Sunnyvale-based DrChrono is taking another step in making medical care easier for both doctors and patients. The app-based company recently announced a partnership with another app-based company, 3D4Medical. The deal will allow doctors to use 3-dimensional renderings of human body parts to help patients better understand the medical procedures they are about to undergo.
“Say we have an orthopedic surgeon,” said Daniel Kivatinos, co-founder of DrChrono. “They can use DrChrono to do all the charting…but the moment that they want to actually educate the patient and to do more to help the patient understand, they can tap a button inside DrChrono for 3D4Medical.”
Once the 3D4Medical app is open, the surgeon can zoom in on the specific area being worked on and sit with the patient to explain in detail what’s going to happen using the app’s animated 3D models.
“How do doctors describe this stuff today?” asked Kivatinos. “They hand the patient a pamphlet and then the patient takes that pamphlet [with] drawings on it and then they can use that. With 3D4Medical, all of that is done on the iPad and the patient can get a full understanding of what’s going on through iOS.”
DrChrono was able to team up with 3D4Medical thanks to Apple’s Mobile Partnership Program (MPP). The two companies are preferred Apple app developers and so their paths crossed.
DrChrono was founded about 10 years ago in New York City, where it caught the attention of the Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator. As part of an investment deal, DrChrono moved to the West Coast for three months.
“Our team was small back then, so we could do it,” said Kivatinos. “Once we moved here, it was really hard to go back to the East Coast simply because it was such a great environment with the investors. It definitely felt like a good energy and everything.”
“There’s a lot of dreamers out here and we were able to recruit amazing talent even in that three month period,” said Kivatinos. “It was just one thing after another that led us to stay.”
DrChrono now has well over 100 people at its Sunnyvale office and a second office in Maryland. There are roughly 15 million patient records accessible through DrChrono, representing three percent of the U.S. population.
“We built a really complex app in a really simple way, where the doctor can see a patient and start to chart their encounter with that patient,” said Kivatinos. “They can prescribe drugs, they can order labs, they can send all this information to the insurance companies to get paid.”
Kivatinos says DrChrono is all about saving time. In fact, it’s in the name. The word “chrono” is derived from chronometer and chronology.
“So we said, let’s take the name DrChrono, time, and make this software about time,” said Kivatinos. “Efficiency around time, around scheduling, around sending patient information, about encounters they had with their doctors.”
“In the future, everybody should have their medical record in their pocket,” said Kivatinos. “You want to see what drugs were administered, when you had your last immunization shots, when your family members had X, Y, and Z, when their last visit was, when they had their blood work done, what their blood pressure was. You want all that information in your phone, at your fingertips.”
