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."
