Last Thurs­day, a group of doc­tors gath­ered at Riz­zoni’s restau­rant at Movi­eTowne Fi­es­ta Plaza in Port- of-Spain.

They were not gath­ered for a sim­ple din­ner meet­ing, but rather a pitch meet­ing host­ed by Me­di­al Health.

Me­di­al is an in­no­v­a­tive soft­ware de­vel­oped by St Lu­cia-born en­tre­pre­neur, Stephen Fe­lix, which is geared to­wards mak­ing med­ical record keep­ing more ef­fi­cient and by proxy im­prov­ing the health­care ex­pe­ri­ence of pa­tients not on­ly in T&T but the wider Caribbean.

Fe­lix said the idea came to him while seek­ing med­ical at­ten­tion in the Unit­ed States.

“There was one time I had to see a doc­tor, and some of my med­ical records got mis­placed. That’s one and then num­ber two, I need­ed to have a pro­ce­dure in the US. And they gave me a disc from one hos­pi­tal to take to the sec­ond hos­pi­tal, and they could not use this disc, so that meant I had to do an­oth­er set of scans. That was just an ad­di­tion­al cost, that were de­lays, all that type of stuff. And then I had the idea, and I was just like, You know what? Let me go ahead and build a pa­tient app so that I can store my med­ical records,” Fe­lix said in the What­sapp call with the Busi­ness Guardian.

Fe­lix who stud­ied in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and com­put­er sci­ence at the Illi­nois In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, be­fore work­ing at Gold­man Sachs, felt this would be a ma­jor rem­e­dy for a lot of Caribbean pa­tients.

Me­di­al Health was of­fi­cial­ly launched in St Lu­cia in Sep­tem­ber 2022.

He ini­tial­ly pitched the idea to the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary of the Min­istry of Health in his home coun­try and re­ceived pos­i­tive feed­back, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the app’s abil­i­ty to track the records of pa­tients with non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases such as di­a­betes.

How­ev­er, af­ter meet­ing with doc­tors with­in the pri­vate sec­tor, he de­cid­ed to ex­pand the reach of the app’s op­er­a­tions, so that not just doc­tors but pa­tients as well could re­view their sta­tus.

“I went around the pri­vate sec­tor. There was just no sys­tem. Some peo­ple may have had, like a stand­alone sys­tem, and that stand­alone sys­tem would have still prob­a­bly led to them not be­ing able to con­sume records from an­oth­er sys­tem. So then I de­cid­ed to piv­ot the com­pa­ny and then build elec­tron­ic med­ical records and of­fer that as the pri­ma­ry ser­vice at a very ef­fi­cient and rea­son­able cost to physi­cians in the Caribbean,” said Fe­lix.

“Lat­er on this year, we’re go­ing to re­launch that mo­bile pa­tient por­tal that would con­nect to this EHR (elec­tron­ic health records) sys­tem and al­low pa­tients to, num­ber one, con­sume and view some of the med­ical records and their care plans, ex­act­ly what they have to do, but al­so start to track some of their vi­tals. Be­cause we have a high rate of NCDs in the Caribbean, and the physi­cians send pa­tients home to track so part of this is to help with that as well,” Fe­lix said.

Last week­end, he of­fi­cial­ly en­tered a deal with a hos­pi­tal in his home coun­try.

“We have on­board­ed our first hos­pi­tal as of yes­ter­day, the first de­part­ment, and we’ve ba­si­cal­ly built, we built a part­ner­ship with them, or are build­ing a part­ner­ship with them so that we can get the soft­ware in­to the oth­er de­part­ments. And part of what that takes is al­so un­der­stand­ing the work­flows, un­der­stand­ing the re­quire­ments, and they’re ba­si­cal­ly go­ing to be a de­vel­op­ment part­ner with us so that we can make this one of the stan­dards in the Caribbean,” said Fe­lix.

Over the past two years, Fe­lix said there had been tan­gi­ble ev­i­dence of Me­di­al’s im­pact.

“Just in St Lu­cia, there have been over 20,000 med­ical vis­its record­ed and processed through our sys­tem. So that means we have pro­vid­ed care for over 13,000 pa­tients, or help to pro­vide care for over 13,000 pa­tients, and al­so we have saved clin­i­cians over 500 hours in to­tal,” said Fe­lix.

T&T is the first coun­try apart from St Lu­cia, where Me­di­al Health has been made avail­able.

Last week Wednes­day’s event served as one of the first steps made by the or­gan­i­sa­tion to gain a foothold in this coun­try.

Cur­rent­ly there is an elec­tron­ic med­ical record sys­tem be­ing pro­vid­ed by UK based com­pa­ny Ri­omed, which has been in op­er­a­tion since 2007.

Ri­omed has pro­vid­ed soft­ware to Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties around T&T as well as the CDAP pro­gramme and sex­u­al health pro­grammes.

De­spite this lo­cal doc­tors ap­peared very in­trigued by Me­di­al’s of­fer­ings.

Dr Jade Mur­ray who works in T&T’s pub­lic health sec­tor is the com­pa­ny’s co-lead in T&T.

“I am very en­thu­si­as­tic about this so­lu­tion. My right arm is go­ing to fall off if I write an­oth­er pa­tient record. So I am re­al­ly ex­cit­ed about be­ing part of what the fu­ture of health­care de­liv­ery coun­try should and could look like,” said Mur­ray dur­ing the launch.

Al­so speak­ing at the func­tion was Dr Kwame John­son, who joined Me­di­al Health re­cent­ly as the T&T co-lead and vice pres­i­dent of prod­uct.

The event fea­tured sev­er­al ac­tiv­i­ties geared to­ward learn­ing the chal­lenges faced by doc­tors and pa­tients alike. The ac­tiv­i­ty al­so served as a fact-find­ing ven­ture for the Me­di­al team.

“In T&T, from the event, there have been a few con­ver­sa­tions that have hap­pened, some be­ing with some clin­ic man­agers and own­ers, and al­so those who own a hos­pi­tal who are in­ter­est­ed in ex­plor­ing the Me­di­al health soft­ware. So, with that, our team needs to fol­low up and keep these con­ver­sa­tions evolv­ing,” said Fe­lix.

“In the Trinidad mar­ket, we’re pret­ty new. But again, if you heard the tes­ti­mo­ni­al from one of our physi­cians who’s been us­ing the plat­form on how we just trans­formed a prac­tice in terms of just the flow man­ag­ing pa­tients and man­ag­ing the work­flows and who needs to see what and the in­for­ma­tion they col­lect and gath­er. I think it has just in­tro­duced lots of ef­fi­cien­cies in our clin­ics that we have in T&T, and then we’re look­ing to mul­ti­ply this ef­fect across the coun­try.”

He said the com­pa­ny al­so recog­nised the for­eign ex­change chal­lenges faced in T&T and as a re­sult had ad­just­ed the plat­form to ac­cept pay­ments in TT dol­lars.

Fe­lix said Me­di­al was aim­ing to start op­er­a­tions in Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica by the end of this quar­ter.