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Telehealth and eHealth

 

A new UK primary care model

GP Delivered Quick or GPDQ promises to get a family doctor to your door between 8AM and 11PM 365 days a year, usually within an hour. It charges upwards of £120 (€150) for the service. We spoke to founder and CMO, Dr Anshumen Bhagat, about the business model.

Rating and booking sites: Threats or Friends?

There are growing signs that a new generation of rating and booking websites will change the face of outpatient care in many Emerging Markets. New players, sometimes backed by hundreds of millions of dollars, are investing in telehealth platforms that promise instant access to patients, partnering with pharmacies and making access to healthcare easier for patients. Some are active in dozens of countries. Here we talk to the major players about their strategies and how they see the market.

Siloam to invest $100m in expansion

Indonesia's largest hospital group PT Siloam International has a two-year plan to expand regionally with 13 new emergency hospitals. We talk to Managing Director Dr. Grace Frelita about the challenges faced by healthcare in the country.

Abraaj close to $1bn target

Abraaj is close to its $1bn target for its mammoth Global Healthcare Fund. And its ambitions are becoming clearer.

Gulf States to boost PPPs, eHealth, preventive care and long-term care

In its comprehensive annual report on the healthcare industry in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, private equity house Alpen Capital explores current trends. Projecting the GCC total private and public healthcare market to grow 12.1% to $71.3bn in 2020, it highlights population growth, the introduction of health insurance and rising healthcare costs as key drivers –resulting in the development of PPPs, eHealth, preventive care and long-term care.

Doctoralia innovates across Latin America

In an unusual innovation, Doctoralia, the international rating and online booking platform, is partnering with patient associations and getting doctors to rate doctors as part of an awards programme. Owned by its Spanish founders, Doctoralia is now active in over 20 countries, particularly Latin America. It claims patients book 100,000 appointments a month on its platform. We interview Frederic Llordachs, co-founder of Doctoralia. This month, we are also writing a detailed survey of how such sites are developing in Emerging Markets from Chile to China.

The power of IT

It is startling to learn that by using middleware that can read doctors’ narratives, a single UK NHS Trust claims that it has put together a database of patient records for anti-dementia drugs that is 12 times larger than the entire worldwide Cochrane data. It is also startling to learn that even patients with mental disorders had an 86% adherence to using wearable devices such as Fitbit.

Getting computers to read medical records

Extracting meaningful data from clinician records is not easy – all too often they are a jumble of idiosyncratic narratives. But a £10m project has managed to do just that. Researchers at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust and Kings College London have analysed 270,000 cases in mental health, creating what Prof Matthew Hotopf, director of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at the Maudsley, claims is the world’s largest clinical dataset for mental illness. The Maudsley team are now looking for industry partners.

Bupa smiles despite write offs

What looks at first sight like dismal results from Bupa, the international insurer and healthcare operator, with a fall in pre-tax profits of 39% to £374m on sales of £9.8bn is actually much brighter than they first appear. Exclude most write offs and currency fluctuations, and pre-tax profits fell 2%, exclude all write offs and they rose 7% on sales up 6% in constant currencies. That is despite a 5% drop in sales at Bupa Global, the international insurance arm as Bupa dropped unprofitable business. We talk to CEO Stuart Fletcher about how apps and ehealth are helping sales, new insurance offers and acquisitions.

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