Creative Health Labs

The Health Datapalooza in Washington DC showcased a number of innovative companies, technologies, and people who are leading the healthcare innovation revolution. These innovators are the tip of the iceberg of disruptive innovation piercing the titanic healthcare system, overladen with the burden of poor access, asymmetric information, lack of interoperability, and misaligned incentives. These innovations may transform the future of emergency medicine, often considered the eye of the storm of wasted health care dollars. Symcat , the winner of the conference's $100,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Aligning Forces Challenge, directly addresses the bane of the emergency medicine physician, what co-founder Craig Monsen called the "cyberchondriac" patient - the patient who is convinced he has a spinal cord tumor because he strained his back this morning and "on Google it said... and I want my MRI now!" Symcat is more than a beautifully designed interface - it