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A&E is the barometer of the NHS.  In 2012 some 22 million people attended A&E in the UK. A 50% increase in the last 10 years, while the UK population only increased 7% over the same period.

The Royal College of Surgeons has warned that the knock-on effect of this is last minute cancellations of planned surgeries. Official figures show that for the first three months of 2013 some 20,000 planned operations were cancelled.
 
Transferring resources out of hospitals
Minded of the seriousness of the A&E challenge, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the NHS Confederation and the patient group National Voices combined to report that the NHS urgently needs to transfer resources out of hospitals and into the community by expanding GP surgeries, health centres, district nurses and social care.
Such a significant transfer might be helped by enhancing the ways that health providers engage people about their health, which is about improving communications while reducing face-time with health professionals. This is important if Matthew Parris is right. Writing in The Times, recently he warned that patients' allegiance to traditional health providers is weakening. Online communications technology has the potential of strengthening this.

 

Both health professionals and patients have embraced health technology as transformational. Doctors are in love with iPads, consumers are loading wellbeing apps onto their phones and patients with chronic diseases are using smartphone attachments to measure and monitor their vital signs.
 
Exploiting technological trends to improve healthcare
However, technology alone is not the answer. Technologists have an undying faith in technology, which they view as the primary driver of change.  This is mistaken because people select, install, develop and manage technology. It is therefore people and the choices they make, not technology, which is the primary driver of change.  

Already health professionals are making choices to help transfer healthcare out of hospitals and into communities. They are successfully harnessing the propensity for people to play games to improve patients' cognitive skills, especially after stroke or the onset of dementia. Health workers are exploiting telehealth to provide patients with remote access to healthcare professionals as well as using social networks to improve the connectivity of health workers and enable patients to play a more active role in their own healthcare.
 
What patients want
Communications between health providers and patients benefit by an understanding of patients' healthcare needs and preferences. In today's world of interconnectivity, we know what patients want. 

Sixty six per cent of patients want answers about specific disease states, 56% want information about treatments, 36% want to find the best place to be treated and 33% want information about payment.
Further, 80% of all patients search online for health information and, if they cannot get face-time with their health professionals, they prefer online video answers to their questions directly from doctors. Video has become the preferred medium for content consumption by patients.

However, we also know that 90% of all doctors provide patients with information in pamphlet form. While this difference describes a communication challenge, it also suggests the answer: more doctors should use online solutions to communicate with patients.
 
A new online solution for health providers
Currently, there is no easy solution for patients to quickly and easily obtain reliable online answers to their questions in video format.  Also, there is no easy solution for doctors to post answers to patients' questions in an online video format.

Dr Sufyan Hussain, a specialist registrar and honorary clinical lecturer in endocrinology at Imperial College London, has participated in a beta test of HealthPad, a new free and easy-to-use web-based communication solution for non technical health professionals to create rich media publications for their patients and colleagues: www.healthpad.net.

Doctors post short and easily understood video answers to frequently asked questions about the prevention, symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, side effects and aftercare associated with different disease states and also about wellbeing. The videos are aggregated and stored in a cloud, linked to biographies of contributing doctors on HealthPad and can be easily accessed by patients on smartphones and tablets at anytime from anywhere. 

To-date, Dr Hussain has accrued a substantial personal video content library, which addresses frequently asked questions from his patients who, "don't always have to attend a hospital for reliable information to help them manage their conditions".  According to Dr. Hussain, using HealthPad, "can reduce valuable doctor face-time with patients while improving doctor-patient relationships and patient compliance by helping them understand their condition and treatment better".
 
Video healthcare libraries
Video healthcare libraries, similar to the one Dr Hussain has created, play a significant role in the US to communicate premium, reliable and up-to-date health information to patients and their carers. An important difference with pamphlets and WebMD is that people feel an allegiance to personalised video content in a way that they do not for pamphlets and the written word.
 
Psycho-social benefits of video healthcare libraries
US evidence suggests that patients feel a greater allegiance to health professionals who provide them with sought after information in a format they like and understand and deliver it personally to their smartphones.

Dr Whitfield Growdon, a cancer specialist who teaches at the Harvard University Medical School and has a gynaecologic medical and surgical practice at the Massachusetts General Hospital also participated in HealthPad's beta test and, like Dr Hussain, accrued a significant video comntent library, which he now uses with his patients. "Videos", says Dr Growdon, "personalise medicine and have positive psycho-social effects. Patients feel that they know me before we have even met and are less inclined to be swayed by discordant and often incorrect medical information they encounter on the internet that can create misperceptions and fear".

Video healthcare libraries connect doctors directly with patients and inform about medical conditions and treatment options. They are cheap to create, cost little to operate and develop, they can be quickly and easily updated and accessed 24-7, 365 days a year from anywhere at any time.
 
Significant opportunity for UK health providers
Seventy per cent of patients who search online for health information become confused and frustrated.  

HealthPad, the new platform which Drs Hussain and Growdon contributed, aggregates premium reliable health information in a format demanded by patients and represents a significant opportunity for health providers to transfer medical knowledge out of hospitals and into the communities.