David Loney has spent two decades envisioning a better system for electronic medical records.
Working in health care, he often encountered doctors who were frustrated, even burned out, from time-consuming record keeping. So Loney designed a more streamlined option called Scope, which allows doctors to take notes by clicking pre-populated buttons, rather than typing notes. He launched his business, Hanover-based EMRLD Health, in 2018 as an independent group within a prosthetics company for the first two years before spinning it out as its own entity.
Loney estimates Scope can reduce note taking time from 20 minutes to one minute. Despite that, physicians and hospitals were hesitant to adopt it, in part because they spend millions of dollars on existing software to manage their records.
“It’s such a big beast to tackle, that we actually pivoted to medical students,” Loney says.
That shift happened about two and a half years ago. EMRLD still uses the Scope system, but Loney has reimagined it as a learning tool. Using Scope, students can run through case studies guided by the app in about five minutes. For example if a child shows up with a sore mouth, a student can click symptoms (such as fever or sores) and see what conditions are most likely to cause that.
The studies are meant to help students feel more prepared for their time in the clinic, Loney says. Scope currently has about 400 case studies loaded into the platform, with a goal of having 3,000 eventually.
The platform, which is browser-based due to its complexity, went live to students in mid-June. It is free to medical students, but once he has a user base, Loney plans to market the technology to medical device companies. Those companies have traditionally relied on face-to-face sales to familiarize doctors with their products but are now trying to move to digital marketing. EMRLD will be on deck to meet that need, Loney says.
And Loney hasn’t let go of his long-term vision for disrupting the medical records system in the United States. “We still want to displace [existing systems],” he says. “It just might be another five to 10 years till we do.”