Healthcare and Online Communities

ByLaurel Papworth

Carolina NewsWire reported that:Cary, North Carolina — ProviderLink, Inc., a healthcare I.T. communications company dedicated to helping clients build results-driven online communities, announced that Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, the largest private medical center in Louisiana, has successfully implemented ProviderLink’s communication tools. The medical center’s case management team is now using ProviderLink…

Carolina NewsWire reported that:

Cary, North Carolina — ProviderLink, Inc., a healthcare I.T. communications company dedicated to helping clients build results-driven online communities, announced that Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, the largest private medical center in Louisiana, has successfully implemented ProviderLink’s communication tools. The medical center’s case management team is now using ProviderLink to communicate online with government and private payors, as well as skilled nursing facilities, all through a single interface and workflow.

ProviderLink seem to have understood one of the key points of online communities:
Most difficult of all, the technology must provide real value even before all of the healthcare organizations in a given community are online with the new network. In other words, if there were no value proposition for the early adopters then there would never be an online community.

And now for the scary part:
The medical sector spends as much as $125 billion annually on unnecessary and inefficient communications. The Wall Street Journal 7/2/03

What’s an equivalent workflow/online community system for healthcare here in Australia? Anyone?

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