Transforming Caribbean healthcare

BY KIMBERLY WALLACE

IMAGINE you're at work when a personal medical issue arises.

Rather than leaving the office and waiting an indeterminate amount of time to see a doctor, Patient Connect allows employees to log into the wellness hub and begin a chat with a doctor or another healthcare provider on the spot.

Patient Connect is a low-cost digital health services provider for businesses. It offers digital health and wellness apps that are available at the tap of a finger.

'This service makes it convenient for employees to access care and we know that with better access to care there can be earlier interventions which will always lead to better outcomes,' says medical doctor and dentist Dr Navi Muradali. 'This is one way we're trying to do our part to reduce high morbidity and mortality of lifestyle diseases in the Caribbean.'

Certainly, not all issues can be resolved using chat-based care and telemedicine.

However, Muradali, a firm believer that the future of healthcare is hybrid, says merging in-person experiences and digital experiences can provide doctors with greater tools to manage their patients effectively in this day and age.

Muradali stresses that the role of AI and services like Patient Connect is not to take over the responsibilities of healthcare providers. Instead, they are intended to support doctors, nurses, mental health counsellors, and other care providers.

'Having an app specifically for T&T and the wider region makes a big difference in how we communicate the language of healthcare to our population; it will redound to better health outcomes,' says Muradali. 'For far too long we have utilised other sources of info which can be misleading; not because something works in the US means it will work with our population.'

The adoption of chat-based care and telemedicine has been very well received.

At the foundation of the wellness hub are dozens of qualified, experienced medical specialists, doctors, mental health counsellors and dietitians, not only in Trinidad but also in Barbados, who are vetted to ensure quality over quantity.

The wellness hubs will be launched soon in Jamaica and the Bahamas. Based on the feedback, health care providers are gravitating towards telemedicine as one of the tools they can use to support their patients.

It leads to greater collaboration between care providers within the region. For example, a doctor in Trinidad can talk to care providers in Barbados. It also benefits patients who can get second opinions from healthcare providers within the region easily, rapidly and efficiently via the wellness app.

Muradali always envisioned himself practicing medicine, but Covid-19 changed his perspective. The need for telemedicine became obvious in the early days of the pandemic when patients' needs were not being met. Muradali was faced with the question: How do we keep the continuity of care going during the pandemic? After all, diabetic and hypertensive populations had to continue taking their medication, and their blood sugar and blood pressure levels had to be monitored. At the time there was no telehealth software available in Trinidad for doctors to use.

'It dawned upon me that I needed to find something that I could have my patients use so that we can continue with patient management,' says Muradali. 'We used Whatsapp, but its security features did not make it sustainable. I had to embrace technology, I have this motto: automate or die. So many of the mundane processes we use can be automated and save us time and energy.'

Muradali and his team were advised to create electronic health records with patient portals, and what emerged was the telehealth service called Virtual Wellness. As a medical doctor entering the tech space, Muradali had a great advantage.

'I had a much better understanding of the type of software we need to develop as opposed to those in the tech space who are trying to develop medical apps,' he said What started as a free service to his patients extended to a wider population and before he knew it, it evolved into a telehealth service for people in the Caribbean. By the end of the pandemic, Muradali and his team had seen over 9,500 patients on that platform.

When Virtual Wellness first started, it was strictly for medical consultations. Soon, mental health counsellors, dietitians, physiotherapists, vets, dentists and many other health professionals were also using Virtual Wellness. Based on the data analytics from Virtual Wellness, Muradali and his team thought it was necessary to continue providing a digital health service for our population. So Patient Connect, a low-cost digital health service, was launched. It is provided to businesses so that they could offer it to employees or customers. Muradali and his team signed up with Amazon web services to get Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance which is the gold standard for protected health information in our region. This ensures that none of the information that patients provide on the wellness apps is also available on any local server. When it goes on to the Amazon web services cloud, it is encrypted.

At the request of the Human Resources Management Association of Trinidad and Tobago (HRMATT), the Wellness Hub was launched last November 2023. Since then, the team has offered similar wellness hubs to other organisations who are in the developmental stages of offering it to employees and subscribers and customers. They also partnered with the Human Resources Management Association of Barbados (HRMAB) which will start using the wellness hub next month. The next step would be to create a One Caribbean wellness platform, an e-medical tourism platform which would integrate healthcare providers into one ecosystem that provides services to a wider population. In other words, users in Barbados would be able to access providers in Jamaica via the wellness apps that Patient Connect develops.

Currently the number of users on the wellness hubs across the Caribbean has exceeded 10,000. By the next quarter Muradali hopes to double that in Trinidad and Barbados. He expects that by the end of the year there will be 50,000 users across the Caribbean.

With wider adoption, Muradali and the team at Patient Connect hope to make a dent in the surge of mental health diseases.

'So far, based on the data we have received, at least 80% of all the consultations on the wellness hub are mental health related. Our mental health providers have so far done a great job providing support to employees. This is why we have reached out to many companies, offering them the wellness hub for their employees. We hope they do take advantage of this. Many companies have Employee Assistance Programmes but sometimes employees have had to wait two weeks to get appointments. They also come at a high cost to the company, whereas on the wellness hubs, because the chat base is live and in real time and very affordable and employees can chat with a mental health counsellor via their phone, it's far more convenient,' says Muradali. 'We understand that the challenges of lifestyle disease or mental health is not just one for the Government or private sector to solve. We all have to play our role in providing better access to care, not only in T&T; I have a greater passion to serve the entire Caribbean and even Latin America.'

AT THE LAUNCH: Director of AI at Incus Services Leslie Lee Fook, president of the Human Resources Management Association of Trinidad and Tobago Cavelle Joseph-St Omer, CEO of Patient Connect Dr Navi Muradali and CEO and chief innovation officer at Plain White Table Inc Lorenzo Hodges attend the recent launch of Patient Connect's Omni AI.

-Photo: PATIENT CONNECT FB