Dora is not replacing your doctor, but freeing them.
When people find out I am a doctor, who is also working for Ufonia - an artificial intelligence telemedicine startup - one of the most common questions I find my self answering is how I will feel when the machines take over and I lose my job!
What I find myself describing to them is why Ufonia is building a future healthcare system that improves my ability to do my job…
The NHS was born during a time of crisis and we find ourselves in yet another one 70 years later. Spend one day in any service within the NHS and you will see the pressures facing our staff. Covid-19 pushed these to extremes: >104 week waits for surgery, missed cancer referrals and ambulances unable to unload patients needing emergency care cause distress to everyone within the system. Having graduated and started working in the NHS only to be immediately faced with a pandemic, this is all I have ever known. I have seen and felt first hand the frustration of patients, relatives and clinicians alike.
Clinicians are highly skilled workers. They have spent years studying and then years training on the frontline. Dora isn’t removing anyone’s job, Dora is freeing them to do it better. Automation of patient pathways has limitless potential when you think about the second order benefits being fed back into the system. Automation increasing, not decreasing care, and more time for those patients that need it will allow us to become a healthcare system that is sustainable.
We know there is a healthcare workforce crisis. To put this into context: The World Health Organisation estimates there will be a global healthcare workforce gap of around 14.5 million clinicians by 2030. The workforce crisis has been described as the worst problem currently facing the NHS, and the Care Quality Commission states it is having a direct impact on patient care. Ufonia have built Dora to solve this problem.
Dora is Ufonia’s automated clinical assistant. Dora is not a clinician, but Dora’s ability to call hundreds of patients at any time of day, can release weeks and potentially months of clinician time. It will free up me, and my clinical colleagues, to spend more time attending to inpatients, to get involved with research, or work through the backlog of elective work that faces us all.
At the moment we have nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals (such as optometrists and physiotherapists) spending endless hours of their days calling patients to ask them simple, routine questions. These are conversations that Ufonia has shown Dora is able to carry out safely, and with high patient satisfaction.
When I talk about a ‘future’ healthcare system, that seems too far away. The reality is that today our healthcare system urgently needs technologies like Dora, to provide, new alternative models of care. This will free us up to do what we were trained to do, what we are driven to do and what we must do; work with patients to provide an excellent and timely service to as many people as possible, when they need it the most.
