This is the first part of a special 4 episode series about doctors who left full-time clinical practice to develop new solutions for healthcare improvement.

As Faces of digital health is a podcast exploring global perspectives, you are going to hear from doctors from different countries: the US, UK, and Spain.

Many doctors who go into entrepreneurship are trying to solve systemic issues plaguing healthcare. You will hear UK surgeon Owain Hughes explain, how he started building a company and platform that connects GPs to specialists, to enable GPs to refer patients more accurately. Consequently, patients can receive better care already on the primary care level, which makes the work of specialists much more efficient once patients reach them, making specialists and GPs much more satisfied with their work, because they don’t lose time with patients with poorly defined conditions or because patients have better outcomes since part of the urgent treatments have been begun by GPs based on specialist’s recommendations.

Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org/

You will hear GI pediatric specialist Michael Docktor from Boston’s Children’s Hospital explain, how he designed a task management app to enable better coordination of healthcare and administrative workers around all the bureaucracy and care entailed in the treatment of every patient.

Dock.Health: https://www.dock.health/

Guillem Serra is a serial entrepreneur coming from a family of doctors – his mother, father, grandfather, and great grandfather were doctors, which made it easy for Guillem to go study medicine given his familiarity with the profession. Besides medicine, he studied math and during his medical studies, discovered, that for him, medicine was actually boring. So he went to found what is called a “Whatsapp healthcare app” connecting doctors and patients in Spain, South and Latin America.

Mediquo: https://www.mediquo.com/

This episode features Daniel Kraft, one of the top authorities in digital health. Daniel Kraft is the founder and Chair of Exponential Medicine – a program with the goal to ‘un-silo’ thinking and unleashing cross-disciplinary innovation across healthcare by bringing together thought leaders and forward-thinking clinicians and innovators to explore potentials to reshape health and medicine with technology. Daniel is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist, inventor, and innovator with over 25 years of experience in clinical practice, biomedical research, and healthcare innovation.

We discussed:

• his journey from the medical practice to digital health,
• his mission to turn his website digital.health into a medical digital health formulary, where doctors could search for clinically approved and reliable digital health solutions to prescribe to their patients,
• Daniel also shared his views of COVID-19 related innovation, some broader societal problems that are arising in the US because of imposed measures to manage COVID-19.
• We also talked a bit more about how to improve medication adherence in patients with chronic conditions and co-morbidities, that take five or more different pills daily. The idea behind his company Intellimedicine is to provide patients with a device that would keep all medications of a patient in separate cartridges and would produce only one pill the patient would need to take. The pill’s structure would be based on the patient’s daily various health measurements supported by AI analysis.  

Summary of this series: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f081-084-doctors-and-digital-health Daniel Kraft: https://danielkraftmd.net/ Exponential Medicine: exponential.singularityu.org/ Digital.Health: https://www.digital.health/