About Neuroaxis
Neuroaxis is the first integrated neurology clinic in Bucharest, where the patient benefits from consultation, precision diagnosis, treatment and constant monitoring.
Neuroaxis is a neurology & Neuro-Oncology clinic that is activating in Bucharest. They are handling cases from normal neurology consultations to complex cases like neuro-oncology cases. Another important feature of Neuroaxis is represented by their international collaborations with doctors and hospitals from Europe or the US. They are able to send Romanian patients abroad for complex surgeries or oncology treatments.
Key People
Dr. Dan Mitrea is a neurologist with a specialization in neuro-oncology. In addition to owning his own neurology practice in Romania, Neuroaxis, Dr. Mitrea performs neurology consultations and provides second opinions on various neuro-pathologies.
Dr. Mitrea discovered Medicai in its early days and wasted no time before adopting the platform into his practice. Now, Medicai has grown substantially and Neuroaxis continues to reap the benefits of its use.
Challenges
Efficient triage
One of the first pain points we focused on solving was to improve the efficiency of their triage process.
Fast and accurate precision diagnostic
Neuoraxis offers precision diagnostics for complex diseases. Another problem they face is the time it takes to determine the diagnosis. For doing so, the patient needs to do multiple investigations. Then, a multidisciplinary team of doctors, located in multiple countries (Romania, France), needs to work together, collaborate, discuss and then conclude the diagnosis.
Easy and efficient monitoring
After an intervention, the team needs to monitor the patient and ensure they adhere to treatment.
The biggest challenge is ensuring the patient adheres to the treatment after intervention and periodically comes in for routine medical investigations or to send in their results.
Key Numbers
With Medicai, Neuroaxis reduced by 70% the number of unnecessary face-to-face check-ups for patients requiring medical imaging. Also, the number of non-relevant cases was reduced by more than 90% by implementing online triage with Medicai. With Medicai 1.341 cases were precisely diagnosed by a multi-disciplinary team located in 2 countries (Romania, France).
Our approach
Our collaboration started by offering them a secure way to receive medical data from their patient and an online archive with remote access. In time we helped them to improve their operational flows by bringing new digital tools and improving their numbers in time & money.
Digitize and improve access to patient data
More than 90% of their patients had to come to the medical visits with their medical imaging. They had to bring with them the CDs with MRI/CT Scans. Doctors had to take the CD from the patient in order to open their investigations.
Problems that occurred in this flow:
- CDs might not work
- It takes too much time for the doctor to open the investigation
- CDs might be forgotten by the patient
Medicai workflow improved:
- The administrative personnel from Neuroaxis is able to request in advance all the medical files from the patients
- The patients can send from Neuroaxis website all the medical files
- From the clinic’s reception, the information is uploaded directly to the doctors’ Medicai account
What they gain:
- 5-10 minutes saved from the doctors’ schedule and, therefore, more quality time for the patients
- They reduced errors and returns for the same cause
- Improved patient experience
Remote collaboration & prioritization
Being the No. 1 neurological clinic from Bucharest they receive requests from patients across Romania. Having limited time, they had to respect the schedule not knowing if they missed a complex or urgent case.
Another complex flow from their activity is represented by international collaboration. Many Neuroaxis patients got their treatments outside Romania. But they had a communication issue related to the same area of triage.
Problems that occurred in this flow:
- Lack of communication between the medical teams
- Lack of a triage solution
- Losing important cases
Medicai workflow improved:
- Having all capabilities from Medicai (viewer DICOM, chat & video option) they can work remotely
- The patients’ triage was improved by having all the investigations prior to the visit
- Collaboration with the foreign teams of doctors, Medicai allows them to easily share the patients’ cases with their partners
What they gain:
- Triage tool - easy to access, easy to use, not a time-consuming option
- Possibility to collaborate with all their partners local or foreign ones
- More time to prioritize the complex cases
Receiving medical imaging from patients
Before Medicai, the doctor would receive the CD in his office, while seeing the patient. That meant 10 min of the appointment was occupied by the doctor copying images on his laptop and opening them with a DICOM viewer.
With Medicai, the receptionist can take the CD from the patient, easily upload the images and create a case for the doctor that is about to see the patient. By the time, the patient walks into the doctor’s office, the physician can already see the images, resulting in 10 min saved. On top of this, the clinic realized that they no longer had incidents involving the patient forgetting the CD at the doctor’s office or the doctor forgetting to copy the images locally, in order to review them later.
Another problem with the old way of working was the fact that during the appointment, the doctor was seeing the images for the first time, taking up precious time that should have been dedicated to the patient exclusively. With Medicai, they can receive the images online to allow the doctor to prepare for the appointment if they’re dealing with a complex case.
Online evaluation and triage
Triage is essential in a clinic’s activity as it leads to efficient use of resources. Without a way of receiving medical data and DICOM images from patients ahead of the visit, it is very difficult to properly triage and prioritize appointments. Medicai offers a way to do exactly that by simplifying the whole upload and transfer process.
Even more, the clinic can integrate the solution directly in its website to ease the process for new leads. With this solution, clinics see the data and can make decisions about cases before they physically receive the patients. The data is then reviewed by someone working in the clinic and a decision is made regarding the appointment, whether it should be online (telemedicine), offline (visit) or whether it is urgent or can be delayed.
Sending and receiving referrals
Highly specialized doctors receive patients mostly from collaborators. For this reason collaboration is very important in today’s healthcare system. Through Medicai, doctors can create and maintain a network of referrals where data can travel freely and securely for the benefit of both doctors and patients.
This has allowed Neuroaxis to collaborate with doctors across Europe and find the best option for patients that could not be treated locally. Some of these patients even travelled for surgery.
Online Multidisciplinary Boards
To ensure optimal outcomes for complex cases (i.e. oncology) multidisciplinary teams are needed to coordinate care. This becomes a challenge if the transfer of data between team members is done through CDs or download links. With Medicai, these teams have an online environment that can extract data from local systems in hospitals and clinics to collaborate and coordinate the care of patients. Neuroaxis has implemented this way of working with their referral network and vastly improved the journey of these patients.
