Facilitating One Patient One Record Access with Dr. Oleg Bess 4medica An Empowered Patient Podcast Published August 17, 2021
Karen Jagoda: Welcome to the EmpoweredPatientPodcast.com show. I'm Karen Jagoda, and my guest today is Dr. Oleg Bess. He's the founder and CEO of 4medica. 4medica.com. I want to welcome you to the show today, Oleg. I know you're a busy doctor, and I really appreciate you taking a few minutes to be with us.
Dr. Oleg Bess: Thank you. Thank you, Karen. It's a pleasure.
Karen Jagoda: Thank you. Let's start with just giving us a sense of the mission of 4medica.
Dr. Oleg Bess: Sure. 4medica's mission is really to formulate a one patient, one record paradigm, where we are able to access a number of data sources for a patient. We have the engine that is able to, on-the-fly, real-time actually, add these records into the correct chart. Even in this country where there's no unique identifier for patients, we're able to look at all kinds of demographics data for the patient and on-the-fly place that record into the correct chart.
Karen Jagoda: Part of this mission is to give patients more access to their own data, isn't it?
Dr. Oleg Bess: Absolutely. And that's how we started. We started with actually working for laboratories, transmitting data from a doctor to a lab and from lab to the doctor. What we realized was that we needed this type of engine to be able to put it all together into the same chart.
Karen Jagoda: And really, the challenge here is to make sure that the information is accurate and that it's up to date. Tell us what kind of impact it has on a patient to be able to have access to the data in an easy-to-use format.
Dr. Oleg Bess: I think this ability to access your own data is a great equalizer for healthcare. The people that have ready access to doctors and are able to have consistent care with a particular physician probably have much better access to that data set, where the doctor can make good decisions based on the history that they already accessed. A population that really ends up using more intermittent care with the emergency room, walk-in clinics, et cetera, may not have all that access to their historical data.
Dr. Oleg Bess: When the doctors have to make decisions, critical decisions sometimes, there's not enough of a data set to make those decisions. So if the patient had this type of app and had that in their hands and that app almost automatically updates the information that the doctors need to make decisions, that's what I call the great equalizer.
Karen Jagoda: I think that's a great description of what's necessary to respond in a fast way. The other side of that is this whole question of social determinants of health Dr. Oleg Bess 4medica Page 1 of 5 EmpoweredPatientPodcast.com ©TBI LLC 2021
Facilitating One Patient One Record Access with Dr. Oleg Bess 4medica An Empowered Patient Podcast Published August 17, 2021
and having the doctor understand the patient in a more 360-degree view. Say a little bit more about your work in that realm.
Dr. Oleg Bess: Yes. Just having this data set, including the social determinants of health, including all the other test results and the medications, and all of that, it is very hard for a physician to identify the right data elements to make decisions quickly. The app that the patient must have really should be able to synthesize the right information for the doctor to make their decisions. I've mentioned before that I'm a practicing physician.
Dr. Oleg Bess: I just recently had a patient who walked into my office, who was transferring from another facility, with a stack of paper that was about 125 pages high. It was like a ream of paper. What I really needed out of that is maybe two pages, a summary of the test results and a summary of the visits that the patient had. Instead, I had to spend maybe 40 minutes looking. And in fact, in that particular ream of paper, I never found what I needed. You're absolutely right.
Dr. Oleg Bess: With having the right information, whether it's social determinants of health or any other clinical information, it has to be presented in a way where it's easy to make decisions and to apply care for patients.
Karen Jagoda: I've asked this question to other people who are trying to get health records organized, and I've been wondering about the ability to use handwritten notes or to use natural language processing in some way on handwriting. Does your system allow for doctor's notes that are not necessarily digital?
Dr. Oleg Bess: No, unfortunately not yet. We are working on some machine learning NLP applications. We've applied machine learning in some of the other areas of how we identify patients and how we actually decide that this is the right patient. However, this part is still in the works. It's hard to say how long that will take, but even some of the best machine learning applications from Google, from Amazon, Microsoft, they're still somewhat lacking in handwriting recognition.
Dr. Oleg Bess: It's there, but It's starting to get better, and it's amazing how fast it's improving. We're hoping that within a year or a year and a half, it will be good enough to actually do so.
Karen Jagoda: Handwriting is still an element of a data source. It's not that everyone has gone digital, is what I'm hearing you say, which is a good reminder because sometimes I'm told that people are still clinging to their fax machines, and they're resistant to scanning. It's good to know that we're meeting the laggards halfway.
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Facilitating One Patient One Record Access with Dr. Oleg Bess 4medica An Empowered Patient Podcast Published August 17, 2021
Karen Jagoda: I'm wondering if what you're offering in the marketplace is helping the providers do a better job, contain costs, have higher patient satisfaction. Can you say a bit about the kind of feedback you're getting?
Dr. Oleg Bess: Yes, absolutely. I can even tell just a recent story where a patient who came into the emergency room was actually able to share her data of the previous Beta- hCG test, which is a pregnancy test, that you need to be tracking to see how the pregnancy is doing. For that particular patient, it actually made a difference not having surgery for ectopic pregnancy. We were able to treat her rapidly with an injection. That's a very common problem that can easily be solved with just the ability to look up a test result that's 48 hours old.
Karen Jagoda: Are you finding that doctors in general, the hospital administrators in general, are seeing the benefit of using this approach to simplify their own workflows?
Dr. Oleg Bess: Oh yes, absolutely. I think at least the hospitals that I am associated with and some of the practices in our area in Los Angeles, most of them really avail themselves with an electronic medical record that has an obviously different degree of utility. But that's useful enough for them to be able to do their work and, of course, look at the historical data.
Dr. Oleg Bess: The problem that we're seeing is actually exchanging that information between different vendors. Where we're really seeing the problem is that me, as a patient, I may have three or four doctors.
Dr. Oleg Bess: And invariably, even if the doctor is using the same EMR, I would need three or four different logins to view my records. Of course, I'll go to one or two hospitals as a patient, and each one of those will have a separate log.
Dr. Oleg Bess: Think of a mother that's got two or three kids, and she needs to track all of their records. It becomes a really difficult task to maneuver among all these logins and apps. So really, what needs to happen is the ability for patients to bring the records into the same place.
Karen Jagoda: 4medica is working with a variety of clients to do the backend integration, but you're really consumer-focused, it sounds like, to get patients to take more control. Would that be an accurate way of describing your approach to the market?
Dr. Oleg Bess: I think so. And that really comes from the pain that our customers, which are usually large health information exchanges or large hospital chains that have multiple hospitals, need to be able to aggregate this data set.
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Facilitating One Patient One Record Access with Dr. Oleg Bess 4medica An Empowered Patient Podcast Published August 17, 2021
Dr. Oleg Bess: Because we have the ability to identify patients and put the data in the right chart to create that one patient, one record concept, they started asking us, well, can we present it now? We're starting to present that to patients.
Karen Jagoda: And what kind of feedback have you started getting from patients? Are they relieved? Are they excited about having this kind of data? Does it make some of them nervous? How would you describe the general reaction?
Dr. Oleg Bess: So far, it's been great. I think patients are more surprised than anything else to be able to see data from multiple sources within this one app. I think we certainly haven't had much of a problem with negative feedback, and it's usually been a pleasant surprise.
Karen Jagoda: Does your system look for potential problems once it does integrate all this data? Is it red-flagging anything?
Dr. Oleg Bess: Well, that's definitely in the future and whether we will be working with someone that helps us to do that. And of course, we have to be really conscious of patients' consent to do so, right? If a patient has a certain problem and they would like their data evaluated to possibly give them advice, possibly say that there's a great new medication that's coming out, or possibly even to tell them that there's a clinical trial that's available.
Dr. Oleg Bess: We feel that once the patient understands that, we feel and we hope that the patient would want to use that type of service because they're really not available just yet online.
Karen Jagoda: I really like your proactive approach for all parties concerned. Before I let you go today, I'm just wondering if you can tell us a little bit about your journey as a physician and why you became so interested in informatics.
Dr. Oleg Bess: Interesting. Well, it actually came from the pain that, as a gynecologist, I had. I guess that was as long as 20 years ago when we started the company. Well, it really didn't even start up as a company. What I felt was that all these piles of paper on my desk, which most of the time represent the test results, and someone needed those test results and needed to access them at the right time. They needed to be placed for someone, for the doctor, on the computer where they could just easily access them.
Dr. Oleg Bess: I had some friends who were brilliant at the time and actually created the very first online app in early 2000. It wasn't an app. It was a website, right, where you could actually log in and see your own patients. So that's how it started. It started off from my own pain on my own desk.
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Facilitating One Patient One Record Access with Dr. Oleg Bess 4medica An Empowered Patient Podcast Published August 17, 2021
Karen Jagoda: Thanks to my guest today, Dr. Oleg Bess, Founder and CEO of 4medica, 4medica.com. Follow them on Twitter @4medica. I'm Karen Jagoda, and you've been listening to the EmpoweredPatientPodcast.com show. Follow me on Twitter @karenjagoda. Like us on Facebook at Empowered Patient Radio. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
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