A look inside Hello Health's EMR platform

Author: Thuc Huynh, MD

Last month, Nat Findlay gave me a personal interview about the company's current standing and future goals.  It definitely whet my appetite for more so I reached out to Steven Ferguson, the Vice President of Product Development for Hello Health and he took me through a tour of the platform.  The platform is pretty modern and clean.

The design interface reminds me of Facebook with a little bit of Google Calendar and Foursquare.  As a physician, you start off at the physician dashboard.  Here you'll see an overview of tasks you need to do, from reviewing labs, new patients, or incoming faxes.  You can also get a birds eye view of all patient appointments for the day on the right side of the screen.  I appreciated that the patient's photo is displayed as well to bridge that association between a name and a face.   That's what reminded me of Foursquare.

The Availability tab is where physicians can set their hours with simple click and drag features just like in Google Calendar.  I found it very easy to use.  There are checkboxes and scroll wheels for every option you can think of.  For example, you can choose to be in office during the weekdays and offer virtual or telephone visits on the weekends only.  Whatever you select as your hours on this tab will automatically reflect on the patient's side when they go to make an appointment.

There are many other features in the platform including secure messaging from provider to provider or provider to patient.  The platform can also send and receive faxes without requiring you to leave it's page.  Pretty convenient.  The company has contracted with LabCorp and Quest to enable lab orders from within the platform and they are working on getting more companies such as BioReference.  A patient's chart has the same features as other EMR's allowing free text or personalized templates.

The Patient's dashboard is just as simple to use.  Patient's have three options : Make an Appointment, Manage My Team, or View My Messages.  Those are the main tools anyone needs to communicate with their physician and it's displayed front and center so you can't miss it.  If you need to update your credit card, address, or membership status, you can do that too through smaller menu icons.  If you need a refresher of what your treatment plan was, you can access old visits and take a look.  Hello Health's Patient Portal is one of the nicest one's I've seen.

Whether you're offering a membership-based practice or traditional insurance, Hello Health's platform is something to look into for a secure, easy to use, and pretty to look at EMR that's affordable.  For more information, be sure to head over to their website.  http://hellohealth.com

About the author:

Dr. Thuc Huynh is CEO of ScrubdIN, a startup company that aims to help health professionals and patients choose their next medical app. Her main interest lies around how medicine can play a role with web 2.0 and social media. Dr. Huynh is currently Chief Resident at her Family Medicine Residency in Rapid City, SD and received her B.S. and M.D. at the Medical University of the Americas.