Even in today’s modern era of care delivery, this description of a physician’s core responsibilities still resonates. As patients, we hope – and even expect – that our care teams are constantly tracking details of our present health, recognizing signs and symptoms learned from millions of other previously treated patients like us, and using all this data to anticipate what could happen next. In other words, we want “always-on” care.

And yet today, as a physician in 2022, I often lament that I have more real-time insight into the status of my sandwich delivery than I do into the daily health of my patients. Memora Health is changing this, by integrating deeply with our most complex care delivery organizations and building the technology infrastructure needed to transform them into learning health systems that can provide proactive, continuous care.

The U.S. healthcare system today is a confusing paradox. On the one hand, we benefit from access to many advanced therapies and medical interventions. On the other hand, we are forced to navigate a fragmented collection of providers, a checkerboard of non-interoperable technology systems, a high ratio of administrative burden to clinical staffing, and a rising cost of care, which is increasingly borne in part by patients directly. U.S. healthcare expenditures represent nearly a fifth of GDP (a figure substantially outstripping that of other developed countries), and yet we still rank poorly on measures of healthcare access, quality, and preventable mortality.

Buried in these (often overwhelming) realities is an important and actionable data point: patients recall less than half of the recommendations they are given by their care providers, just one week after a clinical visit. This is a staggering statistic.

Most practicing providers would not be surprised by this data at all. We have all felt the anxiety associated with discharging a patient after surgery, knowing fully well that maintaining connectivity with them afterwards will be hard. We have hand-written detailed instructions for our patients on a sheet of clinic printer paper, and tucked them into a patient’s purse pocket, in the hopes that they will refer back to these notes. We have struggled while playing phone tag with a cancer patient a few days after writing a prescription, to make sure they know to expect certain side effects on certain days. These activities simply aren’t scalable, or even reliable. But these same challenges also provide a compelling hypothesis for how we might fundamentally improve our care delivery system going forward: by supercharging providers with modern, consumer-friendly technology that leverages automation to synthesize data from patients and support them continuously.

Even in today’s modern era of care delivery, this description of a physician’s core responsibilities still resonates. As patients, we hope – and even expect – that our care teams are constantly tracking details of our present health, recognizing signs and symptoms learned from millions of other previously treated patients like us, and using all this data to anticipate what could happen next. In other words, we want “always-on” care.

And yet today, as a physician in 2022, I often lament that I have more real-time insight into the status of my sandwich delivery than I do into the daily health of my patients. Memora Health is changing this, by integrating deeply with our most complex care delivery organizations and building the technology infrastructure needed to transform them into learning health systems that can provide proactive, continuous care.

The U.S. healthcare system today is a confusing paradox. On the one hand, we benefit from access to many advanced therapies and medical interventions. On the other hand, we are forced to navigate a fragmented collection of providers, a checkerboard of non-interoperable technology systems, a high ratio of administrative burden to clinical staffing, and a rising cost of care, which is increasingly borne in part by patients directly. U.S. healthcare expenditures represent nearly a fifth of GDP (a figure substantially outstripping that of other developed countries), and yet we still rank poorly on measures of healthcare access, quality, and preventable mortality.

Buried in these (often overwhelming) realities is an important and actionable data point: patients recall less than half of the recommendations they are given by their care providers, just one week after a clinical visit. This is a staggering statistic.

Most practicing providers would not be surprised by this data at all. We have all felt the anxiety associated with discharging a patient after surgery, knowing fully well that maintaining connectivity with them afterwards will be hard. We have hand-written detailed instructions for our patients on a sheet of clinic printer paper, and tucked them into a patient’s purse pocket, in the hopes that they will refer back to these notes. We have struggled while playing phone tag with a cancer patient a few days after writing a prescription, to make sure they know to expect certain side effects on certain days. These activities simply aren’t scalable, or even reliable. But these same challenges also provide a compelling hypothesis for how we might fundamentally improve our care delivery system going forward: by supercharging providers with modern, consumer-friendly technology that leverages automation to synthesize data from patients and support them continuously.