Learning to code as a hobby led to a startup for this MD and his patient-handoff software

DocDox’s startup story has a few interesting angles: It was founded by a physician with a knack for coding, it’s run by a husband and wife duo, and it’s solving a problem that the founder says many CIOs don’t realize exists.

Patrick Woodard is a resident physician in internal medicine at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C. About two years ago, he grew so frustrated with how inefficient, and sometimes ineffective, his department’s method of keeping track of patients was that he knew he needed to do something.

Fortunately, he had learned to code as a hobby in college. So he built a patient census system that he thought would be easier to use and do a better job of documenting handoffs within a hospital than whiteboards, Word docs and basic EMR-generated lists.

DocDox is a software as a service that uses a HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based data storage and transfer platform. Physicians can manage problem lists and medications from anywhere using the solution, and it can stand alone or interface with an EMR, Woodard said.

The problem of poor communication during handoffs is expected to contribute to about three-quarters of medical errors, according to the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare. Its given way to lots of hospital efforts around improving communications as well as technology solutions from companies like eDocList and PatientKeeper.

Woodard began testing his own solution in his department at Howard and found that no patients had gotten “lost” in transitions. The next step, then, was becoming an “accidental entrepreneur” by inking a deal with Howard University last year to commercialize the technology together. Woodard runs DocDox as a side project with his wife Kristy, a social psychology PhD and adjunct professor for National Labor College.

In addition to the hand-off system, they’re also working on an integrated e-prescription platform called DocDoxRx that will allow physicians to write, fill, refill and fax prescriptions from anywhere. It will also allow pharmacies to verify prescriptions directly through the software, without having to call a doctor’s office, he said, as well as allow patients to look at their own prescription data. They expect that service to launch in the second quarter of this year.

But it’s already gotten some traction. A “spontaneous and fortuitous” conversation with the consulting firm Connex International resulted in DocDox becoming the sole census management and e-prescribing solution that the firm markets to its portfolio of some 1,200 hospital clients, Woodard said.

“Now we’d really like to move into mobile a little bit,” he explained. “It works on an iPhone or Android, but we would like to have a native application.”

For that, the company would need to bring on a new staff member, he said. So the startup, which has been bootstrapped thus far, is keeping its eyes peeled for potential seed investors.