Pre-primary Care: What is it and why is it important?

Uber is a taxi firm without cars. AirBnb is a hotel chain without rooms. Netflix is a cinema without theatres. And Healthily is healthcare without doctors.

That statement strikes at the heart of why Healthily is different.

We are not trying to substitute a face-to-face relationship with a doctor with a digital approach; we are transforming healthcare by creating an entirely new sector.

We call this new healthcare sector pre-primary care.

It is designed to give 1 billion people the confidence and knowledge they need to take accountability and responsibility for their health and healthcare decisions. Designed specifically to help people “find their health”.

There are an estimated 1 billion queries per day on Google for health information. This is the ground on which we are building a new healthcare sector that dovetails with primary, emergency and secondary care and has its own unique characteristics and role.

Importantly we didn’t invent the pre-primary care concept – it is not a marketing construct. Instead we are using our technical and medical expertise to bring to life an idea first aired by David Lawrence, the former Chief Executive of Kaiser Permanente and Dr Molly Coy, the former Chief Information Officer for UCLA Health.

Dr Coy states: “At UCLA we started to ask ourselves how we supported the 250,000 primary care patients who visited us every year – before they came to us. We started to ask: ‘What might have prevented them coming to see a doctor?”

“David and I realised if something can be provided by technology, it can be delivered by the patient themselves outside the traditional primary care environment. We felt patients and doctors would be more willing to accept these interventions if we could define a different function for the staff and tools delivering the service.”

Pre-primary care, therefore, has no buildings. It is a platform that provides personalised assessments, medical grade knowledge, vetted suppliers of products and services, reliable guidance on what steps to take and insights derived from trackers, journals and notes – all wrapped up with coaching and goal setting into a holistic solution.

At its core, pre-primary care provides self-assessment, education, motivation, services and monitoring to help people manage their health on their own.

Healthily founders, Henrik Pettersen and Matteo Berlucchi, set out 6 years ago to create a pre-primary care healthcare sector that could be accessed 24/7 without the shackles of buildings and the dependence on scarce professional resources.

Our initial building block was the world’s first augmented intelligence self-assessment tool. This ensured safe (medical grade) personalised assessments. Then we secured the world’s best medical knowledge base from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). This guaranteed accessible and comprehensive educational credibility. Then came OneStop HealthTM, our marketplace of vetted health services and products. In 2020 we added a journal, a notes function, symptom trackers and our first “hub” dedicated to the management of back pain. In 2021, we’ll be adding goal setting motivation and monitoring and personalised notifications to remind users what they set out to achieve.

This core service will always remain free to the user. That’s how we are going to bring the concept of pre-primary care to 1 billion people worldwide.

Healthily is striving to take Dr Coy and Mr Lawrence’s concept and turn it into a life-enhancing reality for people in low- and middle-income countries with scant access to primary care – and for people in developed countries, where demand on health professionals means even in state systems, access to professional advice is rationed based on who can afford it.

We have collected the data to prove this point:

1. Findings from a survey, conducted in late 2020, revealed 67% of GPs urge patients to take greater responsibility for their own health and relieve pressure on the NHS.

2. In a survey carried out by Census Wide, 95% of GPs report they see minor illness/injuries that could be managed at home.

3. GPs say 50% of all appointments are for conditions that could have been managed by patients themselves, Healthily findings reveal.

Additional points supporting the need for pre-primary care:

1. According to the Local Government Association, minor conditions are responsible for 57 million GP visits and one in seven emergency admissions are preventable costing the NHS over £2 billion.

2. Findings from a recent survey state that 61% of GPs agree since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the general public are taking more responsibility for their own health.

Pre-primary care is not a gimmick – it’s the only truly transformational digital healthcare concept in the world today. Healthily aims to empower a billion people to be accountable and responsible for their health.

Read more

• Pre-primary care is the biggest opportunity to improve healthcare