Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Peter Hudson, Founder of iTriage (Part 1)

People want simplicity, efficiency and facility in everything they do. Monitoring and maintaining their health is no exception. In fact, when they’re not feeling well and want answers, people tend to be more rather than less impatient.

iTriage LLC, is a Denver, Colorado–based global health care technology company that was founded in 2008 by two emergency medicine physicians. iTriage makes it easier for people to figure out what might be wrong with them, and where they should seek treatment. Consumers around the world have downloaded iTriage’s free mobile app to their iPhones and Androids, and health care providers use it to share with those consumers important health information. 

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Peter. If you could, please give us some context about iTriage and your background.

Peter Hudson: Absolutely. I’m an ER doc by training. I trained in the Bay Area at Highland and UCSF in early ‘90s. So, I’ve been an ER doctor for about 20 years, and so has my co-founder, Wayne Guerra. We started iTriage after witnessing patients struggling with health information over 20 years of practicing in the ER and watching. As you know, in the ER, that’s where everything has sort of broken down; there are people who can’t find a doctor, don’t know what’s wrong with them, are dying, have been traumatized. I don’t think anyone wakes up in the morning and says, “Man, I hope I show up in the ER today.”

What we realized is that there’s a huge deficit of readily accessible medical information for questions such as, What could be causing my medical problem; where should I go, and what kind of treatment should I get? There are a lot of websites out there that have parts of it, but there’s nothing that tied it all together very well. And there’s certainly nothing that had that information in a readily accessible mobile format. When the iPhone allowed for software to distribute through the iTunes or the App Store, we thought it would be strategic to build a consumer technology that made sense to what we see as the major participants in the health care delivery system, the consumer, the provider and the payer. There was a lot of waste in the system. People were going to the wrong places, weren’t aware of what their treatment options might be, both home treatment and different options when they got to the hospital and saw their doctors, and then managing their conditions after diagnosis appropriately. We believed that we could create an actionable technology that served as a utility for health care consumers in mobile platform first. We’re a mobile first company, and then build that platform into different delivery mechanisms, Web, widgets, mobile browser, Android, iPhone, and so on to get it out to as many people as possible.

SM: Tell me a bit more, in more granular terms, what does the application do?

PH: The application allows you to look up lots of different information that is categorized by symptoms, conditions, providers, and providers by doctors or facilities, medications, procedures and then store your own personal information within the same platform. And then we connect between those items, like what kind of conditions causes certain symptoms? What kinds of providers take care of specific conditions? And then what providers are in my local area? And then which ones allow for appointment setting, wait times, things like that that really matter to somebody who’s seeking care.

SM: OK. And how long ago did you launch this?

PH: We launched the company in March 2009. In January 2011, we had one million downloads, and we currently have six million downloads. So, we’re growing pretty rapidly.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Peter Hudson, Founder of iTriage
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