Dr. Wendy Graham didn’t set out to become an institutional silo buster.
The North Bay physician, who’s spearheading a revolutionary health-care delivery application, just wanted to develop a convenient tool that makes her patients partners in managing their own health.
Graham is founder and CEO of Mihealth (pronounced My Health), a privately-held company that features a web-based application that allows consumers to carry their own personalized medical records on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
In the age of digital medical files, there often remains a profound disconnect between institutions, physicians and their patients.
Lab test results can get lost in the shuffle in transferring information between hospital systems, and it can be a colossal headache for patients to reach their physicians by email or voice mail.
“Medicine is shackled by the fax,” said Graham, a family physician for more than 25 years, “and we’re being told by regulators to use secure messaging and not open email which can be tampered with and stored in servers for 20 years.”
The Mihealth application is meant to improve communications between patients and doctors, while at the same time expedite the exchange of information with clinicians, specialists, emergency room staff and other healthcare professionals.
“Health care is probably the most difficult beast to tackle,” said Graham, but patients truly want to take control of their health.
Of the thousands of Mihealth subscribers, many of them seniors, the company boasts a 96 per cent retention rate since they officially launched in 2011.
For a fee of 16 cents a month or $60 a year, consumers have access to a secure messaging and personal health record system that allows them to store their own information, validated by their physicians, which can be reviewed any time they wish.
Patients can make appointments, obtain prescriptions, download test results and diagnostic imagery, ask questions, or share their records with other medical providers, thereby ending the delays and barriers that institutions can throw up.
There are also added features allowing patients to download data from devices such as a blood pressure cuff, glucometers and mostly recently, a cardiac monitoring patch.
“I totally believe that this is the future for health care,” said Graham, who took up the cause years ago when her daughter was hospitalized while living in a small community in the Maritimes.
Local doctors weren’t aware of her complicated medical history and Graham spent an anxious night texting her daughter’s boyfriend to avoid an adverse outcome.
It spurred her to want to empower patients to have their records as close as their pocket or purse.
While attending a conference, she heard a presentation about a content management system which had its origins in the U.S. military.
From a San Antonio, Texas base, the U.S. Army was remotely monitoring the health of soldiers’ health in war zones by managing their diabetes or post-traumatic stress disorders through their mobile devices.
Graham brought the technology to Canada and decided to commercialize it, spending the next five years raising $4 million and addressing privacy barriers with government regulators.
“I was very enthusiastic when I started. I thought it would be as simple as copying the charting, digitizing it, and pushing it onto a (patient’s) mobile device, but I was wrong.”
It was a lesson in perseverance.
“There was a day on Bay Street that I just thought I was going home. There were four lawyers sitting in a room who said, 'Wendy you can’t do this.' I said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m sorry, but I would like to do this and if you can’t do it, I’ll find a law firm that will.’ And we did.”
Graham has tackled the security issues, with both the privacy commissioners in Ontario and Alberta approving of the system along with certification by Canada Health Infoway.
Today, Mihealth has nine employees based remotely in Toronto and locations in Asia, one of the markets they hope to break into along with the U.S.
The company’s main anchor investor is Global Health Innovations, a large New York venture capital fund, which has financially backstopped the technology in preparation for its international expansion.
While patients are clamouring for this kind of access, Graham said the biggest obstacle is the silo mentality of the medical industry with its regulatory procedures and exclusionary business practices.
In the U.S., for example, moving from one health plan to another can mean that your medical records are lost forever. And there’s fierce resistance and nervousness in the profession toward patients seeing their records.
“My goal is to allow patients to keep their information and keep it in perpetuity as they change between systems and countries.”
With the cost of health care skyrocketing to the point of unsustainability as the population ages, Graham said it’s important to limit a patient’s encounters with the system.
Through this technology, catching the warning signs of a heart condition or a leg infection on a diabetic patient can pre-empt a more expensive and lengthy hospital stay.
It’s especially appealing for baby boomers who want choice in their treatment options.
For North Bay senior Louise Lugli, having her own medical records on her iPad delivers a degree of comfort when she goes abroad.
“I brought it to Mexico and I feel secure knowing I’ve got all my information with me if I need to see a foreign doctor. It gives you that feeling of comfort knowing someone can quickly diagnose your case.”
Her daughter also has password access to her records.
“I really believe that a patient has to take their own health in their own hands,” she said. “The doctors are overwhelmed.”
Lugli likes the convenience of writing a message to her doctor’s secretary when she feels unwell, such as when her chronic pneumonia comes on. Graham gets the message, fills out a prescription, staff arrange for a chest x-ray, and both doctor and patient are alerted when the results are in.
“Businesses are just starting to understand the importance of the opportunity,” said Graham.
Her company is in discussions with a customer who airlifts out-patients from “unusual situations,” like cruise ships or government agencies that put people in high-risk situations internationally.
Through Mihealth, family members can be securely messaged along with employee assistance programs and first responders.
“We’ll PDF and share documents in urgent situations.”
