Surgeon entrepreneur develops video replay for specialist appointments to boost patient education
By Stephanie Baum
One vexing problem in healthcare is how best to surmount the challenge of explaining a serious diagnosis or complex procedure to a patient. That’s made all the more difficult as patients digest the emotional impact and struggle to retain vital details of that conversation so they can review the merits, raise further questions and try to figure out what to do next.
A neurosurgeon entrepreneur thinks patients should be able to access a video replay of those interactions. He regards it as a way to reduce the stress of those encounters by providing a way to repeatedly go over that information and share it with loved ones and improve patient education.
Part of Dr Randall Porter‘s motivation for developing The Medical Memory was his father’s prostate cancer diagnosis. Despite being a neurosurgeon, it proved difficult to parse together his father’s recall of the diagnosis and that of his physician.
In a phone interview with MedCity News, Porter noted that with technology advancements, patients can and are trying to record these interactions anyway. But by giving physician practices the ability to deploy this platform, the idea is to ensure the whole appointment is recorded and include complex media like MRI images, X-rays and other relevant information, and make it easy for patients to download and share the video interactions with family members. Porter also regards it as a risk aversion tool — a way for physicians to protect themselves from potential litigation. Although he said it’s preferable to getting a copy of their patient record because some of the contents may be lost on recipients, many patients wouldn’t see it as an either-or issue.
