October 2nd, 2007
Anyone for networked psychiatric questionnaires?
If you’re worried about your medical and genetic records being shared, how about your psychiatric records? (Logo by Logomagic of Boca Raton, Florida.)
Harmonex, a start-up based in Roswell, Georgia, is aiming to do this through a unit called CliniCom. While Sharon Allred is the CEO, most officers are related to founder Nelson Handal, a Dothan, Alabama based psychiatrist. His clinic has been folded into Harmonex.
Like Phreesia, whom we profiled last week, CliniCom starts with a pre-visit electronic questionnaire. But while Phreesia collects the data for doctors based on advertising, CliniCom collects its data for a network which assists in diagnosis.
The idea is that all relevant questions will always be asked in a psychiatric interview, that the collected answers will become an expert system, and that the suggested diagnoses will improve with time. There’s also this goal:
Create a central secured database to allow for broader clinical research initiatives.
I don’t know about you, but that last scares me.
Still, there is a lot of potential good here. Making certain patients answer all questions in a psychiatric evaluation is a good thing. A database which can assist in making diagnoses is a good thing.
But as time goes by, won’t a lot of lazy psychiatrists just trust the computer, then use it to defend themselves when they’re wrong? They would save a lot of time and money, pass those savings along, and maybe roll-up the whole industry. You ready for a shrink-in-a-box?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 10/02/07
