Google Apps in Health Care

03:13 | John Furrier | Mar 7th, 2007 5:00am |

SF Bay Pediatrics has been using Google Apps since last December for the kind of non-sensitive communications that keeps a clinic running smoothly.

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Transcript:

Speaker
Traditionally the health care industry is — I would go so far to say decades behind in terms of using information technology. The collaboration via emails, the exchange of information it’s very slow to travel when almost any physicians or groups get together that’s what they talk about is the fact that the information only goes out by word of mouth and then our inter-office communications about calendar, spreadsheets or documents was paper. In my particular business where we all have to be somewhere among the various doctors and it changes to some degree and we all have to know where each of us is, if you forget your paper then you forget where you are and then you have to call somebody and find out.

The reason why I choose Google Apps for my domain was, it was a very cost-effective feature rich, it’s very good solution. It had almost everything we needed to get off the ground and it really only took about a half-a-day to implement and do it. If somebody has a document on their computer the problem is, it’s on their computer and if they are in a different location at that time it’s really hard to access that document that they have specially prepared in terms of what the patient needs.

So, with the documents and spreadsheets we can just go online, click ‘View’, hit ‘Print’, we can hand it to the patient right there. We had to remind all of our staff to get backstage against the flu. Traditionally we would just have a list of everybody and check off surname and we’d have to send out reminders and call people and track them down to make sure they did it. Now we just use a little message from the start page to say, “Hey, have you done your vaccinations” and they respond, “Yes”. It’s a very changing moral; the whole medical industry new things come out everyday. Trade Journals, they have information and it is so easy now just to say, send this to everybody out in the staff and then everybody gets it to read it. It really doesn’t matter where you are, you don’t have to have a dedicated workstation.

You just sign online, you could be on the beach, you could be on vacation, you could still check all those things. From a personal perspective when I don’t have to answer certain questions on why I can’t open this attachment or I get all the spamming here. How do I deal with all that? That makes me a lot happier. More or less I would recommend Google Apps to anybody out there, it’s a great program. There is no real downside to it, it’s pretty much have got infinite expandability, expectations. Google is always listening to new feature and new request out there. I can’t see it going anywhere but getting better.

So, I don’t see, or anybody should not be using it in terms of both cost-effectiveness and features. It just took that one complication out of the equation and just made it much better and much more efficient in terms of delivering information to our patients as well as providing the best care, because that’s what it dwells down to, is the healthier our practice is the healthier our patient becomes and it’s just a — it’s a win-win situation.

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Tags: SF Bay Pediatrics, Google Apps, GoogleApps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under PodTech, Google, Corporate, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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