Patient Empowering Innnovation
- by Digital Health Bridges
At Digital Health Bridges, we are seeking to pioneer the future of disease management by empowering patients.
Our patient tools integrate with physician EMR systems and a de-identified database for quality control and research.
Combining Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) with enhanced ERM data and biology will enable us to learn more from every patient (real-world evidence).
Our new systems are designed to feed the right data into AI while maximizing support to both physicians and patients.
Our Mission
Digital Health Bridges aims to create a seamless connection between patients and healthcare providers, ultimately advancing medical research and healthcare delivery.
Assisted by AI, this still starts with just building an electronic bridge between patients and health care.
While the immediate gains for daily physician decisions can be marginal, the wider implications and potential for patient empowerment and research are immense.
Creating Disease Management Teams
This site was created to reach out to researchers and clinicians who may share the vision for integrated disease management systems and research that we describe on this site.
We want to find the right people to co-create the disease management systems of the future.
With the right team in place, we want to define the purpose and scope together and jointly apply for grants for digital health solutions. Please let us start the discussion for your disease or specialty.
Challenges With Our Current Systems
Health care tends to be organized into functions with less emphasis on efficient coordination between them.
- Nobody, is usually in charge of delivering the complete services and tools needed to manage diseases optimally.
- This has resulted in and is also a function of entrenched legacy information systems that do not talk to each other.
Several critical issues hinder effective disease management (below).
Poor Coordination
of Care
Time lags and increased costs are common due to a fragmented care systems.
The type of self-service solutions and tools available i.e. from our bank or an airline are often absent in health care. A lot of hone calls and faxes can be replaced by more effective exchanges and methods of direct communication and information exchange between systems.
The need for better communication methods extends to associated services such as patient support programs and insurance providers.
Underutilization of Patients Abilities and Motivation
Patients have an untapped potential to further contribute to their own care.
We want to empower them with tools and resources to take an active role in their health management and help them to contribute valuable data .
One example is the big movement towards medical scribes to help physicians write their notes. Why are there so few articles about using the same technology to generate individualized summary notes for patients?
Many of the things patients ask for should be simple to provide.
Inefficient Learning Systems
Incompatible information system that do not talk to each other creates data islands that do not allows us to use the potential of AI to learn.
Even more often we have not yet collected the data we need. AI as we know it now, did not exist when current our systems were built.
We are developing solutions that integrate AI to enhance learning and decision-making in healthcare. An electronic connection between patients and health care is an essential part of the right infrastructure for data collection and AI..
Key Components of Disease Management Solutions
Improved Electronic Medical Records
All virtual clinics have self-service solutions for patients to schedule their visits. They also use the electronic connection to collect key information before the visits directly into the EMR.
This trend is bound to continue with increasing support of AI. The EMR system of the future will use AI for triage, generate dashboards with key information for diseases and/or patients, use scribe to create notes both for the doctors and the patient, and provide direct decision support.
Many elements are not about AI but simply to make it easier for doctors to provide curated information and make it easier to involve patients.
Direct Patient Connection
The most requested items by patients are:
• Access to their own record.
• The ability to manage their appointments.
• The ability to manage prescriptions and refills.
In addition there are numerous avenues to support patients such as customized, direct involvement in disease monitoring and the ability to volunteer additional data.
Patients want more and better information while clinicians are frustrated by misinformation. Curated, information, with monitoring of usage and easily prescribed directly from the EMR is one avenue forward. We want the provision of relevant, high quality information to become a lot easier and better structured for both patients and physicians. <br>
Most clinicians also see similar types of conditions and provide very similar type of information to many patients. Aspects of this could be enhanced i.e. with pre-recorded videos (featuring even the individual clinician). We are looking to explore and make this customization as easy as possible.
De-Identified Quality Control & Research Database
A connected, de-identified database offers valuable insights for researchers, enabling them to apply AI analyze trends and improve disease management strategies.
The key is the unique data combination of longitudinal data:
• AI assisted collected data in the EMR
• Structured PRO before and between visits.
• Biological data (tissue, blood, urine) volunteered by patients.
• Additional data such as by wearables and the patients smart phone can be donated by patients.
This data-driven approach supports ongoing medical research and innovation.
Patient Support Program Tool
Expensive medications are rationed by payers to control costs, allowing usage only according to pre-set criteria. Pharmaceutical companies offers support to physicians and patients to manage the approval process and administration of these drugs.
This is a very expensive process handled by speciality pharmacies. Integrated electronic tools has the potential to make this process a lot easier and less expensive for these companies, patients and the prescriber.
This is a win-win opportunity derived from better and more integrated information systems.
Integrating The Changing Patient Journey
Virtual visits, digital tools, and AI are all reshaping how patients can and will interact with health care, which is increasingly becoming a “big business.”
Clinicians, researchers and patients need to be deeply involved in this process to ensure their needs are in focus.
Better Care with
New Research Opportunities
The ‘magic’ happens when all components are fully integrated into an efficient disease management system. Combining EMR, Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs), and biological information over time allows for a new way of learning from real-world evidence.
Our focus is to design care solutions that clinicians and patients want to use because they make things easier as well as better.
There are grants available for solutions like this.
From Ideas to Implementation
There are significant design and implementation with any new information system in health care. A large obstacle to integrated systems are the business models of current EMR system suppliers, who are in control.
While we would love to connect to existing EMR systems, we also anticipate that this can be challenging. We are also exploring options that enables us to focus on specific diseases and where there are revenue models that does not depend on other suppliers.
What Exactly is the Business Model?
There is also a distinct possibility that this will be funded by grants and not be any business at all.
About Me
I, Mats Lundstrom, Vancouver, BC, built this site to find like-minded co-creators. Please fill in the contact form below to let me know if you want to discuss. I hope this very soon becomes a story about a team or teams and not about myself.
I have worked in the pharmaceutical industry for a long time, most recently as a Medical Science Liaison (medical expert) for the last 10 years. I have also worked in medical education, sales, marketing, and patient support programs. I have an MBA from the Stockholm School of Economics and advanced training in specifying information systems and have started businesses before as a principal.
I have a passion for solutions that make a difference in real life, that can be implemented outside studies.
Over a decade ago, I developed a digital eHealth solution to detect and treat ulcerative colitis flares early (inflammatory bowel disease). The evidence was compelling. A decade earlier, it had been proven that this works with a reduction of flares, emergency visits, use of steroids, and less hospitalization. The basic idea behind the solution is straightforward: educate and equip patients to detect and treat their disease early in a flare. The treatment was just safe and inexpensive standard baseline therapy (mesalamine) that most patients should be using anyway.
However, over a decade later, and two decades after the evidence first emerged, this is still not a standard protocol.
WE should be able to do much better! Let’s make it happen!
Let's Discuss Your Interest in This Research & Disease Management Initiative
Let me know if you’d like to learn more, get some ideas, discuss collaboration, or help form a group for your disease(s). I am not an academic and will happily leave the scientific leadership to others like yourself.
Let’s explore how we both can best contribute to groundbreaking medical research and apply for grants that support innovative disease management solutions.
Your expertise can help shape the future of disease management systems. Apply for grants today and be part of a transformative journey in healthcare.
