How Jay Parkinson's $1,500 Start-up Changed Health Care | Inc.com

It all started in 2007. After working for years in preventative medicine and pediatrics, the then-31-year-old Parkinson had just finished a residency at Johns Hopkins Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care. 

“I got to see the back end of health care, why it is the way it is and why it costs what it costs,” he says. “I saw how broken everything is.”

He watched doctors treat up to 40 patients a day and have at least four staff members each to handle the nitty-gritty paperwork.

“It’s around 70 percent overhead,” he says. “It wasn’t like this decades ago. Doctors served their neighborhoods, took cash, and didn’t charge a lot because there was so little overhead. So I designed a process that went back to this model, looking at it from the patient’s perspective, and just injected a little technology.” 

With $1,500, he set up a house-call-only practice in his Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood, serving only two zip codes. He created a website through Apple’s iWeb that featured his resume, and posted his schedule on a Google Calendar. He also opened a PayPal account for payments, and used Formstack to create forms for gathering patient medical histories and to create specific questionnaires for particular ailments.

Whereas most practices deal with significant costs in office management, Parkinson’s start-up costs went to getting his license and buying tools, such as an otoscope and doctor’s bag. 

Read the rest.

Hey my company is in Vogue Living’s “Being Human” edition, highlighting “design that puts people first.” Yeeha…

Pediatrician and Preventive Medicine specialist Jay Parkinson believes quality health care requires good design and community engagement. It’s a message he is bringing to consumers and the medical industry worldwide through The Future Well; the design and consultancy firm was launched last year by Parkinson and partner Grant Harrison. The duo use their blog and speaking engagements to articulate their philosophy of better health care through social solutions. Recently, The Future Well collaborated with the British National Health Service on the transformation of Saint Charles, a 150-year old hospital campus in London, by introducing programs to facilitate better community health. It’s as simple as eating fresh whole foods, being more active, and removing toxins from your home. Visit thefuturewell.com.

I don’t know about that last sentence, but all the rest rings true!

Business Week: Inside the Design Thinking Process

Here’s an article from Business Week about the Aspen Design Summit I attended a few weeks back:

The Aspen Design Summit brought together 60 top executives to apply design thinking to large social problems.

Dr. Jay Parkinson is the co-founder of Hello Health, an online network that connects doctors and patients. He was keen to use Web 2.0 principles and techniques to create a virtual community for Austin, featuring videos of local heroes taken by school children and including a diary of local wellness-themed events. By the final presentation, he had even mocked up a prototype of what the Web site might look like. It was a bewitching concept, and Parkinson put together a beautiful piece of design.

Here is my page from Seth Godin’s new ebook, What Matters Now.

Seth's Blog: What Matters Now: get the free ebook

Seth Godin contacted me a while back to write something for his new ebook. It is now published. And it’s awesome:

Now, more than ever, we need to shake things up.

Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. I hope a new ebook I’ve organized will get you started on that path. It took months, but I think you’ll find it worth it the effort. (Download here).

Here are more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about as we head into the new year. From bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert to brilliant tech thinker Kevin Kelly, from publisher Tim O’Reilly to radio host Dave Ramsey, there are some important people riffing about important ideas here. The ebook includes Tom Peters, Jackie Huba and Jason Fried, along with Gina Trapani, Bill Taylor and Alan Webber.

Here’s the deal: it’s free. Download it here. Or from any of the many sites around the web that are posting it with insightful commentary. Tweet it, email it, post it on your own site. I think it might be fun to make up your own riff and post it on your blog or online profile as well. It’s a good exercise. Can we get this in the hands of 5 million people? You can find an easy to use version on Scribd as well and from wepapers. Please share.

What Matters Now

Microsoft Health Tech Today with Dr. Bill Crounse: Dr. Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH

Bill interviewed me recently for Microsoft’s Health Tech Today show a few weeks ago. Bill is doing wonderful things with his show and truly highlighting others across the world who are improving the health of their communities. This is the second month of the show. Last month, Bill interviewed Archbishop Desmond Tutu who talked about leveraging technology to improve global health. He also interviewed Dr. Kim Pittenger who is using Toyota Production System concepts in the primary care clinics he runs in Washington state. Healthcare has a ton to learn from other industries, and I’ve been a believer in Toyota’s concepts for years. Mark Graban is doing a phenomenal job helping implement these models in healthcare institutions all over the US. I encourage you to watch them all.

Esquire - How Jay Parkinson Wants to Reform Health Care Online

As part of Esquire’s Annual Best and Brightest issue “Radicals and Rebels Who are Changing the World,” it’s finally online. Check it out.

Humbled.

Especially when considering the work of Eric Loewen, Clare Lockhart, David Iglesias, and the lovely Neri Oxman.

I’m very honored to be featured in the latest issue of Esquire in their annual “Best and Brightest” issue (aka…Radicals and Rebels who are changing the world). I’m amongst some truly great minds:

• David Iglesias
• Eric Loewen
• Neri Oxman
• Michael Stuhlbarg
• and plenty more…

In 2002, Mayor Martin O’Malley, then mayor of Baltimore, was one of the Best and Brightest (Mayor Thomas Carcetti in The Wire was based on O’Malley). I’ll never forget that article…absolutely inspiring. Ever since then, I always purchase that issue of Esquire. They do such a solid job every time.

And then 7 years after I read one of the most influential articles I’ve ever read, they write one about me and Hello Health. I’m honored and humbled…

If you listen to Oprah Radio today on XM, you can hear an interview with me and George Halvorson, the CEO of Kaiser Permanente. Dr. Oz is doing some really great things:

On Saturday, September 26, television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz hosted a free clinic in Houston, one that attracted over 1,700 people. It was the largest non-disaster-related free clinic in United States history.

The free clinic featured over 700 volunteers, 200 doctors and 300 nurses. Oz chose Houston because of its high rate of uninsured residents, nearly one out of every three.

Silicon Stethoscopes - Forbes.com

Here’s a nice article in Forbes that mentions Hello Health and a few quotes from me:

Then there’s the matter of reimbursing doctors for their time. In America, most physicians prefer to deliver a quantity of medicine due to the reimbursement model of healthcare instead of ensuring quality medicine through good communication, time and establishing personal relationships. As a result, Parkinson believes telehealth will be a good way to augment care between in-person visits but doubts it will ever completely replace in-office visits. “Given the current physician reimbursement model as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, physicians are paid less to see you via telepresence than in the office. Why would a doctor want to sacrifice income just to use telepresence?” Parkinson notes.

Visa Business and Hello Health launches today.

Starting today you’ll probably be seeing me and Hello Health all over the United States on the radio, on TV, in magazines, and, of course, on the innernet.

Visa contacted me back in February asking if I wanted to be one of the faces of Visa Small Business for this year’s advertising campaign about how Visa enables small businesses to be more efficient. I, of course, said yes. In March, I did a photoshoot in LA and spent a few days shooting a commercial in Brooklyn about Hello Health uses Visa. For you Williamsburgers, you’ll notice Diner.

Hello Health literally couldn’t function without the efficiencies of purchasing services online with credit cards like Visa.

At the same time, Visa is launching the Visa Business Network— a social network for connecting small business owners in order to learn helpful hints from one another. They’ve been on Facebook for a few years now and have signed up over 30,000 small business owners. They ported everything from Facebook onto their new site. Check out my profile and sign up if you are a business owner.

Also, don’t forget to check out Hello Health for Business in the near future. Your small business will soon be able to create an account on Hello Health and associate your employees with that account enabling you, as an employer, to pay for all of your employees’ healthcare usage in one monthly sum.

So click here to see the commercial.

The Doctor of the Future | Fast Company

It’s finally up online…check it out. The best description yet by the press about what we’re building:

It’s part electronic medical record, part practice-management system, and part social-networking site, complete with profiles and photos of doctors and patients, all in a secure environment that complies with federal privacy standards.

Fast Company: Hello Health…The Doctor of the Future.

It should be on newstands within the week. Please check it out. Fast Company has always been one of my favorite magazines, and now they’ve covered Hello Health. I launched my initial practice on September 24, 2007. A year and a half later and Fast Company calls us the Doctors of the Future…we’ve got such a good team. It’s going to be a damn fine year…

Google Health Just Perpetuating Antiquated Technology

My earlier blog post was reposted on Business Insider. Take a look, or you can just read it below.