Q&A: The importance of self-care and the tech to support it
Professor Maureen Baker, chief medical officer, and Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Healthily, speak to Med-Tech Innovation News about the importance of self-care, its uses and how it can help alleviate pressure on health services.
The principle of self-care – is this purely to alleviate pressures or are there other aspects at play here?
Maureen: While we truly believe self-care is an important answer to the global health crisis, we also know self-care empowers people to take responsibility for their wellbeing and personal health journey on an individual level. Self-care is any action we take independently to support our physical and mental health. It’s about building healthy habits, noticing if something’s not right, knowing how to take care of yourself when that’s the best thing to do and knowing when to see a health professional.
This obviously going to take a degree of technology use – what kind of provision is there to aid people to self-care? Both at Healthily and more widely?
Matteo: The evidence from numerous studies is that people are more willing and able to care for themselves if they are confident, reassured and certain of support. In the UK, studies demonstrate that approximate 20% or 200,000 of all primary care consultations are appropriate for self-care and result in health professionals providing little more than reassurance, information or non-prescription drugs.
Technology, such as Healthily, can open up every citizen’s personal health black box, ensuring the global population can access a baseline of health knowledge and understanding via a mobile phone. Information and communication technologies enable people in remote and underserved areas to have access to services and expertise otherwise unavailable to them, especially in countries with uneven distribution or chronic shortages of doctors, nurses and health technicians, or where access to facilities and expert advice requires travel over long distances.
People are increasingly impatient with the inability of health services to deliver levels of national coverage that meet stated demands and changing needs, and with their failure to provide services in ways that correspond to their expectations. Pre-primary care products like Healthily, can maximise equity and solidarity, give everyone the right to an attainable high level of baseline health assessment and information, and allow them to self-care where possible.
What else needs to be done – in terms of technology – to encourage more adoption of self-care?
Matteo: The reasons for the slow adoption of transformative digital health technology are many and well-rehearsed. Although COVID-19 accelerated changes to the digital health landscape, post coronavirus clinicians will be too swamped to innovate, and healthcare systems may well revert to prioritising safe change over transformative digital journeys. To stop this from happening, technology must first appeal to the users. They are not passive. They are a resource that can be trusted to take active responsibility and accountability for their care. Then we need to harness the public’s willingness to help their local healthcare systems. Harness their desire to save their GP or save the NHS. If you love your GP, use an app first. If you care for your patient consider prescribing an app.
Tell us about the technology behind Healthily?
Matteo: Healthily was the first company to combine Augmented Intelligence (AI) with medically approved information to bring people personalised and relevant health tools and support - all in one place. When a user enters a symptom into our self-assessment tool known as DOT (Dynamic Online Triage), Healthily uses an AI triage system, to rate how serious a symptom looks for that person and provides them with relevant next steps and health information based on their profile. Healthily uses Augmented Intelligence, not Artificial Intelligence to provide users with this service. The augmented denotes that the data that the system learns from is inputted by our doctors not randomly scraped from medical records or research papers.
Healthily is currently ‘aware’ of 620 conditions and 1500 symptoms in its system. We have plans to grow this to between 1000 and 1500 in the coming years but we estimate that our current set already represents 80%- 90% of the conditions seen by a primary-care physician in an average year. The beauty of DOT is we don’t need to know every condition to tell you what you should do next. We are not trying to diagnose you. In fact, no digital self-assessment tool can really diagnose you. Diagnosis requires empirical evidence - a blood test, x-ray, mucus culture or physical observation. What we are focusing on is to give everyone in the world the answer to the question “What should I do?” rather than “What is wrong with me?”. This is the fundamental difference between our approach and pretty much everyone else in this space.
A recent survey showed 67% of GPs want patients to take greater self-care and two in five actively would actively encourage patients to self-care – what about the patient’s position? What do they think about self-caring?
Maureen: In the referenced survey, over half (55%) of the 2200 adults said that they had been managing their health and wellbeing through self-care at home since the start of the pandemic and 46% said they have been managing their wellbeing/health by taking better care of their health. In addition, nearly half (47%) of adults said they proactively manage their wellbeing by taking lots of steps to ensure they are healthy. We know that people want to be healthy, and from the survey conducted three in five respondents said self-care means living healthily. Furthermore, instead of accessing NHS services during the first lockdown, more than one in ten of those surveyed (12%) have instead turned to healthcare apps or websites for advice and support. Of those, four in ten (41%) reported doing so in order to relieve pressure on the NHS. It’s therefore important that these apps or websites provide safe, reliable advice so that people can make the best decision for them.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Maureen: It’s also worth pointing out that sometimes the best, most appropriate next step is to consult a healthcare professional. As well as supporting people to self-care using Healthily can reinforce the need to consult a professional when that is the safe and appropriate course of action for that person.