Jiff Launches First HIPAA-Compliant Health Care Social Network
By Allison Proffitt
March 27, 2012 | Jiff Inc. unveiled the first HIPAA-compliant health care social network and digital health apps platform: Circle of Health earlier this month at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, March 9-18 in Austin, Tex.
“There’s no place for doctors to interact with patients in a HIPAA secure way,” Derek Newell, CEO of Jiff, told Bio-IT World. “Health care hasn’t been virtual. It hasn’t been about data.”
However Newell sees that changing. “This is a $2.7 trillion industry without an effective way for physicians and patients to communicate and effectively keep track of the patient’s progress between office visits. Circle of Health changes that,” he said in a press release. “Circle of Health will allow consumers, their loved ones, and their care providers to share critical health information and easily monitor and manage their health through digital health applications that seamlessly integrate with each other.”
The “social platform” part may give some doctors and users pause. “You’re not asking your doctor to be your Facebook friend, but you are asking your doctor to engage with you in a social platform,” Newell says.
The Circle of Health platform will allow users to build personalized communities of care comprised of family, friends, doctors, hospice professionals, midwives, home health providers, health coaches and anyone else with whom they want to connect and collaborate. Circle of Health is free, carries no advertisements, and patients own and control all of their data.
But it’s not for everyone in every situation. Newell knows that not every doctor will adopt the platform and doesn’t expect it to spread virally.
Newell expects the platform to first gain traction in “concierge medicine” or private practices. “Those doctors want to differentiate themselves to their patients and they want to provide their patients a different experience and a different level of service,” he says.
He also see uptake among specialists: doctors who do highly specialized but repetitive procedures frequently. “If they’re doing something that’s fairly complex from a clinical perspective and they’re doing it repetitively, the social environment can save them a lot of time.”
For example, Newell proposes that his older father needs a knee replacement. The surgeon will need to administer diagnostic questionnaires, pre-op instructions, and post-op care instructions to the patient and his caregivers. Those steps could be automated within Circle of Health.
“It has to save the doctors time in the exam room or over the course of the entire therapeutic intervention,” he says. “It has to make the doctor feel like a better doctor. It has to make the patient feel like they’re getting better care. And ultimately it has to lead to an increased productivity and revenue for the practice. If those four things aren’t coming true in some combination adoption is very likely to be low.”
Besides the doctor and patient, personalized communities of care could include family, friends, doctors, hospice professionals, midwives, home health providers, pharmacists, or health coaches.
Jiff plans to build a broad collection of digital health applications. The first, the JiffPad, is an iPad app that allows patients to record the knowledge communicated in a doctor’s visit in short videos and store or share the videos securely in their Circle of Health. Newell says that Jiff is also working on applications to manage depression, weight loss, and obesity and the attendant issue or preconditions that could go with that.
Although Circle of Health is free and stresses patient-owned data, Newell expects primarily doctors, practices, pharmacy systems, care plans, or health plans to be the primary drivers for adoption. There will be some apps specifically for patients, but the focus will be on connecting the patients with their care providers.
He hopes that within 24 months, Jiff will have proven to be a stable business and within 5 years there will be widespread adoption—“10% to 15% of doctors are using a tool like this”—with a majority of physicians using a virtual platform within 20 years.
