Amion stands for the question every physician asks at one point or other in their residency – “Am I on?”. As I’ve pointed out before, scheduling is one of the prime candidates for being done externalized – done right by a handful of players, and utilized by everyone else.
Unlike the recent upstarts though, Amion has been around for 15 years. You can read the full story here. And unlike vanity metrics thrown around by other start-ups, Amion probably is used by over 100,000 users, as the company claims. They have products aimed at three user categories -residents, attendings, and organizations. Individuals can schedule their blocks, clinics, shifts synchronized with their personal calendars on external services (like Google Calendar or iCloud). Nuances like shift swaps , didactic pairings are probably what makes it highly relevant product for physician scheduling. Organizations probably value features like the vacation request management, policy-based rules checks, vacation/duty-hour reports, managing last-minute coverage changes etc. Plus there are some logical overlays likes auto-scheduler and template-based scheduling. Last year, Amion announced that they were launching a mobile app in partnership with Doximity. It does make sense that Amion user profiles be powered by Doximity, but the tone of press release seems to suggest more intimacy (scope of which I can’t understand).
For those who dismiss scheduling as a calendering feature, not a product by itself, think again. Here is the rough categories of solutions aimed at the scheduling puzzle in healthcare:
- Scheduling for outpatient, retail care – Eg. ZocDoc
- Scheduling for referrals – Eg. MyHealthDIRECT
- Scheduling for urgent or emergent care – Eg. InQuicker, iTriage
- Scheduling for medical staff – Eg. YourNurseIsOn (started with nurses, now all staff), Amion (physicians), Lightning Bolt
Chances of consolidation? Sure. But more likely are acquisitions by incumbent EHR technology players. Either way, it’s fascinating to see the breed of solutions as evidence for the inherent complexity of delivering timely, coordinated care.
November 2013 Update: Stuart Karon from Amion was kind enough to reach out and explain the Doximity-Amion relationship. Seems like it started with Doximity pulling schedule data for it’s users from Amion. They ended up spinning that part off into an independent app (for Amion). That way Amion got a professional mobile app with minimal investment and Doximity got a channel for getting new users onto the network. Symbiotic…