6: Julia Riley: Breaking Down the Patient-Physician Divide

In healthcare IT, data silos are well-known foes. Talk of “breaking them down” permeates most health IT conferences, and for good reason: These silos stand between our present reality and the future promise of more informed, efficient, and personalized healthcare delivery. But there is a lesser-known type of silo that, until recently, has largely crept below the radar—the silo that isolates a patient’s desire to have a say in their care journey from their physician’s determination of what’s best for that patient. Often these two forces don’t align. At worst, they completely neglect to take one another into account. The drive to break down this silo and embed consent, connectivity and clinical context into the patient-physician relationship is at the core of Coordinate My Care, a UK-based service that’s part of the National Health Service’s (NHS) Innovation Accelerator program. The service helps inform physicians of their patients’ desires, so they can make bespoke treatment recommendations that honor each patient's self-sovereignty. In this episode of InterSystems PULSEcast, we speak with Professor Julia Riley, consultant in palliative medicine and clinical lead for Coordinate My Care, to discover why connected patient plans are such an urgent need, how to bring them to life while minimizing cultural pushback, and how the patient-physician relationship stands to benefit.