During my first year out of college, I worked as a technical writer for a small medical insurance company out in Orange County. We were required to work carefully with doctors to put together comprehensive reports for patients, making sense out of other doctors’ notes and fact checking them against medical handbooks.
Of course, it’s no secret that doctors—like lots of people—have horrible, often indecipherable handwriting. Not only is it dangerous, but lots of needless time was wasted placing phone calls to the doctors themselves to figure out what a particular piece of chicken scratch actually said. Once in a while, those patient packets happened to be as thick as phonebooks, too.
(MORE: Why I Want The Watson Computer to (Help) Take Care of My Baby)
Which is just one reason I’m behind this iPad app, DrChrono. Its goal is to digitize patient information as electronic health records (EHR) and modernize a highly inefficient system for keeping charts. The company just announced that it’s closed $675,000 in second round funding.
According to TechCrunch, one out of every five doctors with a private practice already own an iPad. As tablets continue to proliferate, that number is likely to grow accordingly.
The advantages of using a tablet to store information almost go without saying: Illegibility becomes a non-issue, for starters, and data can be accessed from anywhere. The app itself contains many sensible additives, like medical speech to text, paperless billing, customized clinical note forms, photos and videos (incredibly useful), and even a feature called eRx ePrescribing, which helps doctors send error free prescriptions to any pharmacy in the U.S. The company is also investing in a team of security experts to make sure the EMRs are secure and HIPAA compliant.
“Our goal is for physicians to be able to treat patients and manage their medical practice without getting distracted by complicated computer software”, says Daniel Kivatinos, cofounder and COO of DrChrono.
(MORE: Big Robot Pharma Is Here: UCSF Rolls Out Robot Pharmacists)
“Healthcare is broken and we see an opportunity,” says Michael Nusimow, CEO of DrChrono. “We look forward to working with our investors, benefiting from their advice and assistance as we set about on a course to bring profound change to the medical industry.”
The basic service is free, though there’s a tiered pricing structure depending on the desired amount of functionality. Read more about the service here.
Chris Gayomali is a writer-reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @chrigz, on Facebook, or on Google+. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.