Healthcare should happen everywhere, most especially where the patient is located – at home, at work, at a clinic, etc.
As part of our employee health plan coverage, InterSystems recently contracted with a company called 2020 Onsite https://www.2020onsite.com/, which provides mobile optometry services by packaging an entire eye clinic into a completely new and innovative ‘mobile vision center’. They have taken a creative solution, married to modern technologies, and built a convenient, engaging solution to delivering care.
One day, 2020 Onsite parked the mobile clinic right outside our headquarters building in Cambridge, MA. This made it really, and I cannot emphasize this enough, really easy to get an annual vision check-up.
A quick synopsis of my first-time experience:
- I received a notification of the date of 2020 Onsite’s visit to InterSystems and scheduled an appointment and submitted medical forms online
- 9:00am - the day of my appointment, I was quickly checked in
- 9:27am - routine eye exam, consultation and vision check finished
- 9:30am - back in the office
The next day I received an email with my updated prescriptions; easy-peasy!
I joked with a colleague that “I just got my eyes checked in the back of a food truck”. In fact, the ‘mobile vision center’ is a clean and well laid-out facility which includes a concierge desk, a display area for brand name eyeglass frames and the latest devices for checking eye health. There is also a separate, closed off exam room where you sit and have the eye doc do a thorough vision exam – you practically forget you’re not in a brick and mortar facility.
2020 Onsite puts existing technologies to work for what amounts to truly smart healthcare delivery. My time with the eye doc was made more efficient by the fact that data was being entered quickly by into an electronic medical record system as we spoke, as well as other data being sent automatically from the connected device including the images taken of my eyes. This was also available to me for a real-time view on a large monitor as we reviewed the image together. None of this is ‘earth shattering’ technology, other than the fact that 2020 Onsite has been able to create and store these electronic records remotely.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation nor incentive to write about 2020 Onsite. I just really liked the experience and how they leverage available technologies to:
- Engage consumers (patients) in the care process;
- Make it as convenient as possible for the consumer;
- Create an electronic patient record, including images, in a remote setting;
- Safely and securely deliver the relevant information directly to the consumer.
Not all healthcare delivery can be packaged up like this, and of course not everyone will share my point of view about the service, but I’m willing to bet that we’re going to see more consumer-empowering healthcare in the coming years.
Now to go find lunch in a real food truck…
