GARDEN CITY, NY – When Google announced plans in late February to collaborate with Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic on a pilot program to make medical records available online, the news didn’t go unnoticed on New York’s Long Island.
A group of doctors there have been working on just such a program for several years.
Doctations, Inc. last year unveiled DocPatient.com, a Website designed to bring healthcare providers, their patients and service providers together in a secure environment to enter and share information. The five-year-old company aims to be the antithesis of the EMR, offering all services on an outsourced basis through a series of Web browsers.
“With this system, all the data is online,” said Louis Cornacchia III, MD, the company’s president and CEO.
Cornacchia feels that most of the functions of the traditional EMR can be outsourced, including transcription, scheduling and billing. By connecting to a Web-based infrastructure – what he calls a “Web-Integrated Healthcare Community” – doctors can focus on the sharing of medical data with their patients.
Basic services are provided free for patients, and there’s a $9.95-per-year charge for add-ons, including fax-in capability and document sharing. For physicians, the basic fee is $35 per month, with add-ons that can boost that amount to $50.
“The EMR experiment has failed,” said Nicholas Tarricone, a member of Doctations’ Physician Advisory Board, in a press release submitted during last year’s rollout of DocPatient.com. “Forty years after the first EMR software was developed, 85 percent of doctors have voted it down. They simply don’t use it, despite hype, presidential pressure and mandates for its use.”
“Software doesn’t solve problems in and of itself – it catalyzes change,” added Cornacchia. “What we’re doing is presenting doctors with a new business model … that will substantially enhance revenues and improve quality of care (by) allowing them to do what they do best.”
Cornacchia said he’s had more than 70 physicians and 45 patients discuss the Doctations plan in separate advisory groups, and feels the time is right to push it onto the market. More than two-dozen physicians are enrolled at DocPatient.com, he said, and the company is moving to add more functions to the online model as soon as possible.
“As more and more people use (the service), they add to the value of the system just by using it,” he said.