The Wait is Over: speeding up the healthcare system

“We have Bernie, the bot that burns out so that physicians don’t have to” - Dr. Mohamed Alarakhia, Managing Director of eHealth Centre of Excellence .

Move over Bernie Sanders, Bernie the Bot is here!

How many times have you heard of someone being stuck in the endless carousel of the healthcare system? Even worse, you might have experienced it yourself. From long waitlists for referrals to waiting for what seems an eternity to get a procedure done.

According to the Fraser Institute, patients had to wait about 11 weeks after getting referred to actually meet a specialist. The wait times are even longer after that, with patients having to wait about 14 weeks to receive treatment. That means, almost half a year goes by before the patient receives treatment from their ailment, greatly reducing their quality of life in that period.?

And it’s through no fault of the hospitals or doctors either. The healthcare system is overwhelmed with patient volume and bottlenecked with outdated technology. Most communication is still carried out via fax, and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software are hardly the gold standard for software products. In addition, there are simply not enough doctors in the country. There are only about 47,000 general practitioners in Canada. Considering a very conservative population estimate of 35 million people, that leaves more than 700 patients per doctor.

The problem gets even more concerning when you consider that physicians spend about half their time filling in and maintaining records. That is time that could have otherwise been dedicated towards the patients.

It is quite clear now that that we need not only a more efficient way to connect doctors and patients, but also minimize the time healthcare workers spend on doing repetitive tasks like records management. Ontario based healthtech company, eHealth Centre for Excellence, led by Dr. Alarakhia have identified these problems and since have been working tirelessly to remove such bottlenecks.

Their platform includes software tools to manage appointments, referrals, and patient forms, reducing the amount of administrative tasks healthcare workers need to undertake for the duration of the patient experience.

We recently had the privilege of talking to Dr. Alarakhia on an episode of How Its Med podcast, where he talked about his jump from Computer Science to medicine, virtual assistant bots, and medical procurement.

To find out more about his journey and how he managed to do it all, you can go to howitsmed.com, https://plnk.to/howitsmed/e/1000567513965, or https://youtu.be/RZuWxy0p-qY.