[Music] as a specialist we are very reliant on the quality of the information sent to us and at the moment it's often in a faxed referral from the general practitioner who may not even be that patient's usual general practitioner so often information is missing or if it's there it's hard to interpret hard to integrate into our own systems specialists um do face a number of challenges when we try to bring together um information about our patients we might first see a lot of those patients are complex patients that have had long medical histories and have um you know had multiple experiences already with the health care system many of them are chronic disease patients and and therefore have have have been unwell and and i suppose understandably would like us to rapidly get up to speed with respect to their health medical history it's a challenge so the challenges that face us when we're trying to pull together um information a lot of health information from different sources for our patients is i think the the fragmented approach and introduction of digital health into patient care there is a small sport of options and everyone is using perhaps something different that you know that they prefer so intraoperability is a massive issue for us i think perhaps uh one of the biggest challenges is the uh wide use of email and and that adoption of email as a preferred method of communication while we were kind of all waiting for interoperability to happen and so unwinding that i think is going to be a very big challenge for practices because it's so entrenched in the way that they do things now yeah what are the challenges we face with information um gathering that information that's huge information sits in so many different places the second half of it is when i actually you know produce a letter or something like that i don't have a good understanding of where the information i produce often goes so it's not only being a collecting information for myself but what happens with my information when i want to send it to someone does it end up at the end of a fax machine that's actually turned off it never gets used or does it actually go out there for further use not only for the you know the person i directed to such as the gp but can it be used for further patient care down the line and that's where it's really valid currently we struggle with multiple specialists and sometimes multiple gps looking after the same patient and getting visibility of what other medical professionals are prescribing for the patient that's in front of you is really challenging a digital health platform offers the opportunity for all of us to be seeing the same list of medications for that individual and particularly watching out for adverse interactions that may be occurring or sometimes as i've recently experienced you know often realizing that the patient's actually on two versions of the same drug that they're not able to recognize they're actually the same pharmaceutical compound you
