Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Improving Advanced Care Planning with Video w/ MIDEO CEO Dr. Ferdinando Mirarchi
Transcript
- 0:00Many patients want control over end-of-life care decisions or just decisions for when they get very sick.
- 0:06And it can be a blessing for loved ones who otherwise have to make tough decisions in a tense environment.
- 0:12But traditional advanced directives are often ignored and can even backfire.
- 0:17Can technology change that equation for the better?
- 0:26I want to take the chance to thank my family for making a big effort to get together for Thanksgiving and especially those who are coming from thousands of miles away.
- 0:34It's going to be great to see everyone and especially together in person to say happy birthday to my dad.
- 0:40This month, November is all about gratitude and along with my family, there's someone else we don't thank enough and that's ourselves.
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- 0:51And in this crazy world, that isn't easy.
- 0:54So here's a reminder to send some thanks to the people in your life, including yourself.
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- 1:33That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash care talk.
- 1:38Welcome to Health Biz Briefs.
- 1:40I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group here with Dr.
- 1:43Fernando Mirarchi, CEO of Midio.
- 1:46The company helps patients record advanced care directive plans on video.
- 1:51Welcome Dr.
- 1:52Maracci.
- 1:52Hi, thank you for having me.
- 1:54Well, what is an advance directive and what is it supposed to accomplish anyway?
- 1:59So, advance directives themselves and this is going to sound like a mundane kind of answer.
- 2:05It's basically a paper-based document.
- 2:06It's a legal document and it's supposed to give you a patient a voice in your care to either accept or decline life-saving conditions or life-saving treatments when you are in a terminal condition or persistent vegetative state.
- 2:19Well, that is a simple answer, but also one that I think calls into question about the theory versus the practice.
- 2:26And I wonder, what are the limitations of these traditional paper-based directives?
- 2:33Great question.
- 2:34So limitations-wise, one, they're paper, right?
- 2:37We're in the 21st century, and we're still dealing with paper-based documents and so on.
- 2:41Two is portability.
- 2:43So these are 8 and 1 by 11 page documents, there's more than one page to them and so on and people would have to carry them wherever they go.
- 2:52So if you were going to bring it with you and people don't typically carry them, right, because it's a file based type of paper.
- 2:59But if you're going to go to a hospital, you have to think to bring that paper with you to the hospital or to the doctor.
- 3:04So those are the two most, I guess, antiquated as far as limitations.
- 3:09The other limitation, which becomes a big clinical limitation to them, is that they're interpretable.
- 3:15meaning someone has to read it and make a decision.
- 3:18And that decision, often just, and I don't nonchalantly say this, is often a guess.
- 3:23And it's often a guess by a medical provider who doesn't really know you as far as what they're supposed to do to save your life or to allow you to die naturally.
- 3:31That becomes the biggest clinical limitation of those documents in and of itself.
- 3:36So, know, good idea to put one of these documents in place to think through what you might want if you were in search of circumstance and to communicate it to your family and then to formalize it, but in practice doesn't work out necessarily so well.
- 3:50So that's where MEDEO comes in.
- 3:52And I wonder how is MEDEO different from the traditional approaches?
- 3:57What are some of the benefits of what you do?
- 4:00Great question.
- 4:01So first and foremost, when Living Wills came about, they were never really evidence-based, right?
- 4:06It was a good idea by somebody.
- 4:08It was a good idea by someone, hopefully, to have a person at that time when they were created decline life-saving care and treatment, right?
- 4:15They then subsequently morphed, you that you can accept or decline life saving treatment with them now.
- 4:20So that in and of itself became an issue.
- 4:22Right.
- 4:23So the other issues that come with these types of documents and directives is, again, we we come back to that whole point of whether or not people understand them correctly and the limitations behind them and so on.
- 4:36So what we did with Mideo to make this all a better process is to really bring an evidence base to it.
- 4:41So we have research, we have patient safety research called the triad research that has spanned decades of times now that we took the same issues related to the documents, figured out fixes to them and actually made this a safer process for patients.
- 4:55Kind of like a stop guard measure.
- 4:57Essentially, before you enact you get to now look at a video of a patient actually explaining to you what they want in terms that you can understand as a physician.
- 5:07All makes good sense.
- 5:08And I went through this process with you.
- 5:09I'll show the card that I got.
- 5:12It's complete with QR code, my picture, and it's got witnesses signed and my own signature and a link to that paper document that the healthcare system cherishes so much in case they want to get that and download it.
- 5:25They do want paper, don't they?
- 5:26Yeah, indeed.
- 5:27Indeed.
- 5:28Well, good.
- 5:29Well, that's it for the latest Health Biz Brief.
- 5:31If you like what you hear, check out my Health Biz Podcast.
- 5:34for a full-length interview with Dr.
- 5:36Maracci about his life and career.
- 5:38Dr.
- 5:39Fernando Maracci, CEO of Midio, thanks for joining me today on Health Biz Briefs.
- 5:44Thank you.
- 5:44Thank you for having me.