Discovering Medical Tourism

This morning I’ve had the surprise of testing a brand new website: MXS ! Medical experts Services is a  … french…. company (this was totally not compulsory) whose purpose is to dig into eating habits. They have hence created a software that helps you to manage your nutrition through several questionnaires.

We first have to get at odds with the classical size - weight - sports related questions. But then the software really impressed me. In fact, MXS tries to understand your eating habits by probing into one typical week of breakfirst, lunch and dinners. The software then treats you to depict all these meals through a series of screens where you can precisely elect all the elements of your meal with simple tools. For instance, let’s imagin that this morning I took white bread and nutella, the software will propose me a series of bread (including white bread) and then ask me what did I put on this bread. I elected chocolate and indicated I took what looked to be one regular spoon of nutella. The interactivity of their system is great, and honestly you go through the screens quickly. When finished, the software will then analyse your meals and give a series of comments on your eating habits. Even though this is only a sampled week, the conceivers of the software supposed that a typical week of eating could be significant enough as eating habits only sightly change from one week to another.

 Another interesting application was the relative adjustement of your suppers. Let’s say I depict my breakfirst: a bowl of hot chocolate, two croissants and a banana. The software will process this information, evaluate the current nutritive elements that were ingested and propose a lunch and a dinner that suits me in order to comply to the minimal daily nutritive needs (enough vitamines of all categories namely).

On the left side, our advised menu, on the right side, the predicted nutritional ripoffs…  

Honestly, it is very simple to use, the ergonomy of the website is well studied. Thumbs up. Yet, I am confused as I don’t understand how they are making money. In their demo all the features of their offer is for free and I wonder how they are going to commercialize this product and to whom?? Perhaps another great idea with no market. Readers? What do you think?

PIPS (Personalised information Platerform for Life and Health Services) is another european medical project we would like to dwell upon. I really loved this project when told about it while visiting Brussels a few weeks ago. Why? Because this project perfectly encompasses the Hypocrate oath by trying to diffuse the best medical services available for all.

PIPS is one the major projects in the European Commission PIPEline

The project is an holistic approach opf medical services as it joins Healthcare suppliers, citizens, Public Organisations, drug suppliers, food industry, health policy makers etc etc. How is it working. Let me reproduce an exemple quoted from their brochure:

“Mary Johnson is a diabetic/infracted and her GP suggest to contact a specialist dor an appointement. Mary goes to Dr Brown who uses the PIPS system and prescribes Mary a therapy and a set of tests to be done at ho,e. At home PIPS reminds Mary to take her test and after having done it recognizes an abnormal state. The system may change the prescription following t he doctor’s indication and asking for approval or will alert Dr Brown who, looking at her vital signs and the results  of the questionnaire will suggest Mary to fix an appointement to review the therapy”

Simply put wow! We here have  all rolled in a dime:

+ an appointement manager

+ a knowledge manager (convening heterogeneous information into an intelligible flow)

+ an at home medical care manager with high user interaction

+ a follow up system with an active warning system able to fix a prescription (decision support system)

The sustainability of the system in the mind of the PIPS creators relies upon the involvement of all healthcare actors to create a fluid delivery value chain that can generate valuable information. PIPS has been conceived to be always auto sufficient. The preventive care generated by PIPS is for instance doubled: a primary prevenetion after a disease to reduce side effects and a secondary prevention to reduce the risk of relapse or other collateral disease. Another interesting contribution made by PIPS is the help it provides to act over the prevalent cuases of non compliance such as abandoning treatment before completion.

PIPS is a great project because it is a societal project where everybody is involved in order to help everybody. It is a great vision of medical practices where all forces are garnered in order to help all three kinds of actors involved in medical care namely experts, medical professionals such as GP looking to tie up with qualified experts on rtare condition disease and the end-user at the other end of the delivery value chain that can use this system to assist him in his everyday life according to his IT litteracy (which is simplified to the extreme..)

Health-e-Child is the second software we will review. Conversly to health plus; health e child is not a health assistant but more a preventive care and medical care tool specialised in following the condition of young children.

Merger of Information, Acquisition of Knowledge: M&A is everywhere

Children are in fact suffering from a disconnection of pediatric care and medical care oriented towards adults making it difficult to have a transgenerational biomedical information plateform to build up cross modality and longitudinal information fusion (they phrase it like this) to enhance research and disease treatment on the long run, this being particularly blattant for chronic diseases or chronic pain. How about paediatric heart diseases or early brain tumors for instance? Paediatric care is not as well organised as medical care given the difficulty to make a good screening + prescription process (parents can describe the pain experienced by a child not the child himself given his lack of vocabulary when young)

I really liked this program because it helped me to understand that the assumption I have made in a previous article. In fact I was talking about paediatric preventive care education in order to underline the paramount importance of driving programs that dwell upon young children care. However the Health e Child program helped me to understand that a bigger issue was the lack of knowledge stemming from early age disease which ripple effects are hardly mastered today. Paediatric preventive care could therefore help to give more cohesion to medical care as a whole and determine the real roots of a late detected disease by consulting early age records.

There is an ongoing dream among medical specialists: it is that people can take care of themselves and well manage their health status at any moment. In the following days, I will try to list some very interesting initiatives regarding this matter, namely web based projects for weight control, diabetic control and so forth serving as a lifestyle assistant

Health plus: minus weight!

Health Plus is the first project we will dwell upon. It specialises in fighting against obesity which affects 200 million European citizens  and which costs nearly 5% of the healthcare expenses in Europe. This program is organised around two thnigs:

+ an experimental approach through the monitoring of certain populations by creating and diffusing food frequency questionnaires and food registration diaries.

+ a practical approach whereby health plus helps providing personalised nutritional programs to support any user defining and implementing a personal nutrition plan

What is very interesting about Health plus is its action for pediatric nutrition action. In fact, together with the University of Parma, the Health plus program is building up a plateform among children aged from 6 to 12 to asses their eating ande lifestyle habits (though testing effects are quite important when testing young children habits) in order to design and test corrective measures on the long run.

This kind of preventive care actions make particularly sense, as we are not talking about self care but care under the tutelage of the parents with long term benefits as young children will benefit from his early nutritional education. Preventive care systems should really focus on pediatric applications in order to create sustainable results and ease up the diffusion of self care habits.