I couldn’t resist an email with the subject line of “Nuvenote, the promising French eHealth startup is skyrocketing in India.” Curious, I took a brief tour of the app and read the press releases. I think I’ve figured this one out.
Nuvenote is a straightforward web-based medical records recording app that should appeal to doctors with limited budgets for administrative overhead– whether they’re working in developing countries or in underserved areas in more developed nations.
There are, of course, many, many medical information apps available to doctors–just check out your favorite app store. Based on my own experience with doctors, they’re pretty conservative about their own use of medical software. In their offices, it’s the nurses and back-office staff that are looking at monitors and doing the data entry and patient scheduling. (And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some of those computer are still running DOS.) I’ve only recently seen my own doctor using an iPad to enter notes. But of course he does have staff to do this if he wanted.
And this is where Nuvenote steps in. A simple, but stylish app that doctors who can’t afford IT workers can use for basic scheduling and note talking. To get going with Nuvenote, an MD would need to invest in a tablel computer and internet connection–that’s it. Nuvenote provides the cloud-based back-end for which they charge 7 euros per month (10 eu on the yearly plan). The app is flexible enough to allow MDs to add their own fields so they can customize the patient template. And images–such as X-rays– can be attached as well.
My only quibble with Nuvenote is that they should provide more authentication and data security protections. I go on about basic anti-hacking defenses, including two-factor authentication, on another channel. This is medical data after all– which by the way under EU data security regulations does receive special status–so I was little surprised not to see more advanced techniques being used.