iOWNA
Clinician-Patient Engagement System for Service Optimization

As a consultant doctor, Millicent Stone had always observed how the lack of appropriate medical information could afflict patients’ healthcare journey. Evangelical about the benefits of engaging patients in their care path, she was always keen to build strong clinician-patient relationships and provide them with the correct information. Unfortunately, she often found several patients leaving the consultation room without absorbing the information correctly. They depend on other easily accessible resources to fill the gaps, which leads to increased anxiety and poor patient experience.

Simultaneously, clinicians have huge time pressures and lack the tools to share trusted information that patients need. Millicent witnessed this first-hand when her own daughter got ill with cancer. Early on into the treatment, she realised a deficit of readily available, clinician-approved information to help her along the treatment journey. She wondered, “How does a non-medically trained patient find the trusted medical information to improve their treatment outcomes?”

Millicent’s pursuit to mitigate these challenges led to the establishment of iOWNA, a digital healthcare firm focusing on enhancing clinical outcomes via clinician-patient engagement. The female-founded startup provides a secure cloud-based platform, iOWNA that enables two-way information exchange between clinicians and patients to improve the patient experience. The platform helps clinicians manage personalised patient-centric interactions and deliver medical information to patients. “Our goal is to enable people live longer, healthier lives through clinician patient engagement to improve clinical outcomes,” says Millicent, who leads iOWNA as its CEO.

Clinicians can gather relevant information from a repository of curated materials specific to patients’ conditions and send it directly to them by leveraging this clinician patient engagement system (CPES). This protocolised content is created by leading medical experts and encompasses disease pillars focused on chronic disease areas, including arthritis and autoimmunity, heart and lung, mental health and ageing, obesity and diabetes, and cancer.

iOWNA facilitates clinician-patient interactions with its ability to share information in multimedia formats. This includes expectation setting videos and clinical outcome forms during pre-consultation and treatment videos and educational leaflets during the consultation process. The platform offers monitoring forms and feedback mechanisms for post-consultation interactions. In all these cases, information exchange is tracked and stored in a central digital location that patients can access through their iOWNA portal.

By equipping patients with personalised information and providing clinicians with a tool to minimise repetitive work, iOWNA is an effective solution for service optimisation and digital sustainability. In one of their pilot studies, the company worked with clinicians and nurses to help free up staff time by up to 15 per cent while improving the overall care delivery experience and empowering patients. This rheumatology pilot conducted at Milton Keynes University Hospital revealed that sending medical information via iOWNA and obtaining consent through the eConsent form has saved up to 18 minutes per patient for education delivery.

Built by clinicians, for clinicians, iOWNA helps in hosting clinical digital fellowships to assist next-generation medics to get digital mentorship. It serves as an end to-end solution for clinician-patient engagement during clinical trials and facilitates everything from audits, investigator initiator searches, and pharmaceutical studies at different stages of the research.

As an agile startup, iOWNA promises all possibilities of growth. The company’s partnership with a leading AI specialist, AI NEXUS, manifests its passion for aligning with the changing tides through the integration with wearable technology. They are also in the process of integrating with major electronic patient record (EPR) systems such as Cerner. iOWNA is built to be multilingual and multi-jurisdictional and plans to expand into Europe and other countries with less access to healthcare like Africa and the Middle East.