Category Archives: Other

Women can get online prescriptions for birth control and antibiotics for urinary tract infections (UTIs) or bladder infections from board-certified US doctors as easily as they can reserve time at a restaurant via OpenTable, purchase books via Amazon, or hail a car via Uber. That is what we aim to do with our Lemonaid app (Apple iOS and Android) and website. This kind of hassle-free, worry-free, convenience that we’ve come to expect in travel, banking, and other aspects of our busy lives has finally come to health care. If we build it, will they come? That was the question I had when I left my primary care practice at Kaiser Permanente. I had a great time as a practicing primary care doctor building long-term relationships with my patients and working alongside doctors and staff all focused on ensuring that patients get the right care at the right time. During my fifteen years, we witnessed how an […] Read More »

Can Individuals and Families Fix Health Care and the Planet? by Andy Klonecke, MD It is always fascinating to watch the political ads at election time, getting to hear what the different candidates plan to do for us, the American people, and what problems they plan to solve. The high cost of healthcare is always a huge topic for discussion which has now shifted focus from “let’s fix healthcare” to “let’s get rid of Obamacare.” Everyone has a solution for the water shortage, most of which revolves around figuring out how to get your neighbor to use less. Then there is the ever present issue of energy – energy independence, fracking and pipelines. And somewhere lost in all these discussions, but still lurking in the background, is global warming. The interesting thing about these somewhat diverse major problems is that they are very likely connected both as to cause and […] Read More »

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. — Steve Jobs Health Care Getting specialty care consultation real-time in a primary care office is no longer exclusive to integrated healthcare organizations like Kaiser Permanente or Mayo Clinic. Startup Remedy Labs offers access to Orthopedic Surgery, Dermatology, Cardiology, Endocrinology, and GI.  It won’t be the only one. At any startup we hear the term MVP all the time. At a large organization, I heard “We have to disrupt ourselves before the market does.” How do you get a startup mindset inside a large organization? From HBR – 4 Tips for Launching Minimum Viable Products (MVP) Inside Big Companies AND 5 simple questions to ask front line doctors to spark innovation! – How Brigham & Women’s Funds Health Care Innovation. Dermatoscopes allow dermatologists to diagnose melanoma better than the naked eye. This Indiegogo crowd funding campaign for […] Read More »

What should doctors know before joining a startup? I don’t know if these were questions medical school graduates in the Bay Area asked themselves as they opted to join a startup rather than completing their medical training in residency programs.  These new doctors felt they could make a bigger impact on patient care by leaving the system and its current status quo. How to Predict if a New Business Idea is Any Good. Why not? In the Bay Area, small startups and former startups like Facebook, Google, and Apple are literally blocks away from academic medical centers. Everyone knows someone working at a startup. At a healthcare innovation summit, Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and venture capitalist reassured technology entrepreneurs that the opportunities to disrupt healthcare were tremendous. After all, “Health care is like witchcraft and just based on tradition.” Khosla encouraged attendees to develop technology that would stop doctors from […] Read More »

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity. – Eleanor Roosevelt Health Care The next great challenge for doctors – Judgement calls. Clinching the RIGHT diagnosis. Critical if we are to make care more affordable. The Institute of Medicine (IOM), which released the 2000 report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Healthcare System, is out with Improving Diagnosis in Health Care. “…the occurrence of diagnostic errors — has been largely unappreciated in efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care.“ Doctors can get better only if we get feedback – “as of now we don’t have well-developed mechanisms for doctors to get feedback on the accuracy of their diagnoses, and information about the ones they get wrong.”  To improve your diagnostic skills – listen mindfully to your patient!  Challenging the […] Read More »