Washington-based Dr. Rahul Shah is an otolaryngologist.
By The American Bazaar staff
WASHINGTON, DC: Rahul Shah and his business partner, Alex Grilli, want to revolutionize the way medical professionals communicate with one another.
Behind that lofty goal is a simpler one: they want doctors finally to get rid of their pagers.
Together, Drs. Shah and Grilli—both surgeons—have created a free medical text-messaging solution called hippomsg, which is launching a major update this month. They are combining the highest standards of data security with a desire to build a community of medical professionals who can instantly communicate with each other and improve the quality of care.
“As doctors, we help thousands of patients a year, but nothing has been more gratifying than helping our colleagues communicate with one another,” said Shah, an Indian-American otolaryngologist at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington. “We love it when we get messages from providers who say, ‘Finally, we can reach you now.’ It should be that simple. But—until now—doctors had to clear the same hurdles that patients do when they call another medical office—phone menus, voicemail and missed return calls.”
The company started in 2012, when Grilli and Shah were talking by phone on a Sunday night. They separately got text messages from their residents that contained protected health information, which should have been encrypted. They realized that the messages violated the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but they knew these residents were trying to get their patients the care they needed. That night, they laid the groundwork for hippomsg—Health Information Provider-to-Provider Online Messaging.
“We think of it as WhatsApp for doctors,” said Grilli, an otolaryngologist at Harvard’s Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.
Facebook is buying the popular instant-messaging app for $19 billion.
Since its initial launch, hippomsg has grown to a community of over 3,000 medical providers from over 30 different professions that touch protected health information—doctors, nurses, physical therapists, hospital administrators, EMTs and lactation consultants, just to name a few. The platform can be used on a smartphone, tablet or PC, meaning cost-conscious medical practices and hospitals don’t need to buy expensive new technology to join the digital age of communication. The entire platform is free.
Even a patient’s name is considered protected health information that must be safeguarded under HIPAA. That’s why hospitals and medical practices are still using pagers to connect medical professionals and—eventually—get them talking by phone. The page and the call are considered secure.
“Most hospitals do not even have alphanumeric paging because it’s expensive,” Grilli said. “We knew it had to change. But we knew—whatever we built—we had to make it free. In the age of declining reimbursements and massive shifts in business models under the Affordable Care Act, we had to give the medical community a way to start talking.”
For Shah, the hippomsg business model, in many ways, is an extension of his philanthropic upbringing. His father is an electrical engineer who went to college in India and came to the United States in the 1960s with his wife to start a business and a family. One of Shah’s brothers is a pediatric ENT surgeon and the other is an engineer.
“Like any good Indian son, he joined my dad’s engineering firm,” Shah said.
His parents have always instilled in their children a need to give back. Throughout the development of hippomsg, Shah said, he and Grilli knew they wanted to give back to the medical community.
Shah got his undergraduate and medical degrees from Boston University. Shah met Grilli, his chief resident, in the lab one day when Shah was looking at a business page online. They realized then that they both had an affinity for medicine and business and regularly discussed ways to make healthcare more efficient.
“So many aspects of healthcare are broken, and we’re trying to chip away at one of them,” said Shah, who chairs several major national committees to improve patient quality. “I’ve seen how medical mistakes happen. Often, it’s a matter of miscommunication—an ER doctor who doesn’t have a full list of prescriptions or a specialist who doesn’t have all the information about a patient’s case because he has three other specialists at three other practices.”
Grilli and Shah think that many mistakes could be avoided if it wasn’t such a task to reach other medical professionals.
“The hippomsg solution is so fast and easy,” Shah said. “In the time it took you to read this article, you could have sent your first message.”