Meet Dr Rob Pearlman, CEO & Founder of MedApps, creating more time for patient care
Doctor Rob Pearlman is the CEO & Founder of innovative startup, MedApps, creating more time for patient care by giving clinicians highly relevant information about hospitals in the palm of their hand.
The flagship app, Resident Guide, works to make hospitals more efficient by giving Doctors the information they need through an intuitive app for which every minute they spend using it are saving 5 minutes of time they would have tried to find that information themselves.
It’s nine o’clock in the morning at Stone & Chalk in the community lounge, and sleepy fintech entrepreneurs are beginning to roll into the hub finding their way to the coffee.
Dr Pearlman explains that the app was born out of his experience as an intern when he was first released onto the wards armed with a week-long orientation full of lectures detailing the inside-out procedures of the hospital and a heavy 120-page print-out.
He was asked to order a CT scan for a patient, he says, “I jumped onto the computers and placed the request, and went about the rest of my jobs. Came in the next day, and the patient hadn’t had their scan.”
He soon realised he had missed a crucial step in the procedure; faxing the form off. There goes $650 of the NSW health systems budget. Learning from this mistake, Dr Pearlman taught himself how to code and went onto create MedApps with a brilliant team directed towards helping health professionals do their jobs better.
Dr Pearlman explains that Resident Guide is like a road map for junior Doctors with protocols and procedures laid out, orientation guides, imaging and consult guides, rosters and schedules, a phone directory to bypass the hospital switchboard, and wellbeing resources.
He explains, “Being able to provide Doctors with all of the information of how the hospital operates means that they hit the ground running and have a better experience.”
MedApps streamlines workforce management meaning there’s less time spent on admin and more time for patient engagement, with Dr Pearlman’s experience as Doctor leading to insights for innovation in the medical field.
He says, “If we can free up just five minutes in a day, it’s more time for them to spend with their team and the patients. It might allow them to do some de-briefing with their team and have a coffee. Ideally, this returns some of the human elements to medicine that we have lost through the general busyness and high levels of activity that are happening”.
Today, MedApps is currently live in 21 hospitals across NSW and QLD, recently tipping over more than half of the health districts in NSW with contracts in 8 of the 15 districts.
MedApps is currently being rolled out to Nurses and Allied Health, with medical students in Toowoomba already finding a lot of value from using the platform. There’s also plans to reach New Zealand by the end of the year.
Dr Pearlman explains, “What we’ve developed is a process to reliably provide that source of initial orientation so that it can be replicated with minimal overheads for the hospital and improves patient care and saves the hospital money.”
In creating MedApps, Rob says he wanted to improve the current clunky user-interfaces used by hospitals and re-invent the UX (user experience) and UI (user-interface) so that there is human-centred design that helps clinicians do their jobs better.
Today, MedApps’ flagship app Resident Guide is a fully fledged multi-tenanted platform with inbuilt sophisticated security.
Dr Pearlman says, “Fortunately, our existing customers are also our biggest supporters and they can see how we’re making lives easier for junior Doctors. We’re actually now expanding out of that junior Doctor space to broaden the scope.”
He says enthusiastically, we’re now seeing a lot of Doctors and Nurses who are branching out into medical technology companies which is a testament to the diverse and growing startup ecosystem which explores a range of areas in Australia.
The Australian healthcare system, he says, is full of incredibly intelligent, driven and passionate people who want to make a difference.
Speaking about Stone & Chalk he says that it’s such a great central location, “The hub is an amazing place. The open-plan offices are great for collaboration, and the fintech events are always really interesting.”
Dr Pearlman says he was fortunate enough to have enough people believed in the vision that he was putting on the table and with traction MedApps is achieving, the results are speaking for themselves.
If you’d like to find out more about MedApps and access innovative digital solutions for healthcare professionals, contact them here.
Updated January 2020: MedApps is a S&C alumni
8 November 2018
