DocDox, a medical startup based in Columbia Heights, has formed a partnership with
Connex International, a health/IT consulting firm, to market its cloud-based software solution for patient handoffs in hospital settings. The partnership comes after the startup, cofounded by Patrick and Kristy Woodard, piloted and successfully launched its software with Howard University Hospital in the District.
"We've got all the kinks worked out," Kristy Woodard, CEO of DocDox, explains. "The whole hospital is using the software. Residents who are using the software are reporting that it saves them a lot of time. Now we're ready to move forward and get it into other hospitals."
DocDox is secure, cloud-based tracking software that stores patient information so it is accessible by an entire team of doctors at once. The software stores a patient's demographic, diagnostic and medication needs, and has a place for follow-up instructions. All of the patients on a particular "physician team" can be entered and managed in one place, allowing for easy communication and hand-off among team members and between teams.
Cofounder Patrick Woodard is a resident in internal medicine at Howard and came up with the idea of DocDox after witnessing inefficiency in patient handoffs in medical school.
As clinicians move toward using electronic medical records, teams use MS Word or Excel documents, or Google Docs, to track their patients. That's an improvement over the old pen-and-paper model, but can lead to outdated or multiple documents for the same patient. Occasionally a patient transfers from one floor to another and gets "lost" in the system.
"When a sending team transfers a patient, that team deletes the information," Woodard says. "The receiving physician team doesn't always write down the information they receive. There was one patient who didn't have a doctor for 26 hours because his information didn't transfer. With DocDox, both sides have to acknowledge the transfer."
In addition to getting their software into other hospitals, DocDox is developing an e-prescribing platform, which Woodard says should be available by late spring. The company also recently filed with the SEC to raise funding. "Nothing officially yet," Woodard says, "but we're interested in getting funding for a full-time developer for mobile."