Meet Rupert Spiegelberg, CEO of Doctorlink
Doctorlink is the UK’s leading online triage provider to the NHS helping to assess patients’ conditions and triage them to the right point of care whether it be A&E, a GP, to a pharmacy or elsewhere. Our app also enables patients to talk to their GP over video as well as order repeat prescriptions and other online admin tasks. We are now making this technology available to other healthtech companies whose service could benefit from improved online triage capabilities as well as private healthcare providers and payers in the UK and globally.
For patients it provides 24/7 instant access to healthcare advice and for GPs it can free up to 30% of capacity and allow them to focus on the right patients by routing others to a more appropriate point of care such as a pharmacy, self-care or A&E. Our service also helps GPs prioritise patient appointments by making sure those who need to see a doctor the most urgently can get access to the earliest appointments.
Not only does this save time in appointment call queues for patients and get them immediate access to the right form of care first time, it also gives time back to clinicians to allow them to focus on patients with urgent or complex needs.
By re-routing patients away from their traditional instinct to contact their GP – or often A&E out of regular hours – and to the most appropriate form of care, our technology can give back valuable consultation time to doctors, particularly during the pandemic.
How you do set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?
Doctorlink’s algorithms have been developed over many years by our in-house team of clinicians using Bayesian logic – a sophisticated form of decision tree – to create the most accurate and safe symptom assessment tool in the market. Our algorithms are tested both internally and externally by medically-qualified experts, which has enabled our technology to be classified as a Class 1 MHRA medical device whose outcomes are indemnified by a leading insurance company.
This approach ensures a higher degree of safety and accuracy over competitors and also enables us to adapt the alogrithms when best practice medical advice evolves or changes. For example, we were able to update our algorithms within days to begin recognizing COVID-19 symptoms and were able to launch a COVID-ready product in January this year while others, who use artificial intelligence to power their algorithms did not update their systems until many months later. AI-based systems deploy more of a trial and error technique to arrive at an outcome that rely on large datasets so are more difficult to adapt when medical recommendations change and evolve and cannot always generate the same level of accuracy.
How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?
There is vast potential for a digital transformation to complement and enhance the current role of medical practitioners, ensuring patients receive a more comprehensive and proactive program of care.
At Doctorlink we have focused on providing a digital front door to patients across the country, as well as critical support to clinicians during these unprecedented times. Doctorlink enhances the work of healthcare professionals rather than seeking to replace them, and is helping to revolutionise a sector that has traditionally resisted moving away from an analogue system in the digital age.
How has Doctorlink grown since launching?
Since our launch, Doctorlink has become the leading provider of digital triage to the NHS, available to more than 12.5 million NHS patients at 1,500 GP practices across England.
This exponential growth is set to continue in the months ahead. While the NHS has for some time had a digital-first system in mind, with the goal of offering all NHS patients the option of an online consultation by 2021, the pandemic has accelerated this process.
As part of this transition, Doctorlink has been selected to provide NHS video consultations and online triage across England which will see the platform become available to millions more patients.
Already we have seen a rapid growth in active users – which almost doubled in the first three months of the year – and general practices opting to use the service – which increased by a third in the same period.
Any recent product launches we should know about?
Having provided digital healthcare tools during the MERS pandemic, our clinical team were quick to recognise the urgency of COVID-19 and need to develop new tools to support the NHS through a potential UK pandemic.
As a result, Doctorlink was the first health tech platform to launch new algorithms to identify and assess potential cases of the virus – in January, before the first case had been detected in the UK.
Since then, we have updated our algorithms more than 15 times to reflect new medical and academic knowledge about the virus and ensure that we always have a fully up-to-date, coronavirus diagnosis triage solution.
We are effectively acting as a first point of contact for patients, particularly at a time when NHS 111 is experiencing unprecedented and unmanageable demand – so it has been essential for us to keep evolving our assessment and advice as the pandemic progresses.
Do you believe the Covid-19 pandemic will be a turning point for the evolution of your sector?
The COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of the old adage that when the tide goes out, you can finally see who is not wearing swimming trunks. While areas without digital tools found themselves hastily pulling together plans for remote consultation, we’ve heard from surgeries who were already using the Doctorlink platform that they have been able to carry on as before and continue to effectively care for their patients.
As remote consultation facilities were already embedded into their practice it has been far easier for them to adapt to the digital-first approach that is now required months ahead of schedule and, as a result, they have not seen the pressure that was anticipated at the start of the outbreak.
To date, healthcare has been slow to adopt new technologies for understandable reasons, but COVID has changed the balance of demand and supply so greatly that there is now far greater willingness to accept a more digital experience when accessing healthcare. I think that once the dust has settled, people will find it difficult to go back to the old way of doing things and the reliance on digital will become the new normal.
How do you ensure everyone – from young to old – is onboarded and comfortable with a shift to app-first healthcare?
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a significant shift towards acceptance and appreciation of healthtech solutions as an essential part of any healthcare system. Yet there is a perception that health tech is only for the younger generations. In fact, our app is popular with older demographics, with one in ten users over 65.
We achieve this by ensuring our focus groups and user tests include people from a diverse range of ages and demographics. The result is functionality that makes it as easy to book routine appointments and request repeat prescriptions, which are often important to older demographics, as it is to seek urgent symptom assessment, which tends to be the primary use for younger users.
What tips would you give to businesses looking to scale whilst retaining a people-first attitude?
Human feedback should be at the core of what you do as a business, and that’s the best way to ensure you don’t build products for the sake of building products. Analysing the data will clearly show you what will be most meaningful to your audience and how you can build your product to deliver that.
Let’s talk about company culture. How have you mobilized you staff to work from home and how have you found this transition?
At Doctorlink, as a provider of a registered Class 1 Medical Device to the NHS, we felt maintaining business continuity was paramount during this crisis. For this reason, we were one of the first companies to close our offices and begin a ‘working from home’ policy, which has been in place now since early March.
In doing so, we have managed to avoid people going sick (I believe I am the only employee to date that has contracted COVID), and continued to serve the NHS and all of our other clients.
Every department has taken on this new challenge with great vigour and, in a funny way, I feel that we are getting more done now than ever before. We hold daily management stand-up meetings, daily departmental stand-up meetings and daily interdepartmental meetings, all via Google Hangouts or other software.
However, we are conscious that working from home bears its own pressures on individuals, whether they live alone, with flatmates or with family, and we are constantly thinking of ways as to how best to mitigate this by shortening meetings, livening up group chats by making them less formal, ensuring video switch on and getting more active on company message boards with more light hearted material to keep the spirits up, as well as encouraging people to step away from their computers during the day.
When this is all over, I think that we will develop much more of a mixed model in terms of working from home and coming into the office, as each environment offers its own benefits depending on the tasks at hand.
How many people does Doctorlink currently employ?
Doctorlink is headquartered in the UK with offices in the US, and has over 70 employees globally.
What plans do you have for your business over the next two years?
Our focus at Doctorlink is to continue to support the NHS by providing reassuring health advice, symptom assessment and digital triage for patients in primary care. By giving patients immediate access to the right support for their symptoms, we hope to be able to reduce the pressure on GPs and minimise the risk of individuals with COVID-19 visiting their GP or A&E and spreading the virus further.
Looking ahead, we are working to extend our reach to support public and private healthcare providers around the world. The current crisis has triggered a global reassessment of how healthcare is conducted and delivered, and as a result, I think that healthcare globally will become digital-first within the next 5 years. It’s an extraordinary time to be working in health tech and I’m looking forward to the challenges.
