In this ProductTank Edinburgh talk, Jack Francis, founder and managing director of Pogo Digital Healthcare, talks about his experience in digital healthcare and how his product aims to enable better communication in the NHS.
Watch the talk in full, or read on for an overview:
Background
Jack says that Pogo paired with stroke physician Professor Martin Dennis. Together they built a platform which incorporates shared decision making and more consent into healthcare. Using Pogo’s technical expertise and Dennis’s medical expertise, they began to design the product to scale. After pitching and partnering with the NHS and five stakeholders, they had a six-week timeline to deliver a minimum viable product that was a rebuild of a basic clinical platform. As this all took place during March 2019, the platform was designed as a national approach to long Covid.
The problem with communication in healthcare
Jack points out there are two dimensions to the problem with communication in healthcare, clinician to patient and clinician to clinician.
Clinician to patient
- Complaints: Lack of clear communication is the most common NHS compliant
- NHS costs: £400m a year in consent related negligence lawsuits
- Third sector costs: £3m annually printing leaflets
Clinician to clinician
- Time wasted: 1-4 GP appointments could be avoided with better hospital-to-GP communications and better GP communications
- Poor patient outcomes: From missing interventions and unwanted completing interventions
The solution
Jack’s product is a platform that aims to solve the problem with communication in healthcare by providing tailored talks and guidance. Jack says that “after gathering the relevant content for the patient out of the slides, you can view it as PDF, print it out, or send them via email or their patient portal”. This makes tailored guidance easier and improves communication.
The next big project
Jack goes on to talk about Pogo’s next big project to improve stakeholder communication, which is working to develop a long-term condition management app. This app aims to go beyond long Covid and help users with different medical conditions. Jack says it sets out “to give questions and give tailored guidance for patients, then, based on their answers, they will be given a pre-made tailored talk and can request a call back”.
The app has to do three things: link to GP records, be easy for patients to understand and be easier for GPs to understand using the back-end of the system. Jack says this will build a “cohesive health and care pathway” for patients in the future.
Learnings
Jack says the key learnings from this experience were:
- Empirical evidence is key
- With the NHS, timelines are always longer than you think
- Balance your technical knowledge with the experts’ medical knowledge
- Identify the most important part of the product (i.e. ease of use) and use that to drive everything else
- Different partners bring different insights, make sure you listen to each stakeholder
