Jinga Life – Putting the Patient at the centre of Healthcare
Recently, Dr. Johnny Walker was invited to speak at the MedTech Forum and, as part of this, he was asked to write a blog on the continuing innovation in healthcare. This blog is the transcript of part 2, following part 1 last week. Follow this link to read the original blog, or continue here to learn more of Johnny's adventures in medical innovation.
In the second of a two-part series, Dr. Johnny Walker talks about Jinga Life and the power of managing healthcare at home.
We have an ever growing clinical demand and an ever rising consumer expectation to deliver "best of breed" services across every step of the patient journey. We are living in a world where consumer-led market disruption is the norm in business, where technology that at one point was contained purely in the realm of Sci-Fi is now ubiquitous and commoditized. The current resources are strained and incapable of delivering services in this way and we are buckling under the daily fight for survival at the clinical coal face.
The traditional healthcare system is simply unsustainable despite the phenomenal efforts of everyone within the ecosystem in putting their shoulder to the wheel.
We need to rethink the healthcare structures.
An important observation from my experience is that, in 92% of cases, the ever present custodian of well-being in a family is female. Whether this is accompanying the patient, or being the first person members of the family call when they are sick, the centre of well-being in many family units is the female, the protector, the shepherd, the warrior. The Jinga[1].
Jinga Life aims to engage, embrace, enable, empower, and educate the Jinga. By populating an Electronic Health Record, designed and maintained by the Jinga for the family, extending primary care models to include the home, and using simple technologies to increase the connectivity between the Jinga and the family’s care professionals, Jinga Life desires to place the Jinga at the centre of her healthcare team.
Our vision is to change focus from the traditional hospital based doctor focused solution, and put the Jinga at the core of her and her families’ health and wellbeing. And here’s how we would like to do it:
1. Stop people coming to hospital
How? By promoting health and wellness of the community, in the community and at home!
The new e-health platforms will be able to maintain wellness, diagnose basic illnesses, instigate treatment actions and monitor outcomes without the patient ever coming near a doctor, a clinic or a hospital!
We could 60%+ of face to face consultations through the use of smart technologies, communications networks and devices without any compromise to safety or outcome.
2. When patients do need to come to hospital, get them in and out as soon as possible
The Jinga Life platform will allow the Jinga to plan their Patient Journey and arrange rapid discharge before they even arrive.
Hospitals play a real and vital role when appropriately used, but are dangerous places to be for too long. By using smart technology such as, predictive analytics, workflow informatics and best-practice electronic algorithms, e-health platforms can facilitate rapid diagnosis, treatment and discharge, with smart lean fully audited support and follow up protocols, all interlinked within the user’s health team and community.
3. Once the patient is discharged from hospital, stop them yo-yoing back in
The Jinga Life platform aims to ensure that a doctor’s duty of care does not stop at the door with a prescription and a scribbled note to the next care giver.
An important feature of an e-health platform is to link the hospital, or the GP, seamlessly and proactively to the wider healthcare ecosystem while allowing the patient to remain safely in their home environment, amongst loved ones and carers, using home monitoring devices and biomedical sensors.
4. Futureproof healthcare
How does the future of medicine look like? We are seeing the Internet of Things increasingly become a reality, with sensors and wearable devices becoming ubiquitous. In fact, by 2020 it has been estimated that there will be 50billion connected devices purely for monitoring health. This information is invaluable for medical professionals to understand and diagnose.
By aggregating existing technologies that have been proven to work in other instances to fundamentally alter the process of providing healthcare and place the family at the centre of healthcare provision, Jinga Life will allow us to meet the changing expectations of our patients.
5. Promote personalised and preventative medicine
By personalizing healthcare, as well as generating large amounts of relevant data and analytics through sensors and historical trends of the patient records, Jinga Life’s goal is to aid in reaching early and accurate diagnoses, and provide treatment that is matched to the patient.
Overtime, personalized healthcare can also result in decreased costs and become preventative. By using analytics and Big Data, Jinga Life will help to identify concerns before they become problems, reduce admissions and unneeded medical visits, and promote the home as the first point of care.
6. From womb to tomb
Finally, the goal of Jinga Life is to promote the home as the centre of health and wellbeing at all stages of a life cycle. Jinga Life‘s ambitions reside in helping and supporting every step of the way; from pregnancy and early life (digital scheduling and charts, teleconsultations, ongoing monitoring), through childhood (immunisations, dental records) and the teenage years (sexual health, mental health, orthodontics), monitoring chronic diseases or reacting to acute conditions or accidents, right up to smart aging, assisted living (connectivity, monitoring, communication) and dignified dying (treatment, location, planning, wishes).
Never before has the need to provide personalized and preventative healthcare been greater. But equally, never before have we been armed so well with the tools we need. We need to build a new world, with an exciting ecosystem and opportunities that we never even dreamed existed.
Dr. Johnny Walker is a clinically active Interventional Radiologist & Nuclear Physician, International Medical Entrepreneur & Mentor focused on disrupting healthcare for the better.
[1] Jinga was an ancient African Warrior Queen, the great protector, and defender of her people. We believe the contemporary Jinga shares many of these attributes and is central to both healthcare outcomes and transforming how healthcare can be delivered. Jinga is the key to the positive disruption that's required to transform Healthcare.