Nicholas Mollanazar

After reading the Airbnb case, my solutions would be the following:

1. Present more sophisticated consumer reviews: establishing a core group of elite reviewers is a powerful tool utilized by many commercial sites (such as Amazon). Airbnb could incentive users to become elite reviewers with a point system, whereby points can be used to pay for future stays.

2. Collect “other” information about hosts and renters: its important that both parties have thorough profiles with pictures and details about their professional lives. Photos are especially pivotal. Having a photo assures both parties that this is someone they feel is respectable and a worthy individual to conduct business with. When you get a hotel room, many establishments require a credit card and a photo ID – this allows the hotel to have the ability to seek recourse should unsavory events occur during the guests stay. While requiring photo IDs might be a tad too far, a photo is nonetheless pivotal.

3. Provide insurance for hosts: given the recent negative publicity, this is an absolute must. Hosts need to feel secure that their homes or apartments will be protected in the event of a bad customer. Undoubtedly, Airbnb could seek an umbrella coverage from an insurance provider – though this might be costly, given the risk. Alternatively, Airbnb may want to consider self-insuring hosts. This is a system that works for many local governments and municipalities when it comes to health, life, and facility insurance policies.

4. Guarantee customers: providing a written guarantee to customers is a very important element that Airbnb should consider. When eBay first started, their were serious qualms from consumers regarding the purchase of designer wares from the site, given the propensity for fakes. Through its subsidiary, PayPal, eBay provided customers with a 100% guarantee of authenticity – if an item that was advertised to be authentic was found to be inauthentic, eBay would either require the vendor to issue a refund and take the item back – or, in the event that the vendor failed to issue the refund, eBay itself would make the customer whole.

When I started my clinical rotations during my third year of medical school, I fell in love with Epic (Temple’s EMR). It seemed so obvious to me that the system was powerful and if utilized correctly, could greatly improve patient care and physician efficiencies. Fast forward 1.5 years later. I am now a 4th year med student, preparing to graduate in May. While I still love Epic, I have witnessed, on every clinical rotation, physicians that are frustrated, tired and confused when it comes to Epic utilization. The main issue, I have found, is poor training and even poorer institutional policies. I actually trained myself by using other institution’s training tutorials that I found on-line. I taught myself how to utilize some of the more complex functions of Epic. I learned so much, that while on an away rotation at the University of Miami Department of Dermatology, I was actually asked by the director of Mohs to train his staff on  how to take pictures of the surgical sites, upload the images into Epic, and then document, using a feature of the EMR system, on a body map where the lesions where located.

I’ve come to realize, Epic, and all EMR, is only as good as your IT. I’m wondering, are there other clinicians in the group with similar (or different) experiences? I am inclined to say the head of any hospital IT staff needs to have medical training – otherwise, the importance of optimizing training and clinician usage just doesn’t resonate. Thoughts?