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eHealth:
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Case Study: Overlake Hospital Medical Center

Information on Demand: Consumer-Controlled Medical Records

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Internet Use as a Survival Strategy

Case Study Zone

Who is eMed?

Case Study: Overlake Hospital Medical Center, Bellevue, Wash.

In connecting patients with their physicians, the Internet is proving to be a powerful adjunct to office visits.

By Bill Crounse, MD

Our collective futures lie in the emedicine space. Physically, however, Overlake Hospital Medical Center sits on 19 acres in downtown Bellevue, Wash. One of the unique things about our geography is our proximity to Seattle, Lake Washington, and Microsoft Corp. We are the hospital for Microsoft, which is both a blessing and, at times, a bit of a curse. We find ourselves in a truly remarkable environment of growing communities, a strong economy, high technology, and high expectations. In fact, we adopted as our advertising slogan, a few years ago, “When searching for excellence, people who could go anywhere choose Overlake Hospital.” The hospital serves a community known for having millionaires and billionaires by the dozens; these are people who literally could go anywhere. We are always pleased (and sometimes surprised) that they continue to come to Overlake Hospital, home to some of the richest babies in the world.

We are situated in the midst of Microsoft and other companies that are nationally and internationally well known. We are engaged in reorganizing and reinventing the quintessential community or regional hospital. We have a hospital, but we also have a real estate division that maintains and rents out the properties on our 19 acres. We have, like most community hospitals, a foundation charged with raising money, but Overlake Hospital is one of the few not-for-profit community hospitals in Washington state. Our CEO and some highly visionary people on our board made the decision to move us into a new kind of business. Our Overlake Venture Center was established partly to create incentives that would keep people involved with the hospital and partly to give our very smart staff a place where their best ideas can be tried. But mainly we created it to endow the future health care of our community.

THE INTERNET AS BROADCAST MEDIUM

I began my career in broadcasting and then became a physician, eventually bringing the two careers together. As I saw this thing called the Internet coming along, I may have looked at it differently than most people did. I saw the Internet not as anything that had to do with computers, but as an immensely powerful broadcasting tool. Traditionally, most of us have reached the Internet using desktop and laptop computers. All that is changing, however. By 2006, every television manufactured in the world for sale in the United States has to be a digital television. Digital signals will mean that our televisions will be on-ramps to the Internet. More important, a host of new devices are now being released that also are connected to the Internet.