Thursday, January 17, 2008

Patient Office Visits, Phreesia Style

Shorter Phreesia, the first company to provide a free and substantially more useful patient check-in solution in a doctor's waiting room:

You, the doctor, provide the captive audience.

We, Phreesia, provide a free touch-screen pad and enough pharma ads to make us all [who aren't doctors or patients] rich.

I don't think so! Blasting patients with pharma ads does not a pre-visit personalized interactive patient interview in [my] waiting room make.

A first visit, when you're trying to establish a rapport with the patient, gather information, figure out what the problem is and devise a plan of treatment is not the appropriate time for third party commercial endeavors.

I don't have any experience with Phreesia, nor do I know anyone who has. It's just that something about the concept rubs me the wrong way. A lot of bells and whistles to mask the underlying business model: Pharmas pay a middleman to serve their ads to vulnerable people in an inappropriate setting.

I mean, why not just cut out the middleman, pay the doctor directly and have him/her deluge the poor patient with ads. Speaking of which, have I mentioned that there's quite some down time (literally) during a gyn exam and a whole celling begging for a pharma ad projection. [If interested, call me! Lots o' wall space at reasonable rates!]

That's my first impression of Phreesia. What's yours?

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2 Comments:

At 8:31 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Phreesia is a device that solved some check-in problem and solving those typo-error. It is an innovative product that wants to make some money to put some ADS.

I don't complain watching commercials in any TV shows. It is part of making some money.

Just like your website, there's a bunch of amazon products on the right frame. Do I care... no you just want to make some money.

I hope you got my point.

 
At 8:56 PM, Blogger ema said...

Anon,

I appreciate your confidence in my site but let's be realistic here. As much as I'd like it to be true, patients in a doctor's office and readers of a blog are not comparable populations when it comes to ads.

I have nothing against making money from ads. It's just that when you're dealing with a captive and vulnerable population (patients), in my opinion, you have to thread extremely carefully when it comes to commercial interests.

 

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