Y Combinator: Applying, Pitching via Zoom or in Person

All I can say is just do it; if you are thinking about it, it is worth trying to get in. Apply ASAP, don’t delay it. There are no guarantees when applying but it is worth it. Y Combinator is more open then you think if they see a great idea and team. The Y Combinator team is willing to invest early. They invest in startup ideas and people. They take risks in new markets and invest a lot of the time when other investors don’t understand the market. To apply to Y Combinator go here.

Application

Most important things to show on your application:

You can build stuff fast.
Do you have some users using something you built? If not start building!
Have you done something amazing in the past? (E.g. Create Django?)
Make sure there are two of you at least (founders). Founder dynamics is important, if you have been friends or been working together for several years, then there is a great dynamic. Friends general won’t just walk away from something that will take the time to build. Startups can be stressful, show that your team can handle the stress of it.
Make sure you put a video attachment in your application, it will help.
Y Combinator looks for good team dynamics.
Conviction in what you are doing.
Talk about something you have done amazing in the company or in your life that really stands out.
Talk about the passion and idea to the partners.
Know your market size.
Know your competition.
Talk about the vision of your product.
Is there something driving you do build this company, startups are the cool thing to do but generally persistence pushes companies forward and having the right motivation will keep you going. Have the right motivation if you are starting a startup.

Pitching in Person

The first 30 seconds are super important.
Google the top 25 questions Y Combinator will be asking at a zoom or live interview.

Like these:
- There is that initial question: What do you guys do?
- What is the about of time you will need to get to the next stage?

Have one person be the presenter during your very fast pitch in person.
Practice, practice, practice before meeting with the Y Combinator partners. Ask yourself’s questions the night before being interviewed, think about questions you think you won’t answer well, it helped us, my cofounder and I more than we thought it would. It is fast interview questions, rapid fire that will prep you so you are sharp for this kind of fast interviewing.
Find one or more founders that went through YC to talk too. We found two, one of them was the founder of Reddit, Alexis. We also found another founder who really helps us understand the process the day before our in-person interview. Insight into the fast questions you will get will help you think fast on your feet.
Record yourself via video and audio, and listen to it over and over. (Use Evernote to record the audio or something else.)
Put yourself in the partners shoes, the partners schedules are jam packed so answer accurately.
Again talk slow!
The partners will go off script … be prepared to go off script.
Have your numbers down!
Have your market, customer values, growth, LTV down and know it.
Do some jumping jacks or something physical to get the nerves out before you go into the interview.
Again, listen to a recorded pitch over and over and over again of your pitch before you go in.
Think positive so you can go in confident.
You need a two minute tag line that makes the partners and everyone connect with you/
Put your company and roll in the zoom link so they know who you are.
- e.g: Daniel Kivatinos CEO StartupName.com
If you have a cofounder you don’t want to have a cofounder cutting you off, have smooth handoffs for questions so work that you workout beforehand.

Alexis came to drchrono’s office talking to the early drchrono team before we pitched Y Combinator.

One way to think about your pitch to the Y Combinator is this way, all of these can be shuffled around, depending. If you have fast growth shuffle things around and assume you only have 10 minutes to pitch:

If you have the chance to pitch in person, be sure to practice your pitch over and over.
Record your pitch and listen to it several times to see where you are strong and you’re not strong.
You need to be able to communicate, you need to convey information very fast, practice.
Have you done a lot with very little? No investors, bootstrapped?
Show the product if you have one!
Have a demo? Load demo data and be ready to present it!
The partners see a ton of pitches, so have a tee shirt on with your logo. Well worth the branding and you can wear it anytime.
Sometimes context – “we are the X of X” helps people understand what you are doing.
Highlight something impressive, featured in the App Store? Win an award? Have some funding?
Have you burned your boats?
The pitch:
- Team: Talk about your backgrounds, the co-founders.
  - Have a good intro.
  - Why you?
  - The team is super important so introduce yourselves in 30 seconds.
  - They want to make sure the founders get along and there isn’t an internal power struggle.
  - What is something you were super proud of?
  - What is your story? (each co-founder) Did you work for Apple? Do you have a Ph.D.?
    - If it is a company that is big you worked at but people don’t know the name, just say the company is the second largest X in the world. The company I worked at made X billion per year.
  - Who is the technical co-founder? Who is the CEO?
  - Michael my co-founder of drchrono talks about the “Humble Brag“
  - How long have the founders known each other? If you are friends you will tough it out when things get tough.
- Problem: What is the problem?
- Market: How big is the market? Is there competition? Is there a large amount of capital needed to start?
- Product: Can you describe the company in 1 minute.
  - Is there tech risk?
- Traction: Is this just an idea? Prototype? Have real users?
  - Do you have revenue? Do you have growth month over month?
  - Early fast growth helps.
We have X number of users, if you have traction, be sure to put that up!

The partners will ask questions and throw curve balls.

One tip: Be confident and walk up to others at Y Combinator and say hi! There are some really amazing founders around at YC.

Be sure to listen to this great lecture from Sam Altman from Startup School

More on pitching and demoing can be found here.

How to Interview

Interviewing can be hard and having the right questions to ask is extremely important. Below are some of the best questions to ask when interviewing. Always remember, interviewing is a two-way street, the candidate is looking for the right fit and you are looking for someone you can work with. Think to yourself “Can I work with this person?”, “Would I enjoy having dinner with this person?”, “Is this person a good culture fit”?

I look for a blend of different people to bring into my startup, people who might not have domain expertise but have the right a great foundation or attitude with some people who have some domain expertise. Diversity in your team makes it stronger, people from all different backgrounds of life and level of experience.

People generally say,

Hire slow/fire fast

I don’t necessarily agree with this, you really should be forcing yourself to interview at least 10 candidates to give you perspective. Then hire the right person fast. Make calculated and conscious hiring decisions and avoid the “fire fast” part of what people generally say scenario. Firing fast can be demoralizing. Hiring slow, with lots of of interviewing gives a greater perspective into what you are really looking for.

One tip I have is asking a question in several ways, maybe three different ways, to see if a candidate is really sticking to what they initially said when you asked a question the first time. Think about people who can help the company and company plan evolve. Let’s assume that things change in a startup as they do, you need people that can adopt and change the company as the plan changes.

The best skill to look for is to learn how to learn and finding people that know are optimizing learning to learn. Innovation is happening all around us and skills from yesterday are irrelevant to what is needed for tomorrow.

Also, I generally keep a score of how well the candidate is doing, this is the scoring system, below is an example of it for a phone interview and an in-person interview-

Phone Interview Scale, Attributes [1-10]
- Phone skills
- Knowledge of Healthcare 8, 7 years at another EHR
- Knowledge of Technology 6
- People Skills/EQ 9
- IQ 7
- Why pick drchrono? Stagnate Growth at current job
- Ideal salary range? 45k
- Willing to move? Yes, Baltimore, NY, not CA
- Willing to take any position? Yes
In person Interview Excellence survey, Attributes [1-10]
- Good relationship skills?
- Intelligence?
- High energy?
- Self-direction?
- Positive attitude?
- Curious person?
- Going to school to better themselves?
- Always on time?
- Grow and learn and wanted to take on more responsibility?
- Didn’t wine if they needed to stay late or work on the weekend?

From Warren Buffet

Things to look for, these are not questions but qualities to look for in a person!.

Integrity (most important)
Intelligence
Energy

From Reed Hoffman

In every job, you create an artifact.

Founders create the vision statement, the org chart, the financing strategy
Business development creates the signed contracts with other companies
Engineers create code

Questions

What is the artifact you create as a …?

From Kim Malone Scott

Auther of the book Radical Candor.

Questions

Tell me your story?
Tell me about a time you made a big mistake?
What is the hardest feedback you ever got in your life?

Kim is an executive coach to CEO’s and exec’s like the CEO of Evernote Chris O’Neill.

From “Creating Magic” by Lee Cockerell

Questions

What do you do outside of the office?
When you hear the word successful who is the first person who comes to mind?
What would you do differently?

Regina Hartley

Ask revealing questions.
Use structured interviews when possible.

Questions

What is the best idea you ever came up with to improve your business?
How do you plan your day?
What would you do if you found out if your boss was doing something illegal or unethical?
What was the reason you left?
Explain how you plan your day?

Jen Miller of the Gallup Organization

Screening.
Profiles of people.
Find out what really matters to people.
Hire someone you would gladly report to yourself.

Questions

What really matters most to you?
Leisure activities?
What are your passions?
What do you believe in?
Demonstrate your expertise.

Questions for Leaders

Ask yourself how will this leader make my VP of Sales or VP of Marketing better?
How do you stay on top of the labor costs in your organization?

Ask for references, ask for the person’s last company performance review of them. Also get “off-sheet” references, people who know them but aren’t on the potential person’s reference sheet. Find out about the interview candidates reputation.

Some other great reading on hiring –

I do also recommend using Evernote as a tool to record your notes. I also recommend starting an interview scorecard template.

Honored as Winner of the 2016 Stony Brook 40 Under 40 Award

Michael Nusimow and I named third year in a row by alma mater Stony Brook University as tech visionaries

stony-brook-edu-40-under-forty-2016-daniel-kivatinos-michael-nusimow-drchrono-3

Michael and I have been honored by our alma mater Stony Brook University as recipients of the 2016 40 Under 40 Award. The 2016 Stony Brook 40 Under 40 award winners are selected for accomplishments and contributions in industries such as education, technology, healthcare, law, sports, science & engineering and many others.

We are thrilled to be recognized once again by our alma mater Stony Brook University. We want to thank the staff and alumni committee for recognizing our efforts and we feel privileged that we can give back to the Stony Brook community.

stony-brook-edu-40-under-forty-2016-daniel-kivatinos-michael-nusimow-drchrono-1

Michael and I continue to engage with Stony Brook University’s student and alumni community. We enjoy working closely with the young entrepreneurs and students in the engineering and computer science schools and furthermore helping them learn what it takes to build a tech startup in Silicon Valley. Michael and I started drchrono in 2009 with the mission to make healthcare more innovative with the drchrono Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform for physicians and patients. drchrono’s fully integrated mobile EHR solution is transforming how providers are caring for their patients. Michael Nusimow has a B.E. in Computer Engineering & Computer Science from Stony Brook University. I hold an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science & Psychology from Stony Brook University.

More information and the entire list of the 2016 Stony Brook 40 Under 40 Award recipients are available at http://www.stonybrook.edu/40underforty/2016/.

Creating Company Culture: Walking 1-on-1 Meetings

Image by Akshay Parakh

If you are looking to learn a bit about drchrono’s company culture or enhance your team’s communication and culture, read on, this topic is on the walking 1-on-1 meeting and walking in general. The drchrono team goes on walks.

The Walking Meeting

Colleagues, my cofounder Michael of drchrono and I go on walks to talk about strategy, give and get updates and learn from each other.

In the early days even before we incorporated back in 2008, Michael and I would go on lengthy walks to talk about action’s we needed to take to build a company in healthcare from nothing. We both knew creating a lasting company in the healthcare space would be a long-term endeavor. Communicating rapidly every step of the way would be critical. We would stroll to local coffee shops in New York City, talk along the way, grab a coffee, talk some more and walk around the city. Walking also paid off in finding some critical team members. A great example: We hired Hong our design leader simply by going on walks with him. Hong and I knew each other as friends. I would tell Hong a bit about what Michael and I were working on and he would give me input on design, we did this a bit and those walks led to him joining us early on.

Walking made us more productive. We would go for a walk, get our legs moving, blood would be flowing and get our minds in a good headspace where we would think clearly about the company. We have been doing this since the beginning of the company.

Investor Walk Meetings

Paul Graham of Y Combinator, our first investor in drchrono would do the same thing with us, when he and the Y Combinator partners invested in drchrono in 2011, Michael, Paul and I would have “walking office hours”, wandering around nearby the Y Combinator office. Before we started any meeting with Paul, he would ask:

Is this a walking meeting or a sitting meeting? ~ Paul Graham

Most of the time it was a walking meeting. The meetings were extremely productive.

To this day, we go walking with several of our investors.

Follow in the Footsteps of Giants

Aristotle was a “peripatetic” lecturer, he walked about as he taught. The peripatetic school was a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece. Allegedly the school name came from Aristotle’s habit of walking while lecturing.

Ludwig van Beethoven was an enthusiastic wanderer, taking short breaks while working and spending his afternoons sauntering around Vienna. He would take a paper and pencil with him to write down ideas. Influence his wooded walks can be heard in his symphony’s.

A Steve Jobs & John Sculley Walk

Steve Jobs the cofounder of Apple made it a habit of having walking meetings and was know for his long walks, which he used for contemplation, exercise, problem solving, and meetings. According to CNNMoney, Steve Jobs did this particularly for first encounters. “Taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation.”, from Jobs’ biography.

“Taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation.” ~Jobs’ biography

Mark Zuckerberg the founder and CEO of Facebook also likes first meetings with people to be on the go. A walking conversation is natural, distraction-free and you can focus.

Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, would take new hires for his ‘Gandhi walk’. This is a historic walk through the streets of San Francisco, where he talks about the companies guiding principles.

There are countless others, like Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Harry S. Truman and Charles Dickens to name a few who would walk to brain storm and talk with others.

A Deeper Look

Walking meetings are great for 1-1’s or ~3 people. With larger groups, a walk sometimes gets a bit more complicated with people pairing into smaller groups to talk. But even larger group walks can be productive if you want everyone to communicate and facilitate team camaraderie.

There are health reasons and research on how walking makes you more productive. A study conducted by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology incorporates an experiment where participants took the Guilford’s Alternative Uses Test, a timed exercise used to measure artistic thinking: first while sitting and then while walking on a treadmill. The results? For 81% of participants, walking increased creativity, improving creative output by an average of 60%. That is a big change in creative thinking.

We have a walking desk at the chronoplex for the team, I can attest to it, it works.

drchrono-chronoplex-walking-desk

The TED presentation from Nilofer Merchant gives some alarming statistic’s: we’re sitting, on average, for 9.3 hours per day, with 7.7 hours spent sleeping. “Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don’t even question how much we’re doing it,” Merchant states.

This is a great talk from TED on walking:

A Walking Culture

Some of the greatest minds used walking as a tool, it is a simple way to enhance your productivity, let the creativity flow and to allow the team to communicate. I highly recommend the next meeting you take, do it going for a walk. You will be surprised at how well a walking meeting works.

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono

Daniel drives direction, brand vision, and business strategy for drchrono. Daniel’s focus has been in the technology space since 2001, as a software engineer and entrepreneur. Daniel holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science & Psychology from Stony Brook University.

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

The Basics of SaaS Metrics

5 C’s.

1. Committed MRR – this is the same as MRR if you don’t have an implementation phase ie. someone starts paying as soon as they commit.

2. Churn – you can calculate unit churn as “paying users lost”/”total paying users in previous month”. If you track cumulative MRR, you can also calculate $ churn in the same way

3. Cash (operational cash flow) – the financial statements

4. CAC – is the total acquisition cost (sales + marketing) divided by the gross new paying users added

5. CLTV – for this ideally you have the cohort as churn for a cohort should be going down over time. Else you can do as upfront cash + MRR*(1/annual churn) – CAC. This is pre time value of money to keep it simple

Some more great information to read.

How do medical claims work?

Because there are a heck of a lot of medical claims being submitted electronically through drchrono, the questions is how do we do this? There is something called the “EDI”. “EDI” simply means Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI is the electronic interchange of business information using a standardized format; a process which allows one company (e.g. drchrono) to send information to another company, (e.g. Emdeon/Change Healthcare, TriZetto, iHCFA) electronically rather than with paper. (Learn more here.)

It all starts with “EDI 837 Health Care Claim”: The EDI 837 transaction set is the format established to meet HIPAA requirements for the electronic submission of healthcare claim information. The claim information included amounts to the following, for a single care encounter between patient and provider: A description of the patient. Of course, there are many different types of claims that can be submitted:

Insurance: To submit the claim to the patient’s primary medical insurance.
Secondary Insurance: To submit the claim to the patient’s secondary medical insurance.
Auto Accident Claim: To submit the claim to the patient’s Auto insurance.
Worker’s Comp Claim: To submit the claim to the patient’s Workers compensation insurance.
Durable Medical Equipment Claim: To submit the claim to the patient’s Durable Medical Equipment insurance.

The 837 file is simply transaction file that is submitted from drchrono to a clearing house, which is then sent on to an Insurance Provider/company. There are a number of other transactions which also have numbers associated with them.

I’ll give you one more example: if a medical professional wants to check electronically if a patient has eligibility coverage, the medical provider press a button in drchrono, which triggers an EDI 270 Health Care Eligibility/Benefit Inquiry transaction.

The EDI 270 Health Care Eligibility/Benefit Inquiry transaction set is used to request information from a healthcare insurance plan about a policy’s coverages, typically in relation to a particular plan. The in turn then Insurance Provider sends back to drchrono the EDI 271 Health Care Eligibility/Benefit Response transaction, this is the response back to drchrono to let the provider know what a patient’s coverages is under a plan.

There are a number of these types of transactions, below is a great diagram of the workflow.

drchrono-life-of-a-medical-claim-how-it-all-works

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

The Precision Medicine Initiative

The more data we have, the more we’re going to be able to learn.~ President Obama, February 25, 2016

On Thursday, February 25, 2016, I was honored to be able to do something that was hugely rewarding, professionally and personally. I was able to represent drchrono, joining the White House administration, President Obama, scientific experts, and key medical/tech leaders at a Summit in Washington, D.C. A major part of the focus of the summit included a collaborative announcement on the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). The goal of the collaboration is to bring together the private sector, public sector and government to design and implement a new technology for healthcare.

Digital health is a field that drchrono has been focused on for years. From the start of the company, we have been bringing together many players, having a “let’s work together” open culture, partnering with many different developers and companies. We are convinced that linking medical records together from various Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors is critical in giving a whole picture of the history of a persons care, also bringing in genomics, big data and analytics together will only enhance our understanding for more precise and better healthcare for an individual, helping us understand disease, improving outcomes and helping to lower/contain costs.

We have already started the process by allowing healthcare-focused software developers, companies and Internet of Things (IoT) device organizations to push and pull data from the drchrono platform. The relevant data can then be used when needed. We are in talks with genomics labs and genomics software vendors on how we might be able to bring more relevant data to physicians fingertips. This will help physicians and care professionals make more focused decisions, giving them insights on what medications and procedures have worked successfully in patients like the one they are seeing now that have similar genomic patterns. Physicians and care providers can predict which patients are at risk, and then can deliver appropriate treatments before a patient’s condition worsens, by discovering and seeing these similar genomic patterns.

Around the world we are generating large amounts of data, coming from our new ability to sequence the human genome and our second genome, the microbiome. There are new opportunities to analyze and understand disease onset and progression, and how and why people stay healthy, also on how people get healthy. Genomics is an interesting field for cancer researchers and big data companies. Researchers and industry have started to develop and use tools to understand cancers, via genomic data, looking to help diagnose and treat it. The goal of looking at genomics is to give patients personalize medicine, to understand an individuals illness, environment and to design treatments for that individual. ( Note: Some great software genomics companies worth taking a look at are Station X and Real Time Oncology. )

Providing proper treatment to a person at the right time improves outcomes which in turn lowers cost. Given the right treatment, people get better faster. Precision medicine is valuable in controlling and in reducing care spend.

With Obama’s dogs Bo and Sunny at The White House.

drchrono has worked with InfoGard to get meaningful use Stage 1 and Stage 2 certified, but this is the first time we will be working with the White House directly, joining PMI, specifically the “Sync for Science” pilots. Companies that joined will be working in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. The “Sync for Science” pilots end goal is to develop open standards with electronic health record companies, there are six EHRs working toward this goal, including drchrono. The lessons learned will inform efforts to scale individual data access and donation for precision medicine research, and could be used to support implementation of consumer-mediated data access across the healthcare industry. The data submitted will be based on the patients “opt-in”.

The President’s announcement brought together several hundred people from different organizations that have made commitments. Around forty organizations, including drchrono, made substantial commitments of funding, training, data and other resources to support PMI. It was great to meet with key players to understand how we can make PMI successful.

As part of the announcement, drchrono committed to enabling and supporting Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). FHIR is an Application Programming Interface (API) for exchanging electronic health records. The standard was created by the Health Level Seven International (HL7) health-care standards organization. The FHIR API will work in tandem with our existing medical API. We have alway supported an “open the data” API culture, allowing developers to build on our platform, allowing them to build in amazing ways, enabling FHIR will allow the developer community and others an additional API option.

Taimur at HIMSS 2016 talking about FHIR and drchrono

As we make progress over the next coming weeks and months, we will talk about the ways we are making progress on the “Sync for Science” pilots. We are all excited at drchrono about PMI. Enabling open and connected medical records data to make better decisions for personalized healthcare only makes sense. With huge amounts of data also coming from proteomics, genomics, and focusing on a total organism instead of just anatomy, enables new paths for prevention and treatment.

Some key resources about PMI:

Keep up to date with PMI on twitter as well.

Doctors have always recognized that every patient is unique, and doctors have always tried to tailor their treatments as best they can to individuals. You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type — that was an important discovery. What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard? What if figuring out the right dose of medicine was as simple as taking our temperature?

~ President Obama, January 30, 2015

Watch the event here –

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

Healthcare Hacker Challenge: Clinical iFrame API

A great healthcare challenge for developers is to see what you can build on top of the drchrono iFrame API technology. Pick from this idea list. Be sure to make your iFrame webpage responsive for mobile screens also.

This is a quick explanation on how a developer can leverage our API and iFrames within drchrono

Below are examples of other developers placing technology into an iFrame.

One example, we now can place box.com‘s new DICOM viewer right into the medical record via an iFrame:

drchrono-medical-records-iframe-ehr-api-health-record

Also within the physicians inbox, a message can be placed from another developer via an iFrame, leveraging our API, to send a message from another app, below is an example again with box:

drchrono-medical-records-iframe-ehr-api-messages

And lastly a developer can now place an iFrame within the clinical note/documentation section, so while a physician is at the point of care with a patient, the doctor enter data the normal way using drchrono, but now also has the option to use another developer’s note taking tools. Below is an example from AgileMD ( https://www.agilemd.com/ ), AgileMD is the first partner to leverage this technology:

drchrono-medical-records-iframe-ehr-api-clinical-note

Here is a great video showing off what the AgileMD team has done, it really explains things well:

Janet Wager from Programmable Web wrote a great article talking about the launch of our Clinical EHR Medical Records iFrame API, take a look.

We are now getting around 4+ million API calls per month and this is growing fast. We have around 700 developers who have signed up to build on drchrono. The latest API documentation can be found here with the iFrame documentation – https://www.drchrono.com/api/.

Once you sign up for the drchrono API, be sure to email careers@drchrono.com to get expedited access, let them know you are a hackathon candidate!

Ok once you’re in and have access you can get access to your API account settings here – https://drchrono.com/api_keys/, also the docs can be found here – https://drchrono.com/api-docs/

Also please join the drchrono API community here to also ask questions – https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/drchrono-api

For single sign on you can get a login button here – https://www.drchrono.com/logos/

Once you complete your project, lets our team at know at careers@drchrono.com, send us a video of it in action and submit your project to GitHub in a public repository, we will review the code!

If the engineering team loves your code, we will bring you in for an in-person hackathon with us!

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono
Daniel drives direction, brand vision, and business strategy for drchrono. Daniel’s focus has been in the technology space since 2001, as a software engineer and entrepreneur. Daniel holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science & Psychology from Stony Brook University.

Top 7 Healthcare, Fitness and Medical APIs & SDKs

Top 7 Healthcare, Fitness and Medical API’s & SDK’s

There are a lot of innovative things happening in around healthcare, wearables, new insurance companies, ACOs, amazing new software and hardware; All with the goal of having a better healthcare experience.

The healthcare system in the United States and around the world can be better. At drchrono we care about making the technology fade into the background so patients and physicians can focus on what is important, quality of care and keep everyone around us healthy. So it is core for us to have the most state of the art innovative API we can. There are a number of companies that feel the same way.

Below are some of the most innovative companies I’ve seen around in healthcare tackling that one specific problem, allowing data to flow easily from doctor to patient, doctor to doctor and medical practices and institutions through an API (application programming interface). Having software talk, sending health focused data back and forth is critical, flowing from medical practice to hospital to family member. If you are thinking about leveraging an API to innovate – to push and pull healthcare data I recommend taking a look at the all of the APIs below –

(1) Box API

box Inc has a great API to store healthcare data. The company also has great security controls around metadata and data sharing. If you’re thinking about building something in and around HIPAA compliant storage, look at the box API.

https://developers.box.com/

(2) Human API

Human API allows access to data via their API. They have a Restful API and they connect into large healthcare network’s. One great example app that is using HumanAPI to connect healthcare networks is Glow, they are leveraging Human API so they don’t have to make those connection to some older health networks.

https://humanapi.co/

(3)FHIR Argonaut API Standard

The government is working on fixing the healthcare API issue. The main initiative around this is FHIR Argonaut. FHIR Argonaut is an up-and-coming API that is state-of-the-art and Restful, it is open source on GIT and backed by the government. The API is in its early stages but keep an eye out for this one.

https://hl7-fhir.github.io/argonauts.html

(4)BetterDoctor API

Better Doctor is a company that helps you find the right physician for you. They have an API. If you need to find out something about doctors. They allow partners to connect in to get information about a physician, location, contact info and more.

https://developer.betterdoctor.com/

(5)Doximity API

Doximity has an API for doctors, think of doximity as the LinkedIn for physicians. If you wanted to connect and build with some great information in and around doctors take a look at their API.

https://www.doximity.com/developers/home

(6)drchrono API and SDK

drchrono is an electronic health records company, that focuses on mobility on iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and responsive web. Wehave an API focused on medical records, practice management, scheduling and medical billing. With over 70k physicians, over 4+ million patients and over 500+ million in medical billing processed per year, we have the most modern medical records Restful API, leveraging Physician OAuth and Single Sign on.

https://www.drchrono.com/api/

(7) Apple HealthKit API and SDK

Apple has a great API and SDK called HealthKit, it allows a developer to build an app on iOS and push and pull data into and out of the app. Apple’s Health app is where you can view this information. Apple announced a bunch of new HealthKit metrics at WWDC 2015 — metrics that include UV exposure, how often you’re seated, reproductive health, and track a woman’s period.

https://developer.apple.com/healthkit/

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono

~ Life is short, build stuff that matters.

Top 15 Health & Fitness iPhone Apps for 2015

There are a number of exceptional apps out this year, 2015 for iOS ( iPhone and iPad ) health and fitness. Below is a list of a few of my personal favorite apps that I think are unique and great to try.

Meditation & Yoga Apps

There are two great meditation apps out, Headspace and Smiling Mind.
Smiling Mind and Headspace both have iPhone apps and websites that a patient can access.

Both of these apps are great for stress relief for people who would like to meditate. Headspace gives ten free sessions then you need to pay for more sessions and Smiling Mind allows you to access all the meditation sessions for free.

Headspace was established in May 2010, by Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson. Puddicombe is a former Buddhist monk. Smiling Mind is a completely free app founded by Jane Martino October 2012.

Check out this great video from Andy:

Another great app for Yoga is Yoga Studio. It is an iPad and iPhone app only, they don’t have a website, but you won’t need it since the app is really focused on the mobility. The app is a one-time purchase, but it’s well worth it if you like doing Yoga. There are so many different sessions in the app that the price is an excellent deal. I highly recommend this app to anyone who’s looking to try Yoga or active in doing Yoga but looking for great instructional videos with step-by-step Yoga techniques and classes.

Workout Apps

Runtastic is another great app that I’ve used in the past for jogging sessions it tracks everything in and around running: miles, tracks times, best times and worse times and speeds.

There are other apps like Strava, I hear great things about it for biking as well as running.

Two very focused iPhone apps that are great are Sit Ups Pro and Squats Pro. Both of these apps are very simple and have one focus which makes it simple and easy to use. The apps don’t confuse you with too many options. You know exactly what they do.

Do you have 7 minutes? There is a whole movement around 7-minute workouts, here are a few:

In a short amount of time you can get a great workout in! These apps have great quick training sessions.

I also highly recommend this up though it is a little bit more intense and the meditation and yoga apps I recommended.

Sometimes you need to time a workout, one great app that I highly recommend is an app called Timer+, you can set a timer for how long you’re going to work out or howlongyou’re going to be jogging for, or whatever workout you’re doing. E.g.: Use Timer+ to time workout sessions say a 20-minute workout session or 30-minute workout session.

Weight and Calorie Apps

There are two great weight and calories apps. MyFitnessPal and LoseIt!. LoseIt! and MyFitnessPal are great for tracking your weight. LoseIt! also has a social network you can join for support. Both of the apps are free and have access via the web and iOS.

Health Journaling Apps

One of the best journaling apps for iOS and for Mac I’ve seen to document your day is an app called Day One. This app is iOS focused but also completely mac focused. I like this simple interface and how simplistic it is to journal daily from this app, it’s a great app for anyone who wants to journal daily about health and fitness progress.

Personal Health Record Apps

Some of the apps above are connected directly to Apple’s Health which means that the data that you enter into the apps from sync into Apple’s Health. You can also sync this data into your personal health record. onpatient is an app that can take this data and share it with your physician if you so choose. onpatient also allows you to message with you physician, if you have a question about a medical bill, schedule an appointment or need a prescription refill try onpatient.

So if you want to track something and also have it in your personal health record you can now do that … and you can share that with you doctor.

Article by Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder, drchrono