You may or may not know Dan Slinker. He’s taught journalism at Columbia College Chicago and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. He also created the controversially hilarious fake Twitter account @mayoremanuel.
He’s written a great article you should read here. His piece is entitled “Oh God, Don’t Make Things For ‘Everyone.’” and even though he’s writing about Vertigo Comics, a subsidiary of DC Comics, his point rings true with Atlas.md.
Mr. Didio, who co-publishes DC Comics said, “What we’re trying to do is reach the biggest audience and be as successful as possible.”
And Dan’s point is that Vertigo, who has made some long running, seriously successful comics (the Sandman series, for one, was written by modern sci-fi legend, Neil Gaiman), only achieved this by making VERY SPECIFIC THINGS. In the Gaiman’s case, many of his storylines were lifted directly from Shakespeare.
One thing comes to mind when we talk about making something for everyone. That’s the Federal government. Think about it. Meaningful Use? You’re kidding us. What’s “meaningful” about setting up guidelines that encompass MILLIONS OF PATIENTS AND A SLEW OF INSURANCE COVERAGES? It’s this type of thinking that builds the labyrinthine loopholes that drive doctors crazy when they’re trying to get paid for doing their work. We’re talking HOURS on the phone sometimes, wasted. Why should hardworking people work even harder just to get paid? Medicine is a pinnacle of human achievement. It’s nuanced. It involves myriad fields with highly specialized vocabularies. Groups of outsiders (read: politicians) coming along and trying to improve its operation with one-size-fits-all solutions is plain stupid.
That’s why our goal is to get family doctors out of the nightmare, and into a profitable practice. Atlas.md is thinking the same way that Dan Slinker is. We want to make a product tailored for insurance-free concierge medicine doctors. By knowing who our niche audience is, we can make smart decisions about what will or won’t benefit them. It’s the exact opposite of what other EHR companies have done in the past. Stories like AllScripts defy logic, launching shoddy products that are mass-marketed to help doctors collect Federal reimbursements… and that are so big and clunky, no one knows what to do with them once they’re on the market.
Speaking of making things for one person, Kurt Vonnegut had a great tip in his 8 rules for creative writing. His seventh rule went, “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” The acclaimed writer had a great sense of humor. Maybe he’d appreciate the irony that people might literally be getting pneumonia because of the debacle that’s become our healthcare system.