outside writing

The Non-Physician’s Guide to Hacking the Health Care System

~ cmonsen ~ Leave a comment

Written with my friend and co-founder of Symcat, David.

We are residents and a software developers. Before starting residency, we spent time as software developers in the startup community. We were witness to tremendous enthusiasm directed at solving problems and engaging people in their health. The number of startups trying to disrupt healthcare using data and technology has grown dramatically and every day established healthcare companies appear eager to feed this frenzy through App and Design Competitions.

Continue reading The Non-Physician’s Guide to Hacking the Health Care System on THCB.

Killer Features of the Next Generation EMR

~ cmonsen ~ Leave a comment

I was absent-mindedly playing with my iPhone today and took special notice of a feature I have rarely used before. If you swipe all the way to the left on the home screen, you will get a search bar to search all of your iPhone. This includes contacts, iMessages, and apps. I’ve never needed to use this before–a testament to the iPhone’s ease of use. Just prior to this, I was working on some patient notes using my hospital’s electronic medical record (EMR). In contrast, each task I performed required a highly-regimented, multi-click process to accomplish.

Criticizing EMR interfaces is a well-loved pastime among clinicians. Here, however, I am going to take an oblique approach and reflect instead on what has made good interfaces (all outside of medicine, it turns out) recognized as such.

Continue reading Killer Features of the Next Generation EMR on the THCB.

5 Steps to Making Your Medical App Idea a Reality

~ cmonsen ~ Leave a comment

You’ve got this great idea for a medical app that will transform health care (or at least a chunk of it).

Now what?

There is no one path to executing your idea. Particularly for those of us in medicine where the course is clearly delineated (pre-med, med school, residency, etc), acknowledging this fact can be disorienting. My goal here is to suggest one path that has helped me personally get beyond the ideation phase.

Continue reading 5 Steps to Making Your Medical App Idea a Reality at iMedicalApps.