Introduction
The Tele-consultation product of company MFine is called MFine and it has been available since 2017. The solution providers value care delivery the most. Their business model is B2B and B2C both. They provide both mobile and web based applications for the doctors. They also provide mobile applications for patient and web based patient portals. They also offer white labelling options for the solution.
Size of Healthcare Provider
The categories of healthcare providers that this solution can cater to are:
a) Individual Clinician
b) Clinics
c) Nursing Home/Small Hospital (less than 100 beds)
d) Large Hospital
Level of Specialization
The solution lends itself to use in the following levels of clinical specialisations:
a) Primary care
b) Secondary care
c) Tertiary care
Expert Panel Evaluation
Doctors are given training while onboarding. The doctors’ credentials are verified manually and through the partner hospitals. The platform has an easy to use interface for doctors. In order to provide good consulting experience to patients, the doctor’s side of the interface has facilities to manage appointments, calendar scheduling and seamless appointments because of the waiting room facility (queue management). Platform has an admin role to support in managing consultation schedules.
The platform also supports performance of doctors in terms of time-efficiency by providing a user interface which requires minimum clicks and has easily navigable screens. Note taking is guided data entry, with suggestions based on previous usage. The application is easy to use for patients. Doctors can interact with patients in a synchronous manner; The solution provides multimode interaction i.e., audio, video, text and SMS. Doctors could interact with patients using audio/video call while simultaneously taking notes i.e. noting clinical condition, writing prescription and/or entering data concurrently. This platform supports basic clinical workflow and specialty specific note taking in terms of writing subjective details and objective clinical diagnosis along with assessment and planning. Recording of consultation is not facilitated.
Platform has a feature that enables doctors to take an image of their handwritten prescription, preferably with the header having their registration details and it is shared with patients. Doctors are supported with quick prescription writing by rule based access to frequently used (favorite) drugs. Alerts for drugs and allergies are shown. Platform supports system generated prescriptions with doctor’s registration details (without the doctor’s signature).
The platform has interfacing with the drug database (CIMS) but does not have a feature to automatically restrict usage of schedule X / restricted drugs. The clinician has to manually check for restricted drugs in the prescription. There is notification of drug allergies and drug to drug interaction by pop up during consultation. Prescription is shared with the patient and uploaded in the patient’s account for future use.
Patient side of the interface provides login for booking appointments, keywords based doctor search facility, speciality specific guided searching of doctors based on symptoms (rules based). Platform also allows them to take appointments on behalf of family members / loved ones. Patients have the facility to upload documents and enter vitals which doctors can access. Patients can also set reminders and alerts for appointments and medication. Patients can arrange their records and catalogue it. Frontend is multilingual with translation at the user interface. Smart phones are essential to be able to use this solution. Application supports multi party calling making it suitable for simultaneous cross-consultation with multiple doctors in the call (for multidisciplinary care and discussions). Application also facilitates sharing case records (referral) by providers through sharing of referral doctor’s links to the patient. Patients have control over sharing and accessing their records. Platform provides facility to initiate refund to patients in case of appointment cancellation. Patients are having features to rate and provide feedback about doctors.
The platform has provision to exchange data (HL7 FHIR) It is claimed that the solution provides CDSS for diagnosis through symptoms and supports ICD-9/10 codes. Audit trail is maintained and data is anonymized for analytics. Transactional data is stored without encryption. Compliant with ISO 27001 and SHA 256 bit encryption.
The patient agrees to use the platform by a one time consent to terms & conditions while onboarding. For every doctor patient interaction, there is either just an implied consent (patients making the call) or there is a verbal chat based consent before the start of consultation. There is no explicit consent. There is no separate consent to use the patient data for purposes of use for AI.
Additional Features
The solution also ensures following features:
- CIMS Database integration
- CDSS for diagnosis
- Integration with third party EMR of hub hospital
- PHR
- Patient side Delight features
- Medicine reminders
- Quick follow up,
- Doctor side features
- Offline/Online availability settings
- Quick notes taking.
Solution Maturity Level
a) TPG compliant: 3a
b) Feature complexity: 5 [Partial]