On average, even 30 days, patients in Poland have to wait for test descriptions. It turns out that it can be significantly accelerated thanks to the use of new technologies. How does it work and when is the use of such solutions likely to be common? I am talking about this with Paweł Paczuski, CEO of upmedic, and Sophia Renteria, COO of upmedic.
1. What does upmedic do?
Sophia Renteria, COO upmedic: At upmedic, we focus on accelerating the post-examination stage of medical documentation, so that patients can receive a diagnosis faster and therefore start treatment faster.
We offer an intelligent editor of medical records, which speeds up the creation of test descriptions or diagnostic reports three times faster, while structuring and standardizing the created content, so that you can easily analyze the collected medical data.
It all started with friends of doctors who complained to our founders about the excess of bureaucratic and repetitive tasks that filled their day and at the same time extended the queue of patients waiting for an examination or diagnosis even more. Paweł and Krzysztof, our founders, after thoroughly understanding the problem, realized that it could be solved or reduced using the latest technologies related to machine learning. They started work on the system that we currently offer and the rest is history filled with multiple iterations with doctors of various specializations (we started with radiologists and now we have expanded the offer to other specializations, e.g. internal medicine, rescue or nephrology), medical institutions and business partners, that brought us to this point.
2. Are there any centers that use upmedic in Poland and abroad? What is the current scale?
SR: Our offer is addressed to both B2B and B2C customers – individual doctors can increase their productivity, including the quality of test descriptions, and thus increase revenues, while medical facilities increase their capacity and revenues, but based on the collected data, they can also conduct an analysis and improve the functioning of the facility, as well as the process of treatment and patient service.
Our company is relatively young, at the end of last year we obtained financing to complete the work on the product, so we are just starting to bite into the commercialization stage.
Currently, our system is used by doctors from the network of facilities in Łódź as well as individual radiologists and teleradiologists, we have also conducted pilot studies, e.g. at UCK WUM. We are also in talks on implementations with several institutions and we are also working on integrations with a large telemedicine platform, a start-up dealing with AI analysis of radiological images and a clinical trial system.
We are operating in electronic medical records that would have been overlooked so far, and we see a huge field of possibilities and applications related to it.
3. You say that using this solution, radiologists are able to prepare test descriptions three times faster. What it comes from? What is this time saving on and what does it mean for patients?
Paweł Paczuski, CEO of upmedic: Various observations show that the test descriptions are not as unique as they might seem at first glance, even if different doctors describe diseases using different vocabulary (there is a lot of room for standardization here so that they understand each other better). In the event that something is repeatable, and preferably standard, we can then automate activities that originally took a lot of time in the analyzed process. Such a time-consuming activity is transferring the doctor’s thoughts “to paper” or, in this case, to software. Assuming the repeatability of descriptions, we are able to locate the most frequently used phrases and find the fastest method of their selection: typing is a maximum of 300 characters per minute, dictating descriptions and speech recognition 700 characters, and when we build sentences by clicking on the suggested phrases, we achieve about 1000 characters – hence three times the acceleration that we observe in practice. Patients in Poland, the UK and other countries wait for test descriptions on average 30 days – how many different actions against the disease could a patient take if he / she knew a month in advance what was wrong with him / her?
4. What can make the quick implementation of this system difficult, so that every radiologist can save this valuable time and patients receive their described tests faster?
PP: Each change raises resistance – you have to learn something new, change your habits, and the effects of the change are not immediately visible. We are aware of this and many of our efforts are directed at ensuring that the paradigm shift we propose brings benefits at the level of the individual physician as quickly as possible. On the other hand, we work with our partners to popularize the rightness of change and awareness, for example, with the European Society for Medical Imaging (EUSoMII), which brings together innovative doctors, or with the Polish Radiological Society. From the technical side, we see difficulties on the part of HIS / RIS system suppliers for institutions that are not as open to integration as they describe on their websites. Nevertheless, we manage to smooth this case through various automation and transparency in the subject of the data we process.
5. What makes your business model unique?
SR: Our business model was developed on the basis of numerous interviews with doctors and decision-makers in institutions. In addition, we also tried to use the experience of other companies operating at the interface between information technology and health protection.
Based on these experiences, we have developed two variants. On the one hand, we use the so-called “pay per document” model, i.e. a kind of a fixed low fee for a document produced, which works well for customers who produce a small number of documents or for our business partners who also operate in the med-tech industry. On the other hand, we offer a more “conventional” model based on monthly licenses, the price of which depends, this time not on the number of test descriptions produced, but on the suite of features that the customer wants to have access to.
Thus, everyone can choose the most suitable option, so that they can use the upmedic system freely at a reasonable price.
6. Finally, our traditional question – which innovative technological solutions in medicine do you support the most? Who is your attention?
PP: It is one thing to conduct scientific research, formulate conclusions from the data, and the other is to apply this knowledge in practice, so that what scientists have developed during the implementation of large grants goes to the thatched roofs, best having an immediate impact on the treatment of the patient. That is why we support all solutions that help doctors to heal based on the latest knowledge, delivered at the right moment. In this way, technology becomes a mechanical extension of human cognition and brings tangible benefits to each of us. Examples of such solutions can be found, for example, at MedCurrent – a system suggesting a doctor to refer a doctor to a test that will give the best diagnostic results and will have the least negative impact on the patient in a given situation, or at Kelvin Health – automatic drawing conclusions about the patient’s health based on the image from thermal imaging camera.