10 ms·

Drchrono (YC W11) raises $2.8 Million for iPad Health Record Platform

94 points by Skeletor 15y ago

Skeletor 15y ago
Also covered on techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/drchrono-raises-2-8m-from-yuri-milner-and-others-to-help-bring-medical-records-to-the-ipad/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/drchrono-raises-2-8m-from-y...
- chubs 15y ago
  Keep up the good work. Wow - i just read all the comments here - there's a lot of 'can't be done' negativity. All that means is that you'll have few competitors. To be honest, i'm thinking of not bothering reading HN comments any more. Keep making a difference - if you guys succeed in improving the efficiency of US hospitals, that's something MAJOR to be proud of :)
Nat0 15y ago
I am very excited to see what Drchrono will do in the medical field. The industry is overdue for a smart company to come in and innovate. I don't have any hands on experience with the app yet, but it seems to address one of the biggest hurdles to adoption, the physicians' reluctance to learn/use the cumbersome interfaces of the existing systems.
leak 15y ago
Healthcare is less about these cool technologies and more about how do they devices and software interfaces get access to the patient data. I worked at a startup that launched a tablet application back in 2005 for healthcare professionals to interface with patient records while walking around the hospital. Building the software was and still is the "easy" part. Getting IT to give you access to patient data is the extremely difficult part. It takes literally years. Lots of proprietary stuff that is very hard to get into. Maybe Drchrono is tackling small doctors offices and it might be easier but trying to get into major hospitals is another story. I wish them luck either way.
- Skeletor 15y ago
  We are going to change healthcare from the ground-up. Small 1-10 doctor practices can easily make the decision to completely move to a new solution like drchrono. Once you get every private practice doctor using better tools, you can start banging on the gates of the hospitals to let you in and adopt new technology. It's similar to how Salesforce.com started with small businesses and eventually broke into enterprise sales from the bottom up.
  - leak 15y ago
    Good luck with that.
  - baran 15y ago
    The problem is Epic has effectively locked-in the top end of the market. Their strategy, which is brilliant, is to only go after the biggest, most well-known clients (I know nothing groundbreaking, but it works). They say they only focus on whales, academics, and children (hospitals). Due to this, they have been able to capture 265 of the most prestigious hospitals in the country (and soon in the world). With the lock-in they have, I can't see them giving up this market. It would take a lot to justify replacing that half a billion dollar system for someone else, especially after the hell the administrators have gone through to get the systems up in the first place. Also, in many ways Epic is becoming the de-facto standard, which is leading to network effects that would have to be broken down. I don't think you can fight Epic at their game and win. Added to that they will likely begin to move downstream (recently heard a rev. projection $8.4B in 2016, up from $1.2B today) as the mid-size players would love to have an Epic install if only to mimic the respected healthcare organizations. The most secure place from Epic is the small practices. The IT/intemplmentation/costs requirements of Epic are far too high, in its current form, to sell to them. The problem becomes selling. It recently talked with a VP of Sales at a HIT vendor and he said of 10 hours spent selling a doctor, 9 hours are spent trying to get a hold of him. Difficult.
    - Skeletor 15y ago
      That's the exact way the market looked to Salesforce.com when Seibel system only went after large markets and told their salesforce to "run" not "walk" away from smaller customers. Salesforce.com definitely killed Seibel in the enterprise space after building a better product with feedback from smaller sales forces.
Kadrith 15y ago
How is this iPad app any different from what Canto provides from Epic for physicians and MyChart for patients? Disclaimer: Where I work we use Epic as our EMR and have been on it since 2005.
- Skeletor 15y ago
  For starters, drchrono offers a completely free version (in a freemium model) with the free version being a full EMR that qualifies doctors for $44,000 from Medicare in Meaningful Use incentives. drchrono has also been building on the iPad exclusively since the iPad was first launched in April of 2010 (much longer than any other company). So drchrono on the iPad is more advanced with features like realtime speech to text, customized templates, and automatic note generation and billing features that have evolved over the last 2 years.
csallen 15y ago
Congrats guys, awesome!
gshayban 15y ago
Exciting, inevitable news. Healthcare needs a shakeup. How does drchrono interoperate with medical systems? Other than SureScripts. Does it support regional labs or just LabCorp/Quest? Disclaimer: I am writing a modern interface engine.
blasdel 15y ago
Is the screen capture used in the announcement an "I didn't know I was pregnant" joke?
zmmmmm 15y ago
I looked into Drchrono when I was looking for work last year. I turned away because I found the iPad-centric strategy obnoxious and short sighted. The iPad is a wonderful device, but any company that builds their entire strategy around their love of a device has dangerously blurred vision and a horrible risk (one adverse decision from Apple you're done). Besides which, the last thing healthcare needs is more walled gardens and information silos.
- naner 15y ago
  iPad-centric strategy obnoxious and short sighted I agree that this is short-sighted. I have worked in the Healthcare field and am also related to a couple Doctors who built their own private practice. All the software they use for medical records is buggy as hell and extremely outdated. (Technically the software is updated frequently but it looks like something out of 1998.) An iPad-only (or any tablet) interface, however, would be a non-starter for every practice I've worked with. It would be a great supplemental device for some situations, though.
- brudgers 15y ago
  The biggest issue I see is Apple's approach to legacy operating system versions - typically three years at best - and no ability to purchase old versions. This makes standardization of the platform difficult - i.e. purchasing new devices for replacement or growth may mean different hardware and different software. On top of that, Apple has a tendency to change development requirements and to require updates to existing apps to meet the latest standards. In short, Apple's ecosystem in general is not conducive to the needs of businesses, and the iOS ecosystem in particular is entirely intended to be consumer facing.
taurussai 15y ago
Congratulations! If private practices are willing to use Ipads and meet some of the criteria for the $44k, why not then? Was at a recent healthcare event and met a random med student from John Hopkins, enquired about the exact same problem and a solution that his advisor was asking him to build. Question though - if doctors are already using something for EMRs how will drchrono convince them to switch?
- Kadrith 15y ago
  I don't think that is their target market right now. There is a land rush on for people that do not have an EMR and do not want to join with a larger facility that already has an EMR.
  - taurussai 15y ago
    Sorry I didn't see this earlier. We are actually working on making HIPAA compliance easy in the cloud by providing a platform where developers can easily encrypt/track/audit their data and establish compliance to auditors. We plan to do this using a custom-built stack + a centralized management console. Do you have any feedback on something like this, or would it be okay if I could contact you offline? My email is in my profile. Thanks

94 points by Skeletor 15y ago

Also covered on techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/drchrono-raises-2-8m-from-yuri-milner-and-others-to-help-bring-medical-records-to-the-ipad/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/drchrono-raises-2-8m-from-y...

chubs 15y ago
Keep up the good work. Wow - i just read all the comments here - there's a lot of 'can't be done' negativity. All that means is that you'll have few competitors. To be honest, i'm thinking of not bothering reading HN comments any more. Keep making a difference - if you guys succeed in improving the efficiency of US hospitals, that's something MAJOR to be proud of :)

Nat0 15y ago

I am very excited to see what Drchrono will do in the medical field. The industry is overdue for a smart company to come in and innovate. I don't have any hands on experience with the app yet, but it seems to address one of the biggest hurdles to adoption, the physicians' reluctance to learn/use the cumbersome interfaces of the existing systems.

leak 15y ago

Healthcare is less about these cool technologies and more about how do they devices and software interfaces get access to the patient data. I worked at a startup that launched a tablet application back in 2005 for healthcare professionals to interface with patient records while walking around the hospital. Building the software was and still is the "easy" part. Getting IT to give you access to patient data is the extremely difficult part. It takes literally years. Lots of proprietary stuff that is very hard to get into. Maybe Drchrono is tackling small doctors offices and it might be easier but trying to get into major hospitals is another story. I wish them luck either way.

Skeletor 15y ago
We are going to change healthcare from the ground-up. Small 1-10 doctor practices can easily make the decision to completely move to a new solution like drchrono. Once you get every private practice doctor using better tools, you can start banging on the gates of the hospitals to let you in and adopt new technology. It's similar to how Salesforce.com started with small businesses and eventually broke into enterprise sales from the bottom up.
- leak 15y ago
  Good luck with that.
- baran 15y ago
  The problem is Epic has effectively locked-in the top end of the market. Their strategy, which is brilliant, is to only go after the biggest, most well-known clients (I know nothing groundbreaking, but it works). They say they only focus on whales, academics, and children (hospitals). Due to this, they have been able to capture 265 of the most prestigious hospitals in the country (and soon in the world). With the lock-in they have, I can't see them giving up this market. It would take a lot to justify replacing that half a billion dollar system for someone else, especially after the hell the administrators have gone through to get the systems up in the first place. Also, in many ways Epic is becoming the de-facto standard, which is leading to network effects that would have to be broken down. I don't think you can fight Epic at their game and win. Added to that they will likely begin to move downstream (recently heard a rev. projection $8.4B in 2016, up from $1.2B today) as the mid-size players would love to have an Epic install if only to mimic the respected healthcare organizations. The most secure place from Epic is the small practices. The IT/intemplmentation/costs requirements of Epic are far too high, in its current form, to sell to them. The problem becomes selling. It recently talked with a VP of Sales at a HIT vendor and he said of 10 hours spent selling a doctor, 9 hours are spent trying to get a hold of him. Difficult.
  - Skeletor 15y ago
    That's the exact way the market looked to Salesforce.com when Seibel system only went after large markets and told their salesforce to "run" not "walk" away from smaller customers. Salesforce.com definitely killed Seibel in the enterprise space after building a better product with feedback from smaller sales forces.

Kadrith 15y ago

How is this iPad app any different from what Canto provides from Epic for physicians and MyChart for patients? Disclaimer: Where I work we use Epic as our EMR and have been on it since 2005.

Skeletor 15y ago
For starters, drchrono offers a completely free version (in a freemium model) with the free version being a full EMR that qualifies doctors for $44,000 from Medicare in Meaningful Use incentives. drchrono has also been building on the iPad exclusively since the iPad was first launched in April of 2010 (much longer than any other company). So drchrono on the iPad is more advanced with features like realtime speech to text, customized templates, and automatic note generation and billing features that have evolved over the last 2 years.

csallen 15y ago

Congrats guys, awesome!

gshayban 15y ago

Exciting, inevitable news. Healthcare needs a shakeup. How does drchrono interoperate with medical systems? Other than SureScripts. Does it support regional labs or just LabCorp/Quest? Disclaimer: I am writing a modern interface engine.

blasdel 15y ago

Is the screen capture used in the announcement an "I didn't know I was pregnant" joke?

zmmmmm 15y ago

I looked into Drchrono when I was looking for work last year. I turned away because I found the iPad-centric strategy obnoxious and short sighted. The iPad is a wonderful device, but any company that builds their entire strategy around their love of a device has dangerously blurred vision and a horrible risk (one adverse decision from Apple you're done). Besides which, the last thing healthcare needs is more walled gardens and information silos.

naner 15y ago
iPad-centric strategy obnoxious and short sighted I agree that this is short-sighted. I have worked in the Healthcare field and am also related to a couple Doctors who built their own private practice. All the software they use for medical records is buggy as hell and extremely outdated. (Technically the software is updated frequently but it looks like something out of 1998.) An iPad-only (or any tablet) interface, however, would be a non-starter for every practice I've worked with. It would be a great supplemental device for some situations, though.
brudgers 15y ago
The biggest issue I see is Apple's approach to legacy operating system versions - typically three years at best - and no ability to purchase old versions. This makes standardization of the platform difficult - i.e. purchasing new devices for replacement or growth may mean different hardware and different software. On top of that, Apple has a tendency to change development requirements and to require updates to existing apps to meet the latest standards. In short, Apple's ecosystem in general is not conducive to the needs of businesses, and the iOS ecosystem in particular is entirely intended to be consumer facing.

taurussai 15y ago

Congratulations! If private practices are willing to use Ipads and meet some of the criteria for the $44k, why not then? Was at a recent healthcare event and met a random med student from John Hopkins, enquired about the exact same problem and a solution that his advisor was asking him to build. Question though - if doctors are already using something for EMRs how will drchrono convince them to switch?

Kadrith 15y ago
I don't think that is their target market right now. There is a land rush on for people that do not have an EMR and do not want to join with a larger facility that already has an EMR.
- taurussai 15y ago
  Sorry I didn't see this earlier. We are actually working on making HIPAA compliance easy in the cloud by providing a platform where developers can easily encrypt/track/audit their data and establish compliance to auditors. We plan to do this using a custom-built stack + a centralized management console. Do you have any feedback on something like this, or would it be okay if I could contact you offline? My email is in my profile. Thanks