Your health is complicated enough, the road to your cure should not be.
There
are amazing advances in science and healthcare every day. However, it
is still the final delivery of that care which determines whether or
not the intervention was truly successful. In fact, any amount of
medical knowledge and skill will become limited if:
Patients and physicians cannot easily communicate with each other when they need to do so
Multiple physicians do not work collaboratively when the situation demands it
Medical data is not easily available to the right people at the right time and in the right format
It
has been estimated that 60 to 70 percent of adverse events in
healthcare occur due to poor communication, whether between physicians
and patients or amongst physicians themselves. These types of
problems would not be tolerated in other industries. In fact,
successful companies, from real estate and investment banking to
telecommunications and video games, invest heavily in the development
of innovative ways to ensure they can consistently perform their
missions better, faster and cheaper. We believe it is time for
healthcare to start doing the same.
With
this in mind, the Szollosi Healthcare Innovation Program aims to focus
on improving the process of healthcare delivery so that patients,
physicians and allied providers can more easily take advantage of all
that today’s advanced medical systems can offer. We believe this is
especially important for those with complex medical needs, who have to
deal with multiple providers overseeing a dizzying array of diagnostic
and treatment options.
For
this program to succeed, we will start by focusing our mission on a few
areas of interest which demonstrate how innovative thinking and
technologies can make a difference in healthcare. By studying and
solving problems in these initial areas, we will ideally build the
organization and culture for future successes in an expanding number of
projects.
With
an overlying theme of dealing with complex and critical medical issues,
we are initially focusing on the following two areas of interest:
Information Sharing
We
need to do a better job of quickly and easily sharing medical
information between all interested parties in a healthcare setting –
including the patient and all the physicians and providers involved in
their care. This is especially important for complex patients who have
multiple care providers and are more likely to have critical issues
which need to be addressed urgently. Two key parts of information
sharing are as follows:
Patient-Physician
Communication: Imagine a system that allows patients to send and
receive data in whichever format works best for them, and for
physicians to do the same. For example, a patient could have a
personalized web site to both keep track of their medical data as well
as facilitate communication with each of their physicians. This could
enhance efficiency, patient education and quality of care.
Physician-Physician
Collaboration: Healthcare desperately needs a system in which multiple
physicians could easily communicate with each other about a specific
patient and which would allow all the care providres to see what the
others are doing and thinking. For example, a web site dedicated to a
single patient could display key pieces of patient data while also
allowing physicians to securely communicate amongst themselves or post
their thoughts and plans for the others to see.
Information Visualization
Currently,
we view medical data via interfaces that resemble “Word” documents and
“Excel” spreadsheets. But while we are comfortable with these decades
old interfaces, today’s physicians and patients are being overwhelmed
with the increasingly large and complex data sets with which they have
to deal - where a single patient may have thousands of data points
(e.g. lab values, vital signs, radiology tests, medications, etc…)
spread across a large expand of time.
What
if we could create a fast and intuitive interface to this data which
would allow physicians to quickly see what they need to address; Or
allow patients to better understand their own medical situation? For
this type of project, we could take advantage of advanced theories and
technologies from outside healthcare, including information intensive
businesses like hedge funds and gaming. We might also utilize hardware
innovations such as the Microsoft Surface Table and the Apple iPhone.
Ideally, the result of this improved information visualization would be
better decision support, efficiency and information sharing.