JOHN GALLAGHER TELLS IAN CAMPBELL WHY HE SET UP HIS OWN CLINIC AND HOW IT BECAME A SHOWCASE FOR BETTER HEALTHCARE

 

 

It is easy to understand why technology suppliers to the healthcare sector might grow frustrated. Significant technology advances are being made on a monthly basis that can quite literally save people’s lives, yet the potential customers are sometimes sceptical, occasionally fearful of new investments and almost always constrained by budgets.

 

Rising to the challenge of what is a particularly hard sell, John Gallagher went further than most. He decided that the best way to prove the benefits of the diagnostic imaging equipment that his company distributes was to open his own clinic.

 

“ When you walk people through they can quickly see that their concerns about costs versus patients outcomes are unfounded and they are won over” he said “That would be very hard to do with a Powerpoint presentation. Given the fact that we were finding it very difficult to win the hearts and minds of out potential customers, and because we knew the technology can have such a positive impact, it was a natural progression”.

 

Not every vendor will have the resources or business nous to build a €20 million facility like Charter Medical in Dublin. For Gallagher, who is Chairman of the clinic as well as Chair of Photologic group, which distributes Carestream (formerly Kodak) imaging technology, it was a bold step that would highlight all sorts of things, not least that there is a thriving market for private healthcare.

 

But the most striking element of Charter Medical is the way that it has transformed processes. “We are able to show how the clinical systems need to integrate into enterprise systems and patient management systems” said Gallagher. “We’ve done all that within one location”.

 

This is important because the big pitch for technology is that it can speed up processes and increase efficiencies. In healthcare the potential to reap these rewards is nowhere more obvious than in hospital radiology departments.

 

In the “traditional” hospital environment film would be produced after a patient X-ray and a report would subsequently be dictated by a radiologist and typed up. Then it would be sent back to the radiologist for checking. Further corrections would be made before it was lumped in with a patient report and posted to the referring physician.

 

“That process could take a week to 10 days. And that doesn’t include the period of time on a waiting list to get the radiologist appointment. Now it can all be done in 15 to 30 minutes” said Gallagher.

 

Similarly, a diagnostic study that would typically have taken two to three days to complete can now be achieved in around two hours. Such improvements in productivity will have a huge impact on the quality of care, according to Gallagher, but taking the journey to get there is not easy. “We were lucky because we were a start up and able to design the systems the way we wanted them. For the first 18 months of operation we worked in an analogue environment because we took our time to choose the right technologies. Given that the rate of changes is monthly it can be very hard to get it right”.

 

He accepts that public hospitals are constrained by the baggage of long established processes and have an inherent problem with change. “In their defence there are a lot of conflicting agendas which are sincere and reasonable. When there are so many opinions its dreadfully important from a design viewpoint that you do your homework and get it right”.

 

This problem is compounded with a diagnostic imaging department because the nature of its work means it supports the operations of multiple clinics, from surgery to neurology to orthopaedics.

 

For many organisations the challenge is to see the bigger picture when looking an IT investments and that is not always easy. “Clinicians, for example, will want specific functionality of the technology and that’s perfectly right. But they also need to understand how it fits into the overall patient experience. The problem with healthcare is theres a lot of partial or piecemeal ICT investment where nobody is looking at the overall picture. To get any benefit from any change it needs to be integrated into many other things. There is no value in installing large pieces of ICT infrastructure because it simply moves the problem further along the bottleneck. That’s one of the biggest challenges”.

 

Given the size of the public and private healthcare institutions, investment decisions are never made quickly or easily, he said, so when they do come along it is imperative that all the groundwork is done. “Everyone believes that technology id the way to go, from admissions people to administrators and policy makers but it’s a question of funding and choosing the right project”.

 

Making technological decisions is made harder because every vendor will have a persuasive argument as to why its products are the best and finding independent advice can be difficult and expensive. But it can be done. “There are governments departments where the IT strategy has been a total disaster, but there are examples such as Revenue- where you see highly efficient technology that works very well” he said.

 

Gallagher believes that the prospects for better healthcare, driven by a new way of innovative technology, are good. “The cost of the capital equipment has reduced significantly in the last four years and there is an awakening to the idea that technology investments are a good thing to do” he said. “Ultimately, it makes so much sense that it has to happen”.