Hannah McQueen – yes, the one we’re used to seeing dishing out financial advice – has moved into a new sector and is taking on one almighty challenge: our clogged up healthcare system. But, she’s feeling optimistic because she can see a way forward – one that will stop our hospitals being so stretched and one that will hopefully see us being healthier in the process.
Chances are, you’ve heard the name Hannah McQueen before. As the founder and former CEO of enable.me, she’s often been on our screens, called upon for expert advice when it comes to financial strategies, whilst behind the scenes she individually coached many Kiwis over her nearly two decades at the helm of the business.
But mid last year, Hannah sold the very successful company and has already launched herself into another – one she hopes might make a big difference to Kiwis, because she believes we’re all facing a rather difficult issue:
Our healthcare system.
Right now, she says, the system is pretty broken.
And one of the issues that she can see is one that is only going to continue to grow as an issue – but she also believes there’s a way to tackle it, and prevent a large number of people needing urgent hospitalisation.
“If you look at our health system and look at our hospitals, the average age of an inpatient in a medical ward is 85 years old,” she says. “Our beds are full. They’re filled with older patients and some of those patients could be discharged if there was a place for them to go safely – often that would be a rest home, but they’re waiting for a bed to become available, so what happens is it creates a blockage, a bed block. Because those beds are full, it goes all the way down – we can’t take on any more patients and emergency departments overflow.”
This is all, she says, her non-clinical assessment of things – but she’s now engaged a slew of doctors, geriatricians and healthcare workers to better understand what is happening in our healthcare system, and what interventions might actually alleviate some of the pressure.
While we hear talk of how many hospital beds we’re short on in different regions of New Zealand, Hannah says the answer isn’t to just increase the number of beds – it’s to get to the people, primarily elderly people, and intervene before they need to be hospitalised.
“If you look at what’s caused people to come to hospital, a lot of what’s triggered them to be in hospital is preventable,” she says. “I have engaged independent doctors to assess that anywhere from 40 – 60% of people who have ended up in hospital didn’t need to be there if we got to them earlier.”
And it’s not just causing headaches for our healthcare system – obviously, a hospitalisation is severely bad news for these elderly people who are being admitted.
“When you look at older people and their aging, once they hit hospital – that’s an accelerated point,” she says. “It’s a milestone for accelerated frailty. Often, next sop is the rest home and then it’s death.”
So, how do we intervene?
“If you go back and go – who would they need to have gone to?” she says. “The doctor? But, our doctors are full.”
It means little things that might signal bigger problems are being missed in those early stages. Our GPs are slammed – if you’ve been to one recently, you’ll know they’re under a lot of time restraints. They’ve got – at best – 10-15 minutes to work out what’s wrong, diagnose you, write a script and write up your notes. That means it’s hard to take stock of the bigger picture – especially for our elderly, whose issues often span so many difference facets.
“If you or I stub my toe, then we’ll fix the toe and that’s often all it is,” she says. “Whereas if you’re elderly and you’ve stubbed your toe, or maybe you’ve had a fall and fractured your hip – did the fall come about because of balance issues and strength, or was it because of your medications? Or was it because you’ve got the first stages of dementia, or is it because you’re not sleeping? Or because your home isn’t what it needs to be? There are a whole lot of causes for that output, but that cuts across a whole lot of specialities. Like, your occupational therapist can’t comment on your medications – nor can your pharmacologist – the pharmacist – comment on your balance. Do, everything’s got to start to work together, because one thing in isolation isn’t helpful when we get older.”
That’s where Hannah’s new business, Brightly, comes in. While most healthcare systems are designed to treat illness after it appears, Hannah says Brightly is designed to help you stay ahead of decline instead of reacting to it.
With a multidisciplinary clinicial team, led by Dr Manoj Patel, Brightly brings together leading geriatricians, GPs, nurse practitioners, nurses, and allied health professionals including a pharmacist, occupational therapist, dietitian, pscyholigst and physiotherapist.
Instead of clinicians working in silos, Brightly’s model coordinates proactive, personalised care around each member, helping identify risk early and support long term health, mobility, and independence. Clinics will operate within established GP practices, with services also available remotely to the wider community.
Hannah says they’re using technology to spot signals that something is amiss early on. “We do a baseline test where we take 100 biomarkers, 260 data points, understand your health goals, your medical history, your medications, what’s concerning you and you get a baseline. That assessment goes to our multidisciplinary team and they interpret that data from a clinical lens, determining if there’s anything that’s high risk, or an emerging risk. Depending on the risk, there could be a targeting intervention, which we will facilitate immediately, or that we’ll focus on.”
Brightly launched in late February and so far the mix has been about 50/50 of people coming in for themselves, and the other half coming from adult children signing their parents up.
We’re all busy people – we’ve written a few times here on Capsule about the pressures of being in the sandwich generation. We have young kids who really require our focus, while on the other side of things we have ageing parents who are increasingly requiring our attention.
It can be overwhelming – which is why Hannah hopes Brightly might alleviate that stress, picking up on the things that can be easily missed.
“They’re often small changes that are normalised by the parent and society,” says Hannah. “I’ll give you an example – with my mum, who hasn’t really been sleeping. I met her at the coffee shop with her friend and I asked her, ‘Mum, how was your sleep last night?’ and she said, ‘Well I woke up at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep’. It’s been like this for months, so I say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound good.’ But her friend says, ‘Oh I woke up at 3am as well, it’s just ageing!’
“So between the two of them they’ve solved it, diagnosed it and accepted it as being part of ageing. But I think, when you’re trying to get ahead of decline, you need to detect decline before a symptom presents. Often you get those little things that you just dismiss, but that’s when you have the biggest chance to reverse it and certainly to slow it down.”
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