Jim Gray: Digital Health Entrepreneur, Consultant Surgeon & Clinical Director of Orthopaedic Surgery

‘We are generally desperate to move medically fit patients out of hospital’

Healthcare Voices On Smart Technology Opportunities interview series continue with Jim Gray. Jim is a Clinical Director & Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon, highly intrinsically motivated towards driving change in healthcare software, optimising experience. He is also currently enrolled in a Harvard Surgical Leadership Programme. Let’s dive in…

Technology is taking every aspect of our lives, but how has it changed the home care industry in the past years?

It strikes me that given the struggle one sees in discharging patients back to the community there is an opportunity to adopt care at home with as much care virtually as can be housed in an expensive hospital resource. We push to provide secondary care at home, stretching our resources, but monitoring via the Internet of medical things appears to be the platform for effective possibilities.

Which tech adoptions would you name as the most important in social care so far?

There are several platforms available that act as standalone medical record platforms. These need to align with a broad health record and ingest valuable data.

Is domiciliary care a tech-friendly space in general? Why or why not?

I suspect we are in a transition of using new tech in this space. I suspect also that it is built like so many historic systems by engineers that don’t focus on critical UX and therefore adoption may be cumbersome and slow, and somewhat inadequate.

What's preventing technology from being more widely adopted?

Digital health software is so badly designed that it lacks the UX. This effectively subsequently slows down the task at hand. Poor or slow UX is a killer (or as I like to say sUX) and the majority of software systems to the frontline seems to be permeated by absent or poor slow UX, when it needs to be fast and flourishing (flUX by comparison). Furthermore, the use of technology in the healthcare space can be regarded as a robotic, rogue and risky whereas the support that artificial intelligence (be it narrow or super intelligence) can yield so much more. By harnessing the speed and gathering data, digital healthcare technology can enhance clinical performance and therefore create a more (not less) human empathic experience. The robot allows the human to be more human.

Apart from the pandemic, what have been the biggest challenges that you’ve faced during your career in social care?

We are generally desperate to move medically fit patients out of the hospital. The opportunity to transfer patients to social care from the hospital felt like transferring between burning platforms during the pandemic but besides this, it is a general flow issue.

Which of those challenges, technology could have helped you to solve, and how?

We built a piece of software that was used across social care to assist with managing capacity and demand.

What breakthrough technology do you think will be changing domiciliary care in the next 5-10 years?

Home sensors, personal sensors, video communication automation. Point of care testing, supply chain of products/therapies and supplements based on data and AI forming a precision care model, bespoke to the individual.

What are your company’s biggest ambitions for home care going forward?

My company is striving for on-site automation in hospitals, gathering data in outpatients, and in turn, I foresee the ability to be the point of mediating to home-based care.

Bonus: Is there anything else you would like to add about the role of technology within social care?

The momentum will grow once there is an accessible centrally funded shared care record.

Jim Gray

Digital Health Entrepreneur, Consultant Surgeon & Clinical Director of Orthopaedic Surgery