Sf Bay Pediatrics Talks about Google Apps

ANDREW JOHNSON: Traditionally, the health care industry is-- I would go so far to say, decades behind in terms of using information technology. The collaboration via emails, the exchange of information, it's very slow to travel. When almost any physicians or groups get together, that's what they talk about, is the fact that the information only goes out by word of mouth. ALAN JOHNSON: And then our interoffice communications about calendar, spreadsheets, or documents was paper. In my particular business, where we'll all have to be somewhere among the various doctors, and it changes to some degree, and we all have to know where each of us is, if you forget your paper, then you forget where you are. And then you have to call somebody and find out. ANDREW JOHNSON: The reason why I chose Google Apps for my domain was, it was a very cost-effective, feature-rich-- it was a very good solution. It had almost everything we needed to get off the ground. And it really only took about half a day to implement and do it. If somebody has a document on their computer, the problem is, it's on their computer. And if they are in a different location at that time, it's really hard to access that document that they have specially prepared in terms of what the patient needs. So with the documents and spreadsheets, we can just go online, click view, hit print. And we can hand it to the patient right there. We had to remind all of our staff to get vaccinated against the flu. Traditionally, we would just have a list of everybody and they would check off their name. And we'd have to send out reminders and call up people and track them down to make sure they did it. Now we just use a little message from the start page to say, hey, have you done your vaccinations? And they respond, yes. It's a very changing world, the whole medical industry. New things come out every day. Trade journals, they have information. And it is so easy now just to say, send this to everybody out on the staff, and then everybody gets it to read it. It really doesn't matter where you are. You don't have to have a dedicated workstation. You just sign online. You could be on the beach. You can be on vacation. You can still check all those things. From a personal perspective, when I don't have to answer seven questions on why I can't open this attachment, or I get all this spam in here, how do I deal with all that, that makes me a lot happier. More or less, I would recommend Google Apps to anybody out there. It's a great program. There is no real downside to it. It's pretty much got infinite expandability, especially since Google is always listening to new features and new requests out there. I can't see it going anywhere but getting better. So I don't see why anybody should not be using it, in terms of both cost-effectiveness and features. It just took that one complication out of the equation and just made it much better and much more efficient in terms of delivering information to our patients, as well as providing the best care. Because that's what it boils down to, is the healthier our practice is, the healthier our patient becomes. And it's a win-win situation.