Every now and then we all get to visit a doctor, either for our own volition or due to unforeseen events. And this especially happens in the winter months—and the current winter has been particularly cruel in Europe.
As a matter of fact, even though I try to maintain an above average active life, I’m still prone to sickness and this winter was no exception. Which meant that I had to, of course, visit a doctor recently.
Thankfully I’m quite fine—and as you might know by now, I take great pleasure in trying to fix problems that I discover that affect hundreds of thousands of people and businesses. And my last visit to the doctor was an excellent occasion to discover such a problem. But more importantly, to also come up with a solution.
You see, one of the main areas of expertise of the company I founded more than 25 years ago, Gloobus, is tech in travel industry. And naturally, as the job implies, I also travel a lot, both for business and pleasure.
One of the things that happens when you travel, especially in exotic areas, is that you’re exposing yourself to bacteria and viruses that you’d not normally find in your own habitat. As a result, you might get ill, taken to a hospital and start treatment. Same for hiking, diving or other types of vacation-specific accidents.
And here’s where to problem occurs: no doctor on this planet can instantly access your medical data if you’re not in your country of residence, because each country—and in many cases, hospitals, pharmacies and doctors in the same country—uses its own patient management system.
In most cases, this presents only a minor inconvenient, but in some it’s literally a life and death situation. Of course you might tell them about various allergies or intolerances you might have, but what if you’re unconscious?
Unfortunately there is no data available on how many people die every year because of insufficient patient data caused to interoperability issues, but I estimate it to be in the double digit percentage.
It would be a utopian to wish for a single patient management and healthcare data system all across the Earth (but it would be absolutely amazing!), so the next best thing is to have a way to help all the different systems communicate with each other.
And there is—faced with similar issues ourselves, both in the travel and insurance markets, we created the GSB (Gloobus Service Bus), a fully customizable data exchange platform that connects new and legacy systems in any vertical, gathering any data in any format and pushing it anywhere in the world, in any format, in real time. We do this every day for the industries we actively work in and I’m excited to fix healthcare as well with the help of data exchange.
Up until now, we’ve saved countless vacations, time and money and we’re now ready to save lives too. So if you’re dependent on data, let’s talk.
