A Canadian doctor brings a UX focus to his health-care startup

Damon Ramsey is on a mission to fundamentally change the way health-care providers get patients involved in their own care. The Vancouver-based family physician believes a lack of patient engagement is the single most neglected area of the healthcare system, but one where technology can improve patient care in the process.

Ramsey is preparing to launch InputHealth, a company that develops software tools for health-care professionals—including medical doctors, surgeons, dentists, physiotherapists, chiropractors, and others— to better capture and analyze patient data. The firm’s software products will be provided through security-enabled mobile devices in the health-care provider’s office, such as tablets or the patient’s smart phone. They will include a variety of scenarios such as patient intake, patient satisfaction, medical history and informed consent.

In one hospital clinic, for example, InputHealth has already run a pilot project to automate the follow-up questionnaire to assess patient symptoms, a 20-year old practice the clinic had been performing manually with paper records.

“For years they had been collecting data in paper form, but you can’t analyze it practically,” says Ramsey. “We converted the questionnaire to electronic form, and now the data is becoming useful, as symptoms can be analyzed over time.”

Research shows that physicians receive more data—and better data—using computerized patient interviews than they do with conventional patient histories, says Ramsey.

“Engaged patients make better decisions without high cost to the health-care system,” says Ramsey. “If we can prevent a heart attack from happening, that’s better than performing surgery—on many levels.”

In a typical clinical encounter with a doctor, patients will be interrupted every 30 seconds or so by nurses, admin staff and so on, says Ramsey. “Being able to mine their answers and put logic into the questionnaire means you can clarify the information.”

The design of InputHealth’s software applications and tools was inspired by Steve Jobs’ “obsessive focus on user-based design,” he says. While Ramsey admits there has been some progress in creating electronic patient records, he says many internal IT systems are fundamentally broken and don’t integrate or communicate properly.

“You have these health-care professionals, all of whom have a need to collect data, securely and in the most efficient way possible. They’re busy people dealing with subpar tech or no tech at all. The Apple approach is to say, let’s ignore this mess and produce something that’s so cool—like the iPhone. That was a paradigm shift.”

InputHealth will formally launch in January of 2014, and Ramsey says pilot projects are going well and that the feedback has been positive.

In one of the pilot projects, for instance, InputHealth has also automated Informed consent — the process obtaining a patient’s permission before conducting a health-care intervention. In the traditional scenario, Ramsey says, this process is ineffective because it overwhelms patients with verbal information, and it’s difficult for a health-care provider to assess the patient’s comprehension.

“With the InputHealth platform, in the waiting room, you give the patient a tablet that’s loaded with an informed consent on his or her specific procedure. They can see, in diagrams, what the potential complications are, and every time something is explained, the module tests the patient’s comprehension. It reduces liability, and given that one of the most common reasons for malpractice suits is the doctor not properly explaining the procedure, this tool will be very helpful.”

Besides creating software tools, InputHealth has also developed a content store of medical questionnaires and educational information they can offer as part of patient engagement projects.