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Some of you know that my mom is in the hospital on and off for the last two months. I have been in her city for the last couple of days so far to provide some relief for my sister and one thing I have noticed is that technology isn’t here. Since my mind is always thinking of creative ideas, I want to talk about two things here and perhaps one of the CN team (that’s you) can help me understand if there is technology for these gaps or if we can build something to meet a potential market need.

Healthcare

Why isn’t healthcare more Internet’ized? Why can’t I view my mom’s status online? She has several doctors looking at her each day, it’s nearly impossible to get each one of them on the phone. Why can’t each doctor be outfitted with a tablet pc and write their notes directly into the computer? And then I (1500 miles away) can monitor what’s going on directly. Instead, each doctor maintains all of these charts manually, and then supposedly a doctor can later on see some transcript on a computer. And how does her primary care doctor find out what’s going on and vice-versa? I can understand that her real-time blood pressure might not be available, but imagine getting the updates without spending hours of time tracking down the doctors. Not only is my time saved, the doctor’s (and office) time is saved, along with being able to know what’s going on directly.

And we can take it further… why not have a food menu (and other typical patient needs) be computerized and instead of sending around a nurse 3x a day just to write down a food order, have a simple panel for my mother to select what she wants? (and yes, why can’t they take all the meals for the day in 1 visit!).

Financial

Now this is my game, my sis was always the health, I am the financial. My mom has 15-20 or so bills that need to be paid each month. We have spent hours making sure everything is paid, but I keep wondering, "did we get ‘em all?" Is there an online tool to organize all of mom’s bills, due dates, balances, etc. and send me an email or alert when something needs to be paid? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to put her newspaper, cable, magazines all on hold with one click?  Is there a tool like this already? As all of our parents and loved ones get older or are injured, I can only imagine a tool like this would be extremely beneficial. I know for me personally, it would allow me to help my sister (who is local) by handling more of the financial needs from a far.

Finale

Maybe I am making things too easy, but there’s gotta be a better way. Not just on the financial side, but also on the family side. These simple things are the things I believe technology overlooks many times.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Insights. 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.