LIBERATE launches collaboration with The Medical Post to doctors across Canada

2014 promises to be a big year for The Medical Post as we roll out an innovative collaboration with LIBERATE Health that will provide family doctors and specialists across Canada with a game-changing patient point-of-care education platform. The Medical Post (TMP) recently spoke with LIBERATE’s Founder Dr. John Reeves (DrR) and its Medical Director Dr. Shafiq Qaadri (DrQ) about what the app will do not only for doctors and other healthcare providers, but also how it will increase adherence and promote better patient outcomes.TMP: Hi both, and thanks for speaking with us today. So Dr. Reeves, as the founder, give us the elevator pitch—what exactly is LIBERATE? DrR: LIBERATE is a patient engagement platform free to doctors and patients. It combines a mobile app that doctors use to teach their patients during the office visit, with a secure patient portal where the doctor can send the teaching, decisions and plans discussed during the visit. We designed the app to make it easier and faster for doctors to be brilliant educators with their patients. Patients love the app because it makes it easy for them to learn what they need to know to take care of their health. It actually improves the relationship between doctors and patients.TMP: So what content is on the platform?DrR: We will be offering hundreds of condition and treatment decks—all with infographics—which are particularly effective at helping patients, including those with poor health literacy or language problems, understand what they need to know.You can use our materials as teaching decks during patient appointments, or if you don’t have enough time for that, you can send our educational decks to patients so they can educate themselves when they get home. They can share it with their family or trusted friends, which helps them learn and means they will get support at home where they need it. The content is current, curated and peer-reviewed, so you can count on it.Your teaching efforts will have more impact—no longer falling on overwhelmed ears—while saving you time. But even better, it will improve patient engagement, behaviour change and outcomes.TMP: And our physician readers will want to know right off the bat, how will using LIBERATE benefit them? Dr. Qaadri, what would you say to this?DrQ: There are three main benefits. First, LIBERATE makes me more efficient because it’s all there, ready to go. I’ve got great content that’s current and peer-reviewed. And it’s a really simple structure to follow or adapt. I can use a 2-minute deck or a 5-minute deck or a 10- to 12-minute one. Or I can just send something directly to my patient if that’s all I’ve got time for.I can also ask my nurse to take the patient through a presentation. The app is going to be used by nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals—all sorts of healthcare professionals.Second, LIBERATE makes it easier for me to be a great teacher each and every time I use it. I think most of us are aware that patients remember less than 20% of what we tell them. It’s not their fault. They are stressed and overwhelmed. But the LIBERATE decks are written and produced to help patients feel less stressed so they can take in the information they need to be able to follow their treatment plans. More understanding on their part will translate to better outcomes—which is why we are teaching them in the first place.Third, patients love it. They respond to the visual infographic format that is modern and easy to grasp—kind of like the new graphic novels. It is exciting to see when a patient “gets it.” So it’s a more collaborative conversation that seems to give patients more confidence and builds their trust in me.I should add another benefit—the infographics will also help doctors communicate with patients who struggle with English. The LIBERATE presentations are designed to beunderstood by anyone because they are so visual. And beyond that, as a doctor who speaks other languages, I have the option of recording our conversation in the language of my patient. When they get home, the presentation on the screen will be mostly visuals they can understand with written words in English, but the audio track will be in their own language.TMP: Dr. Reeves, you’ve always had an innovator/entrepreneurial bent. How did you come up with the idea for LIBERATE?DrR: It came out of my experience as a GP. I frequently found myself drawing anatomical images and creating action plans for my patients—typically using the paper on the examination room table. At the end of the conversation, when I would crumple up the paper and toss it into the waste basket, a significant percentage of my patients would ask if they could take my drawings home to help them remember what we had discussed…I guess the old adage that a picture is worth a 1,000 words applied here.I always hoped that technology would at some point support this critical teaching moment in the office visit—probably the most important point in a patient’s healthcare pathway—but surprisingly, up until now, the billions of dollars invested into e-health haven’t done that.The other thing that I wanted to build into LIBERATE was the ability for teaching decks to include reliable resources such as websites, apps, videos and online communities. The objective here is to steer patients toward information that is reliable. We all know that there is great information on the Internet, but there is also a lot of incorrect stuff. We want patients doing their own research, reaching out to others to learn, because that means they are engaged. But we want them to be able to rely on the information they discover and we don’t want to have to spend a lot of time re-educating and re-building their trust because they got some bad information.TMP: You refer to LIBERATE as the “world’s first patient visit record.” How so, Dr. Qaadri?DrQ: Well, it is exactly that. It is an accurate record of our discussion during the patient visit. Some patients have tried to get this by using their smart phones to tape our conversations—which I welcome—but this is better because it is backed up with the visual presentation, including any notes or additions I made during our discussion. It will be stored on their personal, private portal as a video so they can review it any time they want and share it with people they care about.And, if print suits them better, they can print off the PDF of the presentation we send them to stick on the fridge, read in bed, or to review whenever they want—and add their notes and questions to as they come up with them.TMP: Dr. Reeves, you have noted that the original meaning of “doctor” is “to teach.” How does LIBERATE reinforce that meaning?DrR: By enabling doctors to be amazing teachers, we come full circle back to what medicine knew in the beginning, that educating patients about how to help themselves was one of the most important things we could do for them. The future of healthcare is dependent on patients taking this responsibility onto their shoulders, something we can only expect them do if our teaching supports them to make informed decisions about their health.TMP: So, Dr. Qaadri, if I’m a Canadian physician, what will change in my practice when I start using LIBERATE? Should I be using it with all my patients?DrQ: In my practice, I use LIBERATE more than a dozen times a day. Sometimes I use the decks exactly as they are provided, and sometimes I adapt the LIBERATE format to fit with my own content. I have some great visuals I like to use. But I also really like the structure of the LIBERATE decks, their introductory slides and Action Plans, for instance. And they have a fantastic library of anatomy drawings I pull from.Not every patient needs it, but if I want to teach about a condition, a new treatment or a change in treatment, LIBERATE is extremely useful.TMP: The theory is great, but as you know, doctors are time-constrained in their clinical day. Dr. Qaadri, as a busy doctor yourself, how will you maximize LIBERATE’s potential?DrQ: Two minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, we've got slide decks of different lengths. When you've got the time, go for the full teaching module. Otherwise, I know we're all in a rush. Then you give them the two-minute version.What I have found repeatedly, if you teach the patient right, if they get it, they listen to you. They understand their diagnosis and what you're doing for them and what they need to do for themselves. And that makes all the difference. It's really the future of patient education—and your patients love you for it.Just in case you don’t have any teaching time, you can quickly and simply send rich decks and attachments to your patients, providing them with really good information they can go over at home.TMP: Dr. Reeves, you’ve always had an interest in technology. For those doctors who are less than tech-savvy, can they still use LIBERATE?DrR: It is actually a really simple app. All they need to have is an iPad. We know that about 60% of Canadian doctors have iPads, but they simply haven’t had an app that was designed to use with patients. We don’t expect every doctor to use it, but we think the ones who want to be more effective collaborators with their patients will.TMP: You know as a doctor yourself that many physicians are focused and concerned with the thought of privacy violations, etc. What steps have you taken to ensure LIBERATE aligns to privacy regulations?DrR: We’ve been very sensitive to privacy and the requirement to guarantee a reliable, secure, and safe environment for our users. We have built in privacy from the beginning by following the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s Privacy By Design principles. We meet every requirement for security andprivacy of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). We use similar technology to online banking and are at least as secure.To test our system, we had a third-party privacy audit—a Privacy Impact Assessment—to identify and correct any potential risks. The LIBERATE platform is secure and our data is encrypted end-to-end.TMP: You’re starting out with the LIBERATE app on the iPad. Will it be available on other platforms such as Android, desktop etc.? And can I link it to an EMR?DrR: The reason we focused on a mobile iPad solution is that healthcare IS mobile—and we believe this is the future of on-the-go clinical care. We’ll be available for Android and Windows platforms soon, and we expect to be available on an expanded set of devices, such as smart phones and desktops, within a few months. We’re working on that 24/7 right now.At this time, our app is not a part of the EMR, but in the future it will be possible for the doctor to put a link into the EMR to capture the deck, along with the audio, that they used with the patient. That’s coming soon.I should also point out that our French version is going to be available in a month or so.TMP: What’s the business proposition? Are there advertisers involved?DrR: There are no advertisers, but there are sponsors. We aren’t designed as an advertising channel. There’s absolutely no advertising.Our sponsors will include hospitals, non-government organizations, medical device companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and more. Pharmaceutical companies will sponsor us because they will benefit if patients improve their adherence to their treatment plans.When you think that 70% of patients who start a new therapy will discontinue it within one year, you can start to get a sense of the adherence issues we all face. A recent U.K. study showed that about one-third of prescriptions never get filled at all! As doctors, we can’t be happy with that, and we suspect our sponsors aren’t either.In terms of input from sponsors, the treatment decks that are specific to the particular drug a doctor has prescribed will use content from the pharmaceutical manufacturer. We will refer to the Product Monograph and the Patient Information that is required and approved by Health Canada.Ensuring that the patient starts and is adherent to the treatment is a win-win-win for doctors, patients, and manufacturers alike–as well as for associations, hospitals and government.TMP: In your perfect world Dr. Reeves, where do you hope to see LIBERATE in a year from now?DrR: My hope is that our users—healthcare professionals and patients, will take us where we need to go. By providing feedback, insights, and recommendations, maybe even supplying content, they will shape the way we go forward in terms of design, information architecture, content and functionality. We will respond quickly to their feedback, and do it in a way that meets clinical needs, delights patients and improves outcomes.TMP: And how could we wrap up without asking—what’s the deal with the transposed “e” in LIBERATE?DrR: I think of it as showing that a small change, or shift in perspective, can make us see things in a completely different way. So for us at LIBERATE this means that a small change with respect to patient education and engagement can have a dramatic effect on patient empowerment and healthcare outcomesTMP: Thanks so much to both of you.> You must have questions. Check out Liberate FAQs right here.> Why is the Medical Post involved with this? Click here.> Don’t miss the great visuals on our Liberate profile page! Click here

LIBERATE launches collaboration with The Medical Post to doctors across Canada

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