Thread by @Pentropy

I spent around 15 hrs / day for most of May in a fancy hospital because of my father’s emergency neurosurgery. Thanks to the doctors & the staff of this hospital, my father lives. 🙏

But this made me realise how much our hospitals need to fix. My observations - (1/n)

They do really responsible, complicated and important work like neurosurgery which changes the world. Can’t thank them enough. 🙌

Now, on to things that are broken and how they need to change like rest of the world is changing (2/n)

1. Attendant/Family Anxiety - The communication during ICU / coma / recovery times is almost broken. For medical experts, it’s just one of the case but for family it’s really anxious time. All families need is clear communication channels and honest situation assessment. (3/n)

These are content and communication solved problems already. The right information needs to be shared at the right time to right people in a right way. Mankind has solved this anxiety even for food delivery, No reason why not do it here. Can be solved by an app! (4/n)

2. Patient vitals’ capture and viewing - Everyday many different vital stats are measured for various different problems. Other than the basics like BP, Sugar, temperature there are other stats like activity, motion, food intake, sleep, response to meds etc. (5/n)

All this is done on paper and a large part is missed if the nurse or the patient’s attendant isn’t alert. Also, for patients staying beyond 4-5 days, the book becomes thick. Bad data UX. Can be solved by tech! (6/n)

3. Alignment between functions - Never knew that collaboration was such a big issue everywhere! The link between doctor A, B and C was mostly the attendant (me or my mother in this case). We kept on sharing info provided by each one of these individual expert! (7/n)

If you are detail oriented in general, you would freak out by imagining the possibilities of misleading by partial information. Again, information dissemination problem, very well solved by tech already. Fixable! (8/n)

4. Big decisions left to family - Do you want to go ahead with surgery? Do you want to discharge now or later? Do you want to move to ventilator? The family is expected to take these calls and they hardly have enough guidance to decide. (9/n)

Not sure if there's a solution to that, but we can share decision trees on exact same scenarios in past. Families need more context & hand holding by experts. Can’t totally be tech but with more access to decision in similar scenarios in a simple app, families can benefit. (10/n)

5. Cost visibility - While the large decisions of surgery etc need to be taken by families with zero medical background, the decisions to use costly wet wipes are just taken by hospitals as per their 'policies' (11/n)

I did pay around 30-40k INR for trivial things that have much cheaper as good alternatives. One would pay a large chunk for dieticians etc as well even though the patient is largely unconscious (12/n)

6. Lack of Nurses & Help - 2 days after my father moved to the ward he soiled his clothes while trying to walk to the bathroom. It took us 30 mins to get help! The nurses and help were really nice and sincere folks, but severely understaffed so they are super stretched. (13/n)

Most people end up venting out their frustrations on them which makes their job even tougher. This is a cost allocation issue, the hospital just decides to spend more money on making sure the hospital looks fancy but not so much on having more help! Can’t be solved by tech (14/n)

7. Attendant hospitality - Major area of opportunity. People travel from far fetched places to these hospitals. Strict guards won’t allow more than 1 person & in ICU, the attendant wont be allowed in for more than a few minutes. Where would they go? They just wander around (15/n)

What if there is a place they could crash for 1 hour, or just take a bath, or just get in at 11 in the night till 6 in the morning. OYO did set up a booth at this hospital and I tried but the experience was unpleasant. Again, can be solved by tech + operations (16/n)

8. I could go on, but I will stop. The doctors, nurses, help, office staff are great & I am deeply indebted to them for what they did for us. Gods!

But the hospitals are not living in 2019, and are waiting to be disrupted.

Share if you have had any similar experiences. (17/n)

Lastly, I couldn’t stop feeling that just like we have product managers balancing between hardcore engineers & ruthless business folks, we need PMs between doctors & hospital admin.

Users first, even though they are in distress and have nowhere else to go! (n/n: n = 18)