Dr. Jaka Strel is a general practitioner who works at a private practice with two other GPs and a kinesiologist. Their practice is located in a small town with 6000 inhabitants. The closest community health centre and hospital are a 50-minute drive away. This is a daily challenge – along with many others faced by all GP practices, no matter where they are.
Five years ago, Dr. Strel’s practice decided to go wireless and digital to help deal with the issues. Going digital was not simple as every novelty requires changes at the system level. Nevertheless, the introduction of the MESI mTABLET made this process a lot easier.
Dr. Strel reports:
The MESI mTABLET system has an intuitive interface, all the data is stored in one place, and you can share it with health professionals at hospitals, nurses at your practice, and specialists elsewhere.
Dr. Strel discussed a number of different GP practice issues where digital technology could be beneficial.
This issue became highly acute during COVID-19, when the time available at GP practices was shorter than ever. In this, the slowness of the old (analogue) solutions became highly apparent, such as:
The MESI mTABLET offers diverse diagnostic measurements on one device: ECG, spirometry, SPO2, ABI, TBI, and a blood pressure monitor as well as additional clinical apps such as Protocol to effectively guide the medical professional through the patient interviewing and examination process.
Symptoms often encountered at GP practices are chest pain and dyspnea. Such situations can be urgent; for this reason, they require effective triage and well-structured information gathering. This is why Dr. Strel’s practice created its own chest pain/dyspnea protocol in the MESI mTABLET Protocol app.
The nurse uses the protocol to interview the patient (e.g. about when the pain started and about its severity), takes the ECG, and measures the SPO2 and blood pressure. The doctor then reviews the results and examines the patient. In this, all the results are available in one place – the Protocol app itself. The digital ECG can be easily compared to the patient’s previous ones (if available), and instantly shared with specialists when needed.
Another example when a protocol can be useful are chronic patients. At Dr. Strel’s practice, protocols are used for many chronic patient categories, in combination with specific diagnostic measurements offered by the MESI mTABLET, for example:
Dr. Strel’s practice has developed a unique fitness check method. Every year, they organise a large-scale preventive fitness exam, attracting numerous people from around the country.
The challenge of preventive health exams in general is the amount of data to collect, store and process. For this reason, it is useful to create a protocol for all this to be as fast as possible. The preventive health examinations at Dr. Strel’s practice combine health questionnaires, lab results, ECG, blood pressure, pulse oximetry, spirometry, the Ankle-Brachial Index, physical fitness examination and body composition. Most of this data can be stored in the MESI mRECORDS on the MESI mTABLET.
Dr. Strel’s practice uses the MESI mTABLET system for home visits by their patronage outreach nurse. The visits are mostly made to older patients with high frailty index (party or completely disabled). The MESI mTABLET and all its diagnostic modules fit into a single bag. The most frequent measurements performed at home visits are ABI, TBI and ECG. The nurse carries out the measurements procedure and shares the results with the doctor, who can determine further steps of treatment or share the measurements with specialists.
The mission of Dr. Strel’s practice is to provide high-quality and accessible medical practice. This is why they put a lot of effort in the optimisation of their work processes, quality and safety. Dr. Strel is convinced that all healthcare providers can benefit from portable, wireless and digital tools:
The MESI mTABLET has helped us with administrative relief of our personnel, lowered the probability of errors, and provided us with more time for our patients, which is the most important thing.
Dr. Jaka Strel is a family medicine specialist at the Arcus Medici outpatient clinic in Žiri, Slovenia.
Dr. Strel developed a unique model of health prevention, where the treatment of the patient is performed by a multidisciplinary team. Together with his colleagues, he contributed to winning the award for the healthiest municipality in Slovenia in 2021. In his clinical practice, he devotes a lot of time to optimising the organization of work and work processes. His team focuses on providing quality health care, including the digitalisation of processes in clinical work, which makes work more efficient and accessible to patients.