Finding your place in the universe. After three years it really starts to come into focus.

There is a sweet spot or groove you get into when you have the opportunity to consistently help others, particularly when they readily want your help. This spot is found when interests and visions collide. When I opened Care Practice I sought out the help of dozens of other providers in the community from acupuncturists to chiropractors. I went to networking functions all over the city and tried to meet almost every business in my neighborhood. I devoured information from everyone I could find, but I always tried to give as much back as I received. On election night in 2008 we had our first open house for the entire neighborhood with a full dj set up, keg, and cases of champagne. More than two hundred people showed up to celebrate our grand opening and welcome us to the neighborhood.
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EMR Needs a Kick in the App-Hole

The most important lesson healthcare can learn from the mobile industry is that user interface and platform rule.

Intuitive and beautiful design trump complex features. Medicine is overflowing with content, but lacks an easy and comprehensive resource. Sites like Pub Med are rich, but information is not easily extracted. Complex features with poor design is leaving medicine with an antiquated and stale pharmacopeia. Read more →

Remembering one of the physicians who inspired me. Paul Ambrose MD MPH 9/11/01

We can all remember moments in our lives when we met someone and thought, I really want to be like that person. I have been thinking a lot lately about a young doctor I met back in 1997 at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center where I was a second year medical student. I was still in the middle of my preclinical studies at Dartmouth and had ventured over to the hospital with several of my classmates looking for inspiration to sustain our endless studies. Most of my classmates were dreaming of the day they would finally get out of the classroom and be allowed to work directly with patients in the hospital. But for me I was focused even beyond clinical experiences and looking at a possible career in public health and working with the government. To my tremendous fortune I found Dr. Paul Ambrose in the resident commons room that day. He was actually one of the first residents I ever sat down with and talked about what was possible for me in medicine and in public health. He was a second year resident in Family Medicine and we talked about potential careers and his plan to get an MPH at either Harvard or Johns Hopkins. Out of all the doctors I could have met that day I found the one that was 4 years ahead of me on almost the exact path that I hoped to follow. We both dreamed of careers in government working at the Department of Health and Human Services or under the Surgeon General. Many don’t know this about me, but I had always planned on getting my Masters in Public Health and in fact was very close to following in Paul’s large footsteps when my dream came true and I was accepted into his same MPH program back in 2004. Unfortunately I had failed to be accepted into a fellowship program that would have covered all my tuition and living expenses and the thought of losing my first year of significant doctor income, moving all the way to Boston from California, and going into another 50K in debt convinced me that I might be able to have a larger impact on health care from the private sector.
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The rapidly changing user in the age of technology.

We had a patient come in a few days ago who was complaining to one of my doctors that she had called 411 and couldn’t find us listed. For those of you who may have forgot, 411 is the thing we all used to use to get numbers for friends or businesses. She was calling and asking for a listing under Care Practice or the doctor’s name. To her surprise neither was listed in information. I realized that I actually had failed to list us under Care Practice back three years ago when we had started. We are actually just listed under my name. Since we began with zero patients 411 was never much of a consideration. What is shocking though is to realize just how much things have changed for the consumer. To think we have had over 7,500 patients walk through our doors in the past 3 years and that was the first person to have ever mentioned that we were not listed in the phonebook. Similar to the shocker of when I was on the local evening news a few times and never got a single mentions from a patient, text, phone call, facebook message, or Twitter message. I am just so happy that we embraced a future that really struck perfectly where the evolution of patient acquisition was going.