2009.02.04 Health Consumer Needs: Requirements from the patient perspective

Speaker

Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli (www.mo.md) is a PHR researcher at UCL’s Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education (www.chime.ucl.ac.uk). He trained as a doctor at the University of Cambridge and a programmer at Anglia Ruskin University. He spent six years as a researcher in the USA and wrote six books about the use of IT in health care. His most recent, Streamlining Hospital-Patient Communication: Developing High Impact Patient Portals, discussed the use of PHRs by hospitals in the USA. He is the founder and CEO of Patients Know Best (www.patientsknowbest.com), a Cambridge-based PHR company.

Speech

Thank you all for coming here today and thanks to CPD 4 Health Innovation for inviting me. I wanted to discuss what would be necessary to foster technology innovation that would serve patients.

My own background is as physician and a programmer and my current research at UCL’s Centre for Health Informatics & Multiprofessional Education focuses on Personal Health Records: medical records that the patient is in charge of. During medical school and while working as a doctor I was obsessed with handheld computers. I was so obsessed, I even wrote a book teaching chefs how to use these devices.

For the last couple of years my obsession has been personal health records (PHRs). While in the USA I studied the best practices from 2,700 hospitals.

When I came back to the UK, I started HealthCamp UK to learn from local innovators. HealthCamp is an unconference, a conference with no agenda. You can imagine the kinds of people who participate, and it makes for a rich learning experience.

With that background, I would like to state my beliefs. Beliefs are important because they are unchangeable. Whether you think God exists or that the free market is better than communism, it is almost impossible to change your mind. People would save a lot of time if they understood which statements are beliefs and thus cease to argue about them. Just as importantly, if you have not made your mind up about a belief, it is worth considering the implications of that belief.

A word of caution about my beliefs. If what I say sounds self-serving, that is not how I meant it. Rather, I am referring to the excellent work by UK innovators like PAERS (Patient Access to Electronic Record Systems Ltd), MyFamilyHealth, t+ medical and 3G Doctor. And the NHS is full of IT excellence and innovation.

Let me tell you some of my beliefs:

1. The NHS exists to serve patients. I don’t think anyone would argue with this. But...
   
2. The best way to serve patients has not been invented yet. We keep on getting better and better inventions every day, but there will always be even better inventions in the future. So the question is, how do you shepherd these inventions into the service of patients? How do you help the inventors serve patients? Because...
   
3. Most inventors do not, and never will, work for the NHS. This is not to cast aspersions on the NHS, it is just that only million people work in the NHS, and over 6 billion people do not. It is a matter of numbers. Having said that...
   
4. Most inventors do not, and never will, work for a large company. Here I am casting aspersions because when an inventor at a large company comes up with a new way of doing things the first thing they do is to leave the company so that they can perfect that new way. That is what you see with PAERS (Patient Access to Electronic Record Systems Ltd), MyFamilyHealth, t+ medical and 3G Doctor. As inventors try to spread their innovations, it is worth remembering that...
5. Inventors love accountability but hate committees. An inventor is happy to punished for doing something bad with their innovation. Fine them, fire them, imprison them, but for God’s sake do not have them go through a committee to get approval for their invention. Instead, you should use the fact that...
6. Patients know best (if we let them). Most examples of patients making wrong judgements follow a lack of information, so we should allow them access to the information they need. And then we should use their judgement in dealing with innovators and innovation.

If you have these beliefs some interesting conclusions follow about bringing technology innovations to health care in the service of patients. I would like to use the Q&A session to discuss what you think these conclusions might be.

Interview