What 2020 Taught Us About Healthcare Adaptability

Working at a fast-growing technology company means that we deal with rapidly emerging and completely new challenges daily, which has become part of our everyday life during Doctrin’s first three years. Still, none of us could have guessed the extent of what awaited us when we met on New Year’s Day 2020 by news coverage from China about the new coronavirus. 

Doctrin’s medical team began building a questionnaire for patients with symptoms of the new coronavirus as early as Friday, January 31st. We did not know that already the same afternoon we would see the first Swedish case confirmed in the press and that WHO six weeks later would announce a pandemic. In February, only 26 patients used the new coronavirus form, but as early as March, there was a dramatic increase that followed the pandemic fluctuations.

Reading suggestion: Medical questionnaire developed for the coronavirus 2019-nCoV (Article in Swedish)

With one day left until New Year’s Eve, 43,000 patients have received help with their symptoms, questions, and worries about being infected with covid-19 in primary care in Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Norway. After the initial phase of the pandemic, we have also helped our customers handle antibody tests for 33,000 patients and contact tracking and long-term effects of covid-19. Now the upcoming vaccinations are in focus for our medical development.

Doctrin is a company whose employees have broad and in-depth knowledge of healthcare challenges, thanks to our many doctors, nurses, medical secretaries, and others who have worked in healthcare. During the pandemic, several of Doctrin’s coworkers returned to our old workplaces as healthcare professionals to relieve the workload. Here we met the colleagues who had been at the forefront of the pandemic for so many weeks and months. We are deeply impressed by your efforts for everyone’s health and our lives. We want to thank you for your impressive help during this crisis!

The part of healthcare that does not handle emergency care and intensive care has also been affected by the pandemic in various ways. Some companies have had to lend out a large part of their employees, others have suffered from absence due to illness, and many have had difficulty finding alternative ways to meet their patients. That in the midst of this challenging time, succeed in implementing Doctrine’s platform and an entirely new way of working is awe-inspiring. You have not only solved the issue of remote care meetings in the short term, but also in the long term created conditions for preventing and managing the care debt that comes in the wake of the pandemic. Our old customers have managed to scale up their digital business many times during the year, and our new customers have started in a fascinatingly good way. You have together conducted almost one million care meetings in 2020!

One area that has significantly benefited from the medical development we have made during the past year is specialist care. We now work with several major players in areas such as orthopedics, gastroenterology, gynecology, and pediatrics to name a few. Most care units in both specialist care and primary care have common problems. Patients have difficulty getting in touch with their reception, and patients need to repeat the same information to each new person they meet. The fact that healthcare staff also have difficulty finding each other internally and that it is difficult to share information and collaborate with patients does not improve either the patients’ experience or the staff’s work environment. We are pleased that we have now shown that we can overcome these problems in both primary care and specialist care. With the latest development, we now also enable collaboration and competence sharing across unit boundaries and care levels—all to be able to offer patients healthcare free from barriers.

2020 has also meant the great joy of seeing both old and new investors contribute with additional financing to expand our product offering and enable us to address new markets. The latest addition on that front is our investment in the UK, where during the autumn we established subsidiaries with sales starting in 2021. Thank you, investors, for showing confidence in us!

It is now three days since the first covid19 vaccine was given in Sweden, and I look forward to the coming year. We will forever carry with us the memory of a difficult 2020. However, we will also benefit from the increased adaptability that we have gained through the many challenges of 2020. I hope and believe that in the long run, we will significantly enjoy the innovative power that society has shown during this crisis and that we can feel new gratitude even over the small things in life as it so slowly returns to normal.

I want to say a big thank you for the past year and a really happy new year to you all!

Anna-Karin Edstedt Bonamy
CEO
Doctrin AB