iMedExchange continues to climb the Seattle Startup Index... without yet even trying! I'm not sure what this says about the Index but I'll opt for the charitable view: i.e., that we're moving up in advance of our formal attempt to recruit members simply because we've captured the imagination of our market place. In any case, we continue to fire on all cylinders and are gathering lots of momentum. The results from January: we moved up five positions to 138 out of 260 on the overall ranking, 25 out of 39 in the Web Business to Business category (WBB) and 124 out of 206 among all web-based startups. We'll continue to have fun watching our ranking, especially as we begin to actively seek out new members.

As an aside, I noticed that skillbit (the company founded by the Seattle Startup Weekend that I mentioned in my last post) debuted at position 134 out of 260 -- actually ahead of iMedExchange! I know that the skillbit team has some smart folks working to ensure search engine optimization (SEO) so this shouldn't surprise anyone. That said, I consider it a worthy challenge to chase them up the ranks. ;)

I spent this past weekend with about 120 other Seattle startup enthusiasts at Startup Weekend, a 54-hour marathon to build a web product company from concept to launch in a single weekend. Startup Weekend was founded by a group of entrepreneurs in Boulder, CO, just last summer and already the concept has been executed in a total of 14 cities in the US, Canada and Europe. The organization, and the Weekends, are run by Andrew Hyde.

The Seattle Startup Weekend team built SkillBit.com, a tool that helps groups better understand and leverage the skills, knowledge and experience of its members. The team was divided into core groups representing software development, business development, sales and marketing, program management, user experience and graphic design. For my part, I was home-roomed with the user experience team but had privilege of working as a liaison and contributor to virtually all of the teams.

Startup Weekend was a great opportunity to connect with the local startup community as well as several successful entrepreneurs who flew into town just for the event. I am proud of all of the folks who rolled up their sleeves, built a great company and had a fabulous time while doing it. Seattle has a vibrant and talented startup community -- a great place for iMedExchange to call home.

Since opening iMedExchange Beta last week, we’ve gotten great feedback from the community. Today updates were released, most of which were made based on physician feedback. If you log into iMedExchange now you can look in the Feedback forum and see the specifics of what’s new. We’re working on more changes now, so please keep telling us what you think!
And now...random news from around the office: The top 3 employees in the iMedExchange Fantasy Football league have almost no idea how fantasy football works. Those of us that allegedly understand how it works are not doing particularly well. Today I'm trying to trade Brett Favre to Floyd. I hate to have him sit on the bench when he’s having such a great year, but I can’t possibly bench Payton Manning, so I’m hoping Favre will find a good home with someone else. If anyone has unbiased advice on whether or not I should keep Steven Jackson, please let me know.

An InformationWeek article about a security test that was recently conducted with IRS employees is quite eye-opening. Researchers called 102 IRS employees and tried to‘trick’ them into changing their computer passwords to something suggested by the caller. A surprising 61 of the 102 employees complied with the request, which could have exposed highly personal and confidential tax-payer information.

Fortunately, this was a just a test... and also a huge wake-up call. What surprises me most about this study is that only 8 of the 102 employees called administrators to check on this request or report the calls! I take it as a well-timed reminder that it never hurts to be sure when it comes to security. It's also valuable to have resources to whom you can take your questions.

The reason we’re so grateful for our iCN (iMedExchange Consultant Network), is that we have the right resources to whom we pose constant questions. Who better to ask about what physicians need, than physicians themselves? And not a small handful, but a diverse group representing broad specialties, geographic locations and practice types. So this is a quick ‘thank you’ to the iCN for being there to answer our questions... and a reminder that if you ever have questions that we can answer, we’re always available.

As our team continues to build out the iMedExchange platform, I've been thinking a lot about a piece of technology folklore from the bad old days of the early 80's. Many of us are familiar with the recent exploits of Steve Jobs -- the often lauded and maligned "inspirational-genius-ego-maniac" behind Apple's success. But, in my opinion, the greatest Jobs stories come from the early days when Apple was truly blazing a new trail.

My personal favorite involves a 1983 interchange between Jobs and Larry Kenyon, one of the key architects of the first Macintosh computer (the successor to the Apple II). The Macintosh was 10 times faster than the Apple II when actually running programs but it took several minutes boot the computer. Jobs found this unacceptable. The following account of the conversation comes from http:// folklore.org, a web site dedicated to preserving the stories behind the creation of the first Macintosh
computer:

Steve came into [Larry's] cubicle and started to exhort him. "The Macintosh boots too slowly. You've got to make it faster!"

Larry started to explain about some of the places where he thought that he could improve things, but Steve wasn't interested. He continued, "You know, I've been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day."

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and that's 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

Steve's math was wildly off: 50M seconds is only about a year and half. But his heart was in the right place -- miss no opportunity to make the product better for the user. It may be too much to expect iMedExchange to actually save lives but I know we're making every effort to create a product that will save time for those who really do help improves lives and even saves lives every day -- you, the doctors. And who knows, maybe some day that few seconds or few minutes that iMedExchange saves you really will make an important difference in the outcome of a patient. If that ever happens, I hope that you'll share that with us.


The early Machintosh team, ca. 1984.

Why software often goes bad (click to enlarge)

By way of introduction, my name is Bob Crimmins, Chief Technology Officer of iMedExchange. I have spent the past 20+ years striving to build truly useful, truly easy-to-use software. For the past six years, my mission has been to build truly useful, truly easy-to-use software for physicians. As my first contribution to the iMedExchange blog, I want to explain a little about the philosophy of iMedExchange and why I am so pleased to be a part of it. In future posts, I look forward to sharing more specific ideas about what we're up to and, importantly, I look forward to hearing you comments.

At the risk of sounding trite and hyperbolic at the same time, I have to say that I am very excited about iMedExchange... and if you are a physician then I think you should be too. Here's why: while I often hear from software vendors that "physicians haven't kept up with technology", iMedExchange believes just the opposite is true -- technology has not kept up with physicians.

By and large, the software industry caters to large, institutional healthcare interests without much consideration of the individual physicians who carry out the business of healthcare every day. In a certain way, you can't blame them... that's where the money is and that's their business. The result is big, complex systems that are expensive, hard to use, hard to support and don't add value to the day-to-day lives of individual physicians. To keep us on track technologically, I propose the following technology mission statement.

iMedExchange Technology Mission Statement 1.0:
1) Ease of use trumps all other design objectives.
2) Always strive to be the most useful place on the web for physicians.
3) If it doesn't add value to physicians then don't do it.
4) Don't assume you know what physicians want -- ask them.
5) The best ideas haven't been discovered yet -- innovate, innovate, innovate.
6) Ease of use trumps all other design objectives.

I welcome your comments about how to improve this Mission Statement.