Xoc modernizes the doctor's patient chart

Quinn Ahrens has seen the chaos of a

medical practice firsthand.

As an engineer for Medical Manager,

maker of a medical billing system, Ahrens

spent countless hours installing software in

doctors' offices.What he saw was physicians,

nurses, receptionists all scrambling

to access the same patient's chart at the

same time.

That's what gave him the idea for Xoc

Doc - pronounced shock dock a system

for maintaining electronic medical records.

"Xoc Doc makes the charts available to

everyone in the doctor's office at once," said

Ahrens, founder and president of Xoc Corp.

in Reno.

In 1998, two years after moving to

Reno, Ahrens founded Xoc with money

from local and overseas angel investors. The

company spent two and half years developing

Xoc Doc and another year testing it

inside a medical practice in Reno and

another in Las Vegas.

Now the system is commercially available.

It consists of the Xoc-developed application

software running on a Windows-based

tablet PC from Fujitsu Corp. Those PCs

essentially 3.2-pound handheld touch screens

run off a local server, a Pentium-based

Compaq Corp. ProLiant, via Cisco Corp.

wireless networking gear. Xoc, a certified

Compaq dealer, sells and installs it all.

The Xoc software is designed to make it

easy for doctors and nurses to make the

transition from familiar paper charts to the

new electronic ones. The initial screen is a

room full of file cabinets that a user touches

to open and retrieve a patient's chart. The

pages of the chart look just like their paper

counterparts.

"We've taken great pains to keep the

learning curve down," said Ahrens.

"We trained our physicians one at

time and it didn't take too long to train.

Maybe 30 minutes to an hour each," said

Dianne Wilfrid, R.N., operations manager

with Urologic Surgeons Ltd., which tested

Xoc Doc.

The Reno medical practice has nine

tablets that are shared by its seven urologists

and nurses. The office, which has 12,000

active patients, has already scanned all its

patients' histories and now runs a paperless

office, said Wilfrid.

"It just makes good sense," said Wilfrid.

One reason it makes sense is HIPAA,

the Health Insurance Portability and

Accountability Act of 1996 that mandates

all doctors and hospitals meet patient privacy

guidelines by October 2003. The federal

act has been a boon to computer makers and

software providers because much of the

medical community needs to install new

technology to comply.

That's brought competition into the

market, though. Local competitors include

modeMD, the University of Nevada Reno

spin off (see page 1, Oct. 7). That system is

more complementary than competition, said

Ahrens, because it uses PDAs and is geared

to hospitals.

But Xoc has plans to expand. It has

installed a Xoc Doc system with 17 tablets

at a Washoe Health System physicians'

office and will soon start rolling out similar

systems to five more health system offices.

That installation will someday likely

include the system's hospital, the Washoe

Medical Center. And Ahrens said other

hospitals have expressed interest in a system

adapted for them.

Xoc, which employs five people, also has

plans to expand beyond Nevada. "We're

starting a national reseller strategy," said

Ahrens. The company has signed up a

value-added reseller in Sacramento and

hopes to grow a nationwide network of 50

value-added resellers that will sell Xoc Doc

along with training and services.

Ahrens said Xoc expects to hit those

goals through internal expansion and not by

attracting more investment.

"It hasn't been a great market for raising

money," said Ahrens. "It's caused us to be

very frugal and keep our costs down."

And the company is continuing to

develop the technology. Through its testing

program it added at least one major feature:

the background color of a patient's chart

changes to indicate where the patient is in

the office.

Xoc is also working with Lab Corp., a

national testing laboratory, to create interfaces

to the system so that requests for tests

and the results can be automatically sent to

and from Lab Corp. to a physician's Xoc

Doc.

The tablet PC is also about to get

updated. In November, Fujitsu and other

hardware makers will bring out new systems

based on Microsoft Corp.'s Tablet PC. The

new PCs will come out in conjunction with

the next version of the software giant's operating

system called XP.

That may help to improve the handwriting

recognition software, which is still evolving.

Many of Xoc Doc's pages use check-off

forms but better handwriting recognition software

can only help. That and Microsoft's

endorsement of the tablet PC concept could

be a boon to Xoc Doc and applications like it.

"Right now," said Ahrens, "we're all

pretty much at the starting gate."