 2004 after realizing how inefficient the check-in procedure was at a local health clinic.
The patients were each given a form which asked generic questions that might or might not apply to individual situations. The patients filled out the forms and handed them to a staff member, who then had to copy that information into a database. There was no reason why the information couldn't have been input by the patient using modern technology, says Indig.
Out of that simple concept, a company was born.
He says with a Phreesia Pad, doctors can ask patients more detailed information, helping them to gather the clues they need to make a diagnosis. Questionnaires can be tailored based on a patient's age, sex or previous health problems and all of that information can be immediately uploaded for the physician to review.
"Patients can take a more active role in their health care," said Indig. "Instead of sitting around reading a magazine, you are answering questions that will help improve your outcome."
Phreesia's medical system costs a doctor's office $50 per year. The company makes its money on advertisements and health-care information videos that patients can choose to watch after they finish filling out their electronic forms.
Indig said the videos are much like the brochures commonly found in doctor's offices. The videos on the Phreesia pad will be individually targeted, based on a person's responses to their health questionnaire, from sources including government health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or biotech firms.
Allowing businesses to have direct access to patients has stirred some controversy among U.S. physicians. Some doctors worry about having pharmaceutical companies recommend products they may not recommend to patients themselves. "I'd love to have a waiting-room kiosk or webpad that keyed into our electronic health records for patient check-in. It would free up our front office staff," Tammi Schlichtemeier, a pediatrician in Coppell, Texas, said in the November 2006 edition of the trade journal Medical Economics. "However, it would be frustrating trying to explain why the device in my waiting room suggests one thing while I'm recommending something else."
Indig says the videos shown to patients are meant to be strictly educational.
Also, he said Phreesia does not collect or store any of the information that patients enter on its technology.
Phreesia is a privately held company and does not discuss sales or subscription rates.
However, Indig said the company's list of participating doctors increases by about 10 per cent every month.
The company has raised more than US$25 million in venture capital.
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