A message from our Founder

Guide and Guardian

Healthcare has reached a critical juncture. The gap between what any one of us knows and what can be known collectively is growing exponentially. These “knowledge gaps” put us and our patients at risk. Trying to keep up with the literature while dealing with increasing administrative overhead doesn't leave much time for our patients. At the same time costs have become prohibitive and more people are unable to access care. As if these issues weren't enough, we face grave time and content challenges in training our next generation of physicians. In short, we have reached the limits of what our traditional Healthcare model can accomplish.

Much has been made of the promise of Healthcare Information Technology (IT) as a means to address some of these issues. However, if IT is to play a useful role, future systems must do far more than replicate and complicate record keeping and manage billing which is what most of these systems seem to be about. Pushing papers around, whether it be physically or electronically, doesn't really address our problems. So what can we do? In dire times it's often best to return to the basics. At its core, Medical science is decision making – problem solving on behalf of patients. That should be our focus as we search for solutions.

Information Technology experts often fail to understand that our challenge is not simply a lack of information. We are immersed in a sea of information – we just don't always have it precisely when we need it or in a form that helps us make the best decisions. Nor is it in a form that optimizes intercommunication and use of care teams. Lifecom was founded to build a system that does just that. We believe it is the first medical software system built from the ground up to focus on clinical cognition. Our goal has been to build an interactive software environment reflecting how we actually practice medicine – or how we wish it were practiced. It is a time-saving software system that is able to assist our decision-making by increasing our ready fund of knowledge, identifying unrecognized patterns of illness, preventing common cognitive errors, and pre-processing raw data and complete patient history into a usable format at the bedside when critical decisions are being made. We don't want to identify problems after the fact – we want to preempt them.

Our physician role used to be to serve as “Guide and Guardian” for our patients. It can be again. The complexity of modern decision-making and unnecessarily complex external business practices have made it hard to assume that role but that doesn't have to be accepted. Lifecom was founded in order to create technologies that help restore the balance in clinical practice needed to return to our traditional role and find ways to provide access to care for all. Such a system addresses the many problems that we face while preserving the best of our traditions. These are trying times to be a physician. But as long as we remain open to innovation, embrace the new when it is of benefit, and keep the needs of our patients at the fore, we will always find our way home.

Stephen Jay Datena, M.D.