Why Medicai isn’t just your average patient portal

The online era pushed healthcare providers to digitalize doctor patient communication

Modern healthcare facilities are increasingly providing their patients with online portals to manage their health data, appointments and treatments without the need for visiting their healthcare facility each and everytime.

Advancements in communication technologies and platforms enable doctors and patients alike to stay in touch at a tap of a button, answering questions that not long ago meant making an appointment and going on a trip to the hospital.

Despite the fact these advancements are making life better for patients and alleviate pressure on medical practitioners, there is still a long way to go until patients access the true potential that digital healthcare has to offer. And the fact that healthcare facilities are able to better gather data about their patients isn’t necessarily making life better for the patient himself.

Medical data is siloed and out of the reach of patients

In the last years, healthcare providers have been investing resources in developing online portals that ease the process of enrolling patients, make appointments, transfer documents and keep in touch with doctors. This is of course a good thing as it saves a lot of time for patients and the healthcare provider alike, but is also has some caveats.

The main problem is that each and every healthcare provider usually has its own patient portal. So if you need to visit more doctors, that usually means you’d need users for each and every healthcare facility patient portal you’ve been visiting.

Another disadvantage is that you’re not able to share all that data with anyone else, it’s just for the individual healthcare facility you’ve been visiting. So it’s not that useful if, let’s say, you just had some tests and you need to get them to *another* doctor – you’d still need to get the physical file and deliver it to him and that’s not very efficient given the times we live in today.

Communication between departments is difficult and unorganized

Another issue is in the way hospitals and healthcare providers work today. For example, a hospital’s activity relies on labs, primary care practices and other clinics along with a breadth of other providers in order to maintain patients’ good health. That means a lot of documents need to be transferred back and forth between all these facilities in a manner that doesn’t negatively impact the time between the patient’s initial visit and access to the best possible treatment.

The problem is that communication between these healthcare facilities isn’t always very streamlined. Sometimes human error gets in the way, documents or whole files get lost and ultimately the one that will suffer is the patient. Not getting medical documents efficiently from one place to another will surely affect the patient’s treatment or the time until he gets it.

Patients need to be center stage in healthcare

In an era where each and every patient most likely has access to Dr. Google and a breadth of other sources of information, each piece of advice a doctor gives a patient can be more or less scrutinized and independently researched.

The problem is that online information almost always incomplete or inaccurate or it’s not properly understood. So doctor-patient relationship and trust must be at its best in order for the patient to benefit from the best possible treatment.

The patient nowadays needs to actively participate in the treatment and understand the options he has at its every phase. This means that the patient needs access to his data, constantly be in touch with his practitioner about it, needs to be able to share it with third parties and trust that from the wealth of healthcare facilities, doctors and treatment, he made the very best decision.

This is the space where Medicai aims to make a difference

From the very beginning, we’ve been trying to make the Medicai platform a communication hub that supports the doctor-patient relationship and medical professionals. All the data a patient uploads is shareable with anybody online at a click of a button.

Doctors can request support from each other in order to determine what’s the best possible treatment for the patient. Patients can upload an unlimited amount of medical documents that can be shared freely.

We’ve been actively working with healthcare facilities to free up their data and give patients more control over their treatment. This means departments can transfer documents and attach them to different cases and doctors can invite each others to work collaboratively using those same documents.

We envision a world where every patient is free to move his own data around without restrictions, thus benefiting from the wealth of healthcare providers available without the constraints of data silos.

 

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About the author - Andrei Blaj

Co-founder of Medicai, serial technology entrepreneur. Andrei has over 15 years of experience in healthcare & technology. He graduated in Computer Science with a specialization in Computer Vision & AI and started his first company in 2007 while still a student.
Andrei worked with and founded several healthcare technology startups. His expertise is at the intersection between deep technology and healthcare.