Business Scenario

This scenario helps to illustrate how Globalhealth can serve to facilitate patients’ and providers’ schedules while also improving the quality of care rendered and reducing costs.

Before Globalhealth

A patient who is suffering from kidney pain decides to see a physician. She has just switched jobs and is now covered by a new health insurance company. She first has to find a new general practitioner. The insurance company has a large book from which to choose from and she picks a female physician in her area and calls to make an appointment. A few weeks later she is sitting in her new physician’s office. She completes the standard form the office assistant gives her. The form consists of general questions concerning her past and present health. The physician runs several standard tests on her and tells her the results will be available in a week. The doctor calls her the following week to inform her that the tests show that she has a kidney stone and refers her to a specialist.

The patient makes an appointment with the specialist. A few days before the appointment she receives a call from the specialist’s assistant reminding her to bring her file from the general practitioner. The patient has to make a trip to the general practitioner’s office to pick up a copy of her file before going to the specialist. At the specialist’s office she has to fill out the same standard questionnaire about the current state of her health. The assistant makes two copies of the document and files one away in a file cabinet.

The specialist invites her into his office and looks over her file. He also runs some quick tests on her and concludes that a minor operation will be necessary. Before leaving, the patient schedules her surgery. A few days before the surgery, the office assistant calls the patient to confirm the operation date.
The operation is a success and the patient has recovered within a few days.

After Globalhealth

A patient who is suffering from kidney pain decides to see a physician. She has just switched jobs and is now covered by a new health insurance company. She first has to find a new general practitioner. She goes to http://globalhealth.hxcel.comU and searches for female physicians in her area that accept her insurance. She finds one she likes based on the physicians’ online profile and patient ratings. She sees an available slot on the physician’s calendar and requests an appointment.

The patient’s last general practitioner recommended that she sign up with Globalhealth so she could see the results of her appointments with him online. He also told her it would be wise to start creating her own Personal Health Record (PHR) –hyperlink this to a definition- as they are very helpful and save time when visiting other physicians. The patient is very concerned about her health and likes the idea of being able to manage her own records.

A few days before her appointment, the automated notification system calls the patient to confirm her appointment. She accepts the appointment and goes online to give her new general practitioner access to her PHR records. When she gets to the physician’s office, the office staff has access to her medical history online. As a result of this, she does not have to complete a paper based questionnaire and the physician only needs to run one specific test, as the other standard tests have been recently completed and are recorded on her PHR. The physician tells her the test results will be available for her to review online within 24 hours.

Globalhealth notifies the patient when the test results are available. The test shows she has a kidney stone and the physician recommends a specialist. The patient requests an appointment with the specialist the same way she did with her new general practitioner. The specialist immediately has access to her PHR and can view the tests from the general practitioner before her appointment. The specialist responds that he has all the necessary information and immediately changes the appointment to be an operation. The notification system informs the patient that the specialist is ready to perform the operation and calls to confirm her appointment a few days beforehand. She accepts the appointment and takes a few days off work.

The operation is a success and the patient has recovered within a few days.

Feature	Example	Value
Online physician-patient relationships	Patient’s previous general practioniner electronic medical record (EMR) were available to her online	Access old Electronic Medical Record (EMR) –hyperlink to definition - records from past physicians. Learn about what the physician is doing currently through her blog and forum. Ask a question, Physician-Patient relationships have never been closer.
EMR based records	Patient’s previous GP, her new GP and the kidney specialist all made use of EMR records for her online journa	Standardized diagnoses and record keeping. Misdiagnoses, based on lack of information, are severely reduced.
Searchable physicians by gender, insurance type, physician’s own profile text and her ratings	Patient needed to find a new GP	Overall higher patient satisfaction and better service by giving the patient greater control of who she chooses.
Physician online calendar where patient can schedule/request an appointment	Patient scheduled two appointments with two different physicians	Scheduling is no longer limited to physician’s office hours. Patient can request appointments 24/7 from anywhere in the world. Office assistant has an easy interface with which to manage appointments. All parties can sync calendar with mobile phone or PDA and any other iCalendar compatible device. Greater efficiency and higher satisfaction for all.
Notification system that alerts all parties to changes / confirmations / cancellations of an event (e.g. appointment) via email, automated phone and text messages	Both the providers and the patient were notified of the appointment requests and both had to approve and confirm the appointment	With information at your fingertips you will never forget another appointment. Both the provider and the patient will always be informed about events pertaining to their accounts.
PHR records that allow patients to manage allergies, medical conditions etc	Patient had already compiled a list of information pertaining to her own health	Saves time and money by allowing the patient to manage records she can easily track herself.
Shareable PHR and EMR records that are managed by the patient	Patient could share her own EMR and PHR records with her new physicians	Patient medical journals are no longer contained and are available, online, 24/7 to users with the proper credentials.

The Globalhealth Platform made all this feasible. It allowed for very different applications to work together in a unified way. Applications such as: Calendar and Scheduling, Personal Health Record, Electronic Medical Record, Referrals, Lab Results and Physician Finder were all able to seamlessly interoperate and move the patient through a common workflow. These applications could’ve been written by us or by our solution partners. That is the power of Globalhealth!