MedSleuth seeks to make medical histories a BREEZE with web-based platform

Clinicians and their patients have enough on their plates without having to do paperwork. They shouldn’t be wasting valuable time filling in blanks.

That’s the premise behind BREEZE, the software platform designed by San Francisco-based MedSleuth, which aims to complete the patient’s medical history prior to that all-important visit with the clinic or hospital and keep doctors and nurses from becoming “very expensive scribes.”

James Kalamas, the company’s CEO, says the web-based clinical decision support solution targets a primary concern in today’s healthcare space: Incomplete medical records and time wasted by clinicians and patients in completing them. By pushing a customized questionnaire out to the patient before the medical visit, he says, the patient can complete the medical history at his or her convenience prior to the visit.

“With all of the discussion around patient-centered healthcare, the patient wasn’t being put at the center,” Kalamas says. “Too many patient visits were focusing on gathering information and developing medical histories – tasks that should have been done earlier. Generally, they were having their time wasted.”

“This is meant to be the starting point,” says Alicia Gruber, the company’s chief medical officer and developer of the BREEZE platform, who estimates that it would take 15-20 minutes for a patient to complete the questionnaire. “Right now there’s no standardization in approaching patients (prior to the visit).”

Gruber says BREEZE also targets a common misconception among physicians – that a patient can’t be trusted to provide an accurate medical history. By creating a platform that’s simple and tiered, she says, patients are given the opportunity to enter pertinent information, with questions based on previous answers. Once that history is complete, clinicians can access the information through a portal.

Kalamas says the process is ideal for any clinical visit, from a visit to the doctor to a transplant situation to an ER or OR appointment, and works well with telemedicine applications and in instances where a physician has to deal with an incarcerated patient. “In any context where a medical history needs to be elicited,” he says, ‘this gives them the ability to manage the throughput of patients.”

MedSleuth has received grants from the Veterans Health Administration and the National Institutes of Health to develop the BREEZE platform and is currently conducting trials at Vanderbilt University.
 

Eric Wicklund

Editor of mHIMSS.org

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