Remember Gmail back in 2004? How about Yahoo mail back in 1997 or Hotmail in 1996? Regardless of what you are using for email, its evolved & improved (you may or may not agree) – it has changed.

From tags, to filters, to conversation grouping (my favorite) to other tricks and hacks… all to make email more – manageable.

I entered the Healthcare industry a few years ago (I am no doctor), and while my medical and healthcare knowledge is minimal, I can certainly say that there is ample opportunity to innovate.

So why the mention about email? For me, it was interesting to see and learn that in a clinical environment there is “so much going on” and that physicians want a “systems that can give them information without overloading them”. There are definitely challenges in doing that, because what you decide to leave out for the sake of simplicity might actually be needed, by someone, somewhere.

It all starts with the “Inbox”; that’s where all their results, orders, alerts, etc show up regarding all the things going on around them: Have a look at some of the interfaces they currently use, reminds me of outlook express and outlook 2000.

google searched source | Demo Video |GE’s system

Some have tried to replace the entire Inbox, but why would you want to replace such a core functionality in the first place? The ones who use these systems day in-day out know exactly where to look for what they want, yes there is a lot of information and it can get cluttered., so why not build complimentary products that help deliver a smaller snapshot of the big picture – it’s like searching for something on google, you get a general idea of what the page might contain in the return results and you can then decide if you actually want to dig deeper.

It would be neat if you could take all this information, and funnel it into some sort of relative context that “tells you a bit about everything” and then you can funnel down to a “tell me everything relative to this one thing”… Someone must have surely done this already, maybe not for physicians/healthcare, but for some other “busy” information context; hasn’t anyone done this???

If you followed this blog post through twitter, then you are already on a platform that does just this. If you used twitter on the iPad, then you are already using a design that I used as inspiration for my idea for what a Physicians Inbox (Providers Inbox) could look like.

This is still a rough idea, there are several things to consider but it would definitely be fun to change the way physicians interact with their inbox.