September has certainly been a busy month for IHP! We’ve had back-to-back events in the Bay Area this month, beginning with TEDMED and now this week with Health2.0. As a bonus to this event, IHP CEO Norm Wu was interviewed by mHealthWatch author Michael Essany in a brief Q&A session about our company and what we’re doing to improve healthcare. Check it out below, or read it from the source.
“This week at Health 2.0, mHealthWatch was fortunate to connect with Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients, for a quick Q&A.
Given our penchant for picking the brains of knowledgeable industry innovators and visionaries, this was an opportunity for which we were particularly grateful.
Check out the brief interview below.
MHW: For those who aren’t familiar, what is IHP and what role does it aim to play in the healthcare space today?
Wu: We develop comprehensive, online medical patient encounter simulators to help students and practicing clinicians rapidly develop and perfect their patient assessment and diagnostic reasoning skills – the most critical cognitive competencies for any clinician to master. Via this low cost, interactive, browser-based application, we hope to: 1) help improve the quality of care and lower cost by reducing the significant misdiagnosis rate (1 of every 20 adult outpatients in the U.S. today is misdiagnosed, and half of those misdiagnoses can be harmful) and 2) help accelerate the training of qualified healthcare providers to meet demand in the U.S. driven by our rapidly aging Baby Boomer population and the access of the previously uninsured enabled by the ACA, and in developing countries driven by the need to make healthcare accessible to all (e.g., India needs to train 1.6 million more physicians over the next 16 years to reach their goal of just one third the per capital physicians that the U.S. already has today).
MHW: What are some of the most exciting projects in development or recently brought to market by your company?
Wu: Less than two years ago, we launched i-Human. In that short time, educators at 20% of medical schools in the country are already either subscribing to the platform, or developing cases on it in anticipation of future use. On September 10, we launched a major enhancement to i-Human which includes Dynamic DDx. That patent-pending technology enables advanced students and experienced clinicians to pursue a non-linear, iterative diagnostic reasoning flow which mimics the approach used by highly experienced clinicians and ultimately results in a faster definitive diagnosis and lower cost of care, since testing proceeds based on the most likely hypotheses first.
MHW: What does IHP hope to accomplish or introduce to attendees at Health 2.0?
Wu: IHP will expose the provider community to i-Human to a multi-device (desktop, laptops, tablets) platform that will help clinicians develop the competencies to deliver higher quality care at lower cost. These are critical outcomes given the shift towards value-based purchasing of healthcare services. It’s fun to use, intellectually stimulating, and can assist with lifelong learning and assessment.
MHW: What are IHP’s goals for 2015 with regard to accelerating the quality and range of services and capabilities within the mHealth industry?
Wu: We will continue to rapidly grow our user base in the U.S., and begin distributing our platform broadly throughout India with the assistance of the Reliance Foundation, the philanthropic arm of India’s largest private company. We will be expanding our product lines to meet the specific needs of a broader community of healthcare providers.
MHW: Given your expertise in this space, what is the key to creating a successful and impactful product or service in the modern age of mHealth, wearable technology, or healthcare IT today?
Wu: For us, it is finding a way to offer a high impact, high retention education and training platform that is low cost and scalable; and that integrates the expertise of the world’s leading experts in medicine. Using a multimedia, browser-based solution with full simulation in the cloud and partnering in content development with medical educators from top schools and authors of the leading evidence-based guide to diagnosis was important. We were grateful to have garnered the support of the National Science Foundation (based on their belief that we are furthering the state of technology and making a high social impact), the American Medical Association (based on their belief that we have an innovating solution that can help transform medical education) and of the Reliance Foundation (based on their belief that our platform will help make world-class healthcare broadly accessible in India).”