Healthcare innovation; focusing on the “Brilliant basics”

Chris_Wynder

TL;DR: Modernizing Clinical care team experience.

Keep the Doctors, Nurses and Pharmacy team focused on patient management.

In Canada, we have a care centered around the Primary care practice. This means that your primary care provider (Doctor or Nurse Practiconer) needs to schedule/request your diagnostics, Specialist appointments, etc. The issue is that this is essentially an unpaid activity for Primary care clinics and Specialty clinics-where the main care management happens.

Neither private insurance or Government insurance provides compensation to Primary care clinics for managing patient schedules or information sharing across the various care providers. Primary care clinics are constantly looking for ways to reduce the overhead. This is an area where the government officials, Start-ups and private investors that I have talked to see real opportunity for innovation and new companies provide new solutions that reduce costs.

2 Specific areas of Primary Care management:

• Automation of administrative/reporting tasks: Pulling information from clinical visits to create billing reports. Automating next steps; Sending the prescription to the patients preferred pharmacy, Appointment requests with specialists.
• Coordination of care: For the Canadian healthcare system to work smoothly, there is needs to be two way sharing of information between Primary care and — everyone; Specialists, Emerg, Diagnostics, Pharma. That information is complex multiple filetypes.

For example; Managing the year-long care of a Torn ACL (knee ligament). Likely initial diagnosis happens in Emergency department right after accident and may include X-rays and Emerg Doctor notes. They likely will get a referral to an Orthopedic clinic and more imaging. By the time you see your Family Doctor it is very likely that you have seen two other doctors, had 2–4 images and might have surgery scheduled. These reports and potentially, the images are important context for the Primary Doctor to understand what the patient needs to get out of the appointment- having this prior to entering the room keeps visits focused. It might be as simple as ensuring pain control or it might be as complex as an infected surgery site. Maybe the best action is not actually a visit but a refill of meds- or worst case scenario a trip to urgent care. This decision could be automated with the right digital tools- saving a patient a trip and saving the Primary care team several hours of phone calls, requests for prescriptions, etc.

Think about it this way: The scheduling problem alone is $57B market and frankly it is same old players with the same old ideas. There is a hunger for innovation but it needs to be safe.

Want to learn more?

OpenText 2023 Patient Experience hackathon (video tutorials) and our Hackathon community are good places to start. Join our 2024 hackathon on Sustainable Medtech

Resources and citations

Flipboard magazines

AI orchestration: 

https://flipboard.com/%40chriswynder/ai-orchestration-h35a5j99z?from=share&utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=share