Jonathon Carr-Brown, Chief Operating Officer at Healthily, sat down with me to discuss how Healthily is redefining the relationship between retailers and over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies with their customers, and how a digitally-enabled Pre-Primary Care Health Sector promoting self-driven care can reduce the burden on primary and emergency care globally.
Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:
Q: What you’re suggesting is Healthily is ultimately different because it has actually introduced something of gatekeeping. Instead of going the traditional route, once you find the information on Dr. Google and then you now go to your general practitioner, you’re saying that you can do something else, and almost do a bit of triage. Can you explain a little bit about what you do there?
A: Our ambition is to create a service which is trusted and reliable enough to actually give the user the confidence to make different decisions, slightly more sophisticated decisions. I know from my own just choices and all the research we did that, often people would read the information but just not have enough confidence to not go into the doctor. They go to the doctor fully armed and that’s always better because it changes the conversation. But they’re still going in when actually they’ve got a cold. They still need the doctor to tell them they actually just got a cold even though they’ve got enough information. We haven’t quite tipped them over the edge to a different type of behavior.
This works everywhere as well. It’s not only just about preventing people who don’t need to go to a doctor, it’s also about nudging people who do need to go to a doctor. Within our algorithm, we’ve got all the early warning signs of cancer and things like that. Often, people will get a triage to go and see a doctor for the things that I think are quite benign but our AI has approached you and said, “Actually no, there are some things here, given your age, that you should probably go be checking out now.” So, it’s kind of working both ways. it’s getting people to present early and not when they need to present. The tricky bit of all this, if I’m really honest, is “can we create something that’s trusted enough for people to actually make their own decisions based on that information now and do that?” and that’s the unknown.
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Jonathon Carr-Brown, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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