How any doctor or nurse can become a Medical Developer…
Playing with LEGO and making digital health pathways: what do they have in common? — written by Jelle Homans MD, PhD and Cox van de Weg MD, PhD
Playing with LEGO
There’s a large chance you’ve played with LEGO; as a kid with your siblings, as an adult, either because you are an ALE (Adult LEGO Enthusiast) or because you are a parent. LEGO is great: you can easily create the most simple to the most advanced structures with different building blocks. The building blocks have different characteristics, such as different colours or different sizes. You can always change and improve a LEGO construction: make the construction larger, transform it into a castle or change a boat into a jetski.
But what has LEGO to do with digital health? At Luscii, we believe digital care pathways are something that needs to be created as well. By doctors and nurses, based on their knowledge, creativity and medical know how. So when creating the architecture for our digital health platform, we looked at LEGO to get inspired. And those working with Luscii might have noticed that there are quite some similarities.
Like a building from LEGO, a Luscii digital care path consist out of different building blocks (we call them instruments): The instruments have different characteristics, such as a single question, data from a connected device (such as a blood pressure measurement) or an education lesson with a video or animation. Any doctor or nurse can define which instruments they want to use in their digital care pathway and at what moment(s) the app should ask the patient to do a measurements, fill out a questionnaire or take any other action. Just like with LEGO, it is simple to improve; add a new instrument, create a combination alert or change thresholds for any alert like absolute numbers, trend analysis, a combination of measurements.
If you play with LEGO, you have two choices: you can either play with a box full of building blocks to build something from scratch or you can build something with a pre-existing LEGO set. If you play with a pre-existing LEGO set, you know it’s complete: you have all the building blocks you need and a clear instruction how you can build it. Working with Luscii comes in two ways as well: doctors and nurses can choose from a growing list of over 200 instruments in the toolbox to create a new Luscii program from scratch. Or they can choose one of the existing Luscii Specials that are already developed and validated by other doctors or nurses.
What is a Luscii Special?
A Luscii Special is a validated remote monitoring program for a specific care path and/or disease. A Luscii Special is developed by a Medical Developer (any healthcare professional in a hospital) together with Luscii and validated through scientific research by the Medical Developer. Just like there are clear processes and rules how to become a CE-marked device and/or how to get your app in the App Store, we strongly believe that it is important to have clear guidelines on developing Luscii Specials as well. From Luscii, we require that this research proves that the self-created Luscii Special is safe, makes patients and health care professionals happy and/or saves them time and leads to improvement compared to conventional care.
Luscii’s Medical Board, consisting of three people from Luscii and a growing number of appointed doctors that work with Luscii in different countries, assesses whether a requested Luscii Special fulfills all the criteria, and thus can receive the Luscii Special batch. In this way, if a hospital uses a Luscii Special which is developed by another Medical Developer, they know what to expect (just like ordering a pre-existing LEGO set). At Luscii, courage for integrity is one of our core values. That’s why it is important that the Medical Developer initiates out the research to proof the idea is working in a medical practice.
Benefits for the healthcare system
The current COVID-19 pandemic show us that it is extremely important to keep healthcare accessible and affordable for everyone, now and in the future. In order to make sure healthcare is and remains future-proof, it is important that the wheel is not re-invented over and over again and that it is validated whether (new) measurements are effective. This is what we try to accomplish with the introduction of Luscii Specials: The Medical Developer can license the Luscii Special to any other customer (just like an app in the App Store). Once another hospitals chooses to use the Luscii Special, the Medical Developer receives a benefit from it (like in the App Store). In this way we think everyone is valued in doing what he/she can do best, we grow to last and together we aim at maintaining healthcare accessible and affordable throughout time. Together we make sure that every patients receives the right care at the right time.
Become a Medical Developer
At this point in time, Luscii has digitalised over forty care pathways (from cardiology to Orthopedics and from Gynaecology to Otorhinolaryngology). If anyone wants to know which care paths we have already digitalised, please contact us and we can inform.
If any medical doctor, nurse or other healthcare professional want to create their own digital care pathway for their patient group, they can easily create it with help one of the Medical Minds at Luscii. Therefore an agreement covering legal and compliance elements, like (CE) medical device regulations, privacy, security and quality assurance, needs to be in place. Once this is there, it can go really fast: the OLVG Corona Check was developed within a week. If the healthcare professionals hasc reated a digital care pathway, they start to validate it into a Luscii Special in their own prachtice and when approved by the Medical Board, it can be licensed to other hospitals as well. Just like the great examples that are already here:
About this article and the authors
This article was written by Jelle Homans MD, PhD and Cox van de Weg MD, PhD. Both are members of the Luscii Medical Board. Jelle is a Medical Doctor by training who carried out his PhD research at UMC Utrecht in the field of orthopedics. He joined Luscii as Clinical Lead in 2020, becoming responsible for Luscii’s Facultii of Medicine, a department (or circle as we call it at Luscii) that — amongst other things — supports Medical Developers with developing new programs and clinical validation. Cox is a Medical Doctor who works at Erasmus Medical Center. Her fellowship general internal medicine focusses on infectious diseases, immunology and acute internal medicine. Next to her work at ErasmusMC she works part time as a Medical Mind at Luscii to support Medical Developers in hospitals in one of the seven countries Luscii is currently active with implementation of digital care pathways and creating programs on the Luscii platform for new patient groups. In Luscii’s Medium publication people working at Luscii share their experiences on creating a company that is not only successful from a business point, but also creates sustainable societal impact and strives to be a really great place to work and grow for individuals. More on Luscii can be found by clicking here.
