Healthcare Business International: Doctrin reduces frequent visitors by 39% at Capio

Healthcare Business International, one of the most recognised news sources on E-health, shared results from healthcare provider Capio Ringen implementing Doctrin’s platform.

Written by Rachel Lewis, HBI, December 10, 2019.

In December 2018, B2B digital health player Doctrin started to integrate its solution into Capio’s primary care health centres in Sweden. One year on it shares data with HBI that shows significant reductions in frequent attendances, increase in productivity and reduction in waiting times.

The project started in Capio’s Ringen health centre in Stockholm, which has 28,000 registered patients and delivers 80,000 consultations a year with half of those being doctors appointments. Doctrin’s solution – called Flow – was integrated so that it took symptoms from patients seeking an appointment in a text-based application and a small team of nurses treated and triaged 50-120 patients a day through asynchronous chat.

Even with just less than a third of visits digitalised between December 2018 and September 2019, the whole centre saw the average waiting time for a patient to visit their own doctor drop from 4-6 weeks to 1-3 days, Doctrin claims.

“We’re seeing the same kind of results at our other centres too – it’s not unique to this site,” founder Magnus Liungman tells HBI. The solution is currently rolled out in around 150 health centres through Capio, Praktikertjanst and public regional authorities.

Patients contacting the centre by telephone had to wait for a nurse to return the call for an appointment – 20% of which were not returned in the same day. The Swedish has set a target of 100% same-day call backs. Through the pilot, the patients had the option of the digital pathway, which resulted in same day communications going from 73% to 95%.

It also saw a 20% increase in patients seeing the same health care professional three times in a row, more than a third increase in the number of patient contacts per hour and a 39% reduction in the share of patients seeking care more than seven times in a year.

Doctrin describes itself as a “digi-physical” care provider as it embeds itself into the patient’s existing health and care structures rather than acting as digital only like its B2C competitors KRY (known as Livi in France and the UK) and Min Doktor. Recent backlash from policymakers has threatened the nationwide of existence of these ‘pureplay’ companies citing lack of continuity and spiralling costs.

The pureplay model has so far been financially viable, with KRY earning an impressive €22m in 2018 compared to Doctrin’s €1.5m. But recent tariff cuts and political discussions about potentially stopping the pureplays from working nationwide threatens their future growth. Capio pays for Doctrin’s solution in a capitated model.

Different models means it’s difficult to compare their impact but the data does show that where the pureplays typically treat younger patients, who tend to be healthier, Doctrin’s patient cohort sees the highest utilisation in the 31-50 age bracket. Liungman claims that its use by different age groups broadly matches up with people seeking physical care.

The data does show that the total number of digital visits have remained around a third of all visits since the solution was implemented, signalling that there’s going to have to be some work done on patient acquisition to increase penetration.

“Right now we cover almost two million patients in Sweden so our number of digital interactions before the end of year will be around 700,000, which makes us roughly the same size at KRY. The pureplay providers have driven innovation but I think the real value is when you can interact with your GP,” says Liungman.

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