Al-Jazeera English recently recorded a series of episodes titled “Apps for Good”, about smartphone apps that do good in the world. So on Saturday, repeated during the news hours as part of the “Tapping into Technology” segment, Al-Jazeera aired this video:
I am still surprised by just how much effort goes into recording a two-minute TV segment.
Unfortunately patients do not know best, very few have the skills or knowledge to make informed decisions about their care. Wish you luck with your application but patient centric applications are very hard to launch and monetize.
Lovely to hear from you David. You are right, at the moment, many patients do not know best. But when you do give a patient the records from all their medical providers, and explain these records to the patient, then the patient really does know best. This is what our software facilitates.
You are also right that this is hard to launch, which is why it was so important to have an amazing team building the product. But once we did, we found lots of hospitals all over the world who wanted to pay for working with their patients in this way.
This is a great and extremely ambitious project and noble goal. However, being in the medical field for many years, I think getting the records out of EMR systems is virtually impossible. This has nothing to do with technology and has everything to do with doctors themselves and only partially due to EMR vendors’ policies. But that’s only tip of an iceberg. The key here is “explaining these records to the patients”, I believe only the physician can do this. That’s why we have physicians and not patients healing themselves.. If you can solve these problems – it would be an amazing feat!
-Steve
Thanks for the kind words Steve and I agree with you about the difficulties about the getting the records out. Our software does explain parts of the record to the patient, e.g. layering on test results explanations from the Royal College of Pathologists designed for non-professionals. But more importantly, we do not have to explain the record for the record to be useful. As you say, the doctors and nurses sit down with the patient and explain the record. But once you have explained it to the patient, e.g. “We are monitoring your HbA1C so we can see how well-controlled your diabetes is”, the patient learns and applies. You do not have to explain HbA1C again, the patient and their family will watch the value and adjust their behaviour. And in time, the patient becomes the teacher, explaining to other clinicians what they have been taught, and pointing out to them the nuances of their record. What I am describing is not theoretical, it actually happens every day.
This is a great and extremely ambitious project and a noble goal. However, being in the medical field for many years, I think getting the records out of EMR systems is virtually impossible. This has nothing to do with technology and has everything to do with doctors themselves and only partially due to EMR vendors\’ policies. But that\’s only tip of an iceberg. The key here is \”explaining these records to the patients\”, I believe only the physician can do this. That\’s why we have physicians and not patients healing themselves.. If you can solve these problems – it would be an amazing feat!
-Steve