What was the time when you were totally utterly exhausted? You were so cracked that you just crawled in the bed and slept for 20 hours straight? This is the life of most doctors in the world, without the part of sleeping for 20 straight hours!

A doctor often begins his career in the early 20s and works way his 60s. Officially, the doctors have work restrictions per week. A resident in Europe has a cap of 48 hours. A doctor in training in the USA ends up working for 60 hours as an average. However, there are cases when doctors often go without sleep for 30 hours, as described in the Atlantic.

Case in point

A neurosurgeon was working continuously for over 30 hours. When he got a break, he decided to go home. While driving, he blacked out and had a serious traffic accident. Luckily, he survived the crash. However, he was left with injuries that could have ended his career.

Some are not this lucky, though. Last year, a 35-year-old anesthesiologist died 96 hours straight. Dr Stefanus Taofik covers his colleagues’ shifts around the festival of Hari Raya in Indonesia. Hey, what was found dead in a hospital.

Work hours have other consequences as well. Some places like India, the residents often skip their breakfasts to manage the monumental amount of workload. This has led to an increase in the cases of TB among residents. A treatment of TB requires you to take an intensive course of medication for up to 9 months.

Consultants are no better off

This is the case with trainee doctors. However, the life of a consultant is no better. Many still work on weekends due to a shortage of skilled manpower. In the UK, 71% of the hospitals report a shortage of manpower.

Long hours, increased workload, everything is added to the stress of a doctor is always under. This often leads to burnouts, especially in highly demanding faculties like Emergency Medicine, OBGYN, Internal Medicine, and General Surgery. In addition to the stress from work, doctors have to attend regular seminars and lectures to keep their medical knowledge up to date. Factoring in a busy schedule is a very difficult task.

Thankfully, technology is helping out doctors in maintaining the high standards of medical care.

Technology in Medical practice

Of course, there is a high amount of tech involved in the diagnostic machinery. Robotic precision surgeries are becoming more popular by each passing day. However, tech is also finding value in the doctor’s consulting room. 50 years ago, the tech a doctor would use a doctor, a manometer to check for blood pressure, and a stethoscope. Today, doctors are using IoT devices to collect and record information, saving precious time.

IoT and other m-health devices have made a doctor’s life easy by helping him track the patient’s health even after the consultation. This also reduces out-of-hours phone calls from the patient, and they do, the doctor has some data to look at and a course of action.

That said, these devices help reduce the risk of depression.

Aimedis for doctors

Dr Michael and Dr Ben have been practising medicine for over 15 years now. They saw an unmet need and decided to found Aimedis. Using our platform, doctors can connect their devices and see the data in one place. They can also get the patient’s data from his fitness tracker and use it to track the well-being of the patient. If they want to see more patients, they can have a teleconsultation with the patient, saving their time for more serious patients. This kind of digital triage not only helps them manage their time better, it also takes the stress and fatigue from the long hours that they work.

The long hours in a doctor’s life are here to stay for a while. Our endeavour at Aimedis is at least a doctor’s life less stressful.

Also, read Why China is the next big market for AI in Healthcare

Globally, healthcare is a trillion-dollar industry. In fact, according to a report by Deloitte, the global healthcare expenditure is projected to reach $8.7 trillion by 2020.  It is the third largest industry in the United States if you ignore the state spending, after Real estate and the financial sector.

With the massive scale and numerous players in this arena, healthcare delivery is anything but smooth. To begin with, it is not uniform throughout the world. Even in a developed country like the US, the level of care differs from hospital to hospital.

AI can tackle major hiccups in the delivery of healthcare. To understand how, though, let us look at the various nodes in the network of healthcare.

Healthcare delivery model

Healthcare is not simply a patient seeing a doctor. There are many stakeholders involved in the process. Even though the level of care might vastly differ from hospital to hospital, these stakeholders remain more or less constant.

• Patient
• Doctor
• Hospital
• Pharmaceuticals
• Insurance company/payer
• Caregiver

A Patient’s journey

In a simplistic scenario, a patient feels ill and in most cases, Googles his symptoms. He then decides to see a doctor and seeks an appointment. The doctor examines the patient, seeks the previous medical records, diagnoses the illness, probably orders some lab tests, and prescribes medicines. The patient goes to the pharmacy and obtains the medicines, takes them and the condition may improve. If it does, he is out of the loop for a while. If not, he goes to see the doctor again and the cycle continues.

There are several pain points in this workflow.

Pain points for stakeholders

For the patient, getting credible information is difficult. Getting to see a doctor quickly is the next big hurdle. Sure, if there is an emergency, the doctor sees the patient right away. However, if it is not, the patient has to wait. There are very limited diagnostic tools that a patient can use on his own.

When he books an appointment, he might have to wait to see the doctor. He has to carry the medical records with him and remember to take his insurance details. When he takes the medicines, he won’t always see the doctor once he is alright.

And lastly, he might not have anyone who is undergoing the same trauma to discuss this with. In a doctor’s mind, an illness is serious or not-so-serious. However, for a patient, no illness is small if it is affecting his daily life!

For the doctor, there is only a limited set of patients he can see in a day. They often don’t have their medical records with them. In the recent months, more and more patients have been using health trackers to track fitness, Electrocardiograms, Blood pressure, just to name a few. This information is often not captured because of the plethora of apps used by the patients.

The feedback in the form of follow up from the patient is limited after the treatment. So, there is very little way of knowing the degree to which the treatment worked.

For the hospitals, it is a challenge in exchanging information as not everybody is using the same enterprise systems. So, when a patient is transferred from say, a primary care hospital to a tertiary one, there is no seamless flow of information. It is even more challenging when one of the hospitals is overseas.

For the Pharmaceuticals, they know the value and volumes of SKUs (stock keeping units) sold. However, it is often impossible to know exactly what a particular medicine was prescribed for and to whom, including the prognosis.

For the insurers, the reimbursement workflow is difficult to follow and much efforts go into tracking the existing treatment options, medicines prescribed, as well as treatments given. In addition, it is difficult to track overseas treatments.

For the caregivers, the challenge is knowing what is going on! They get a limited set of instructions to take care of the patient as most of the professional attention is given to the patient. They really have no one to talk to anonymously, and they have to join a support group, if one is available nearby.

To conclude

Healthcare industry has its challenges because the various stakeholders are not connected seamlessly. There is a loss of information at each interface and it deters the whole machinery from operating optimally. And this is where Aimedis comes in the picture.

How is Aimedis going to tackle these pain points? Read our next article: How Aimedis Is Adding Value to the Trillion Dollar Healthcare Industry

(Images: Pixabay, Pexels)