Erica Bonns, MD, is a specialist Paediatrician, with long experience in acute paediatrics and children’s emergency care. Erica has also been the Chief Medical Officer at an EMR company as well as, 1177, the Swedish national portal of health and care. No matter what she ventured to, Erica has always been a practicing clinician. In her years in emergency care, she kept seeing the same scenario: Children who come to the emergency room too early, too healthy, oftentimes leaving with a more challenging condition than the one they came in for, often leaving traumatised from this intense environment.

This became Erica’s main driver – and what in her heart she believes is a solution to the challenges of healthcare: Patients come into the right place, the right level of healthcare, at the right time. And she believes that adding complementary digital solutions can be a realisation of that mission. She joined Visiba Care in 2020 as Head of Medical and has been leading our company’s team of Medical Advisors.

What does it take to make this work? Erica says it needs to be easy and accessible for patients and explains why:

Patients come because they are worried – but they often feel themselves that they are in the wrong place. I believe in a tool where the patient feels it is easy; where the patient doesn’t feel wrong to be there. At the same time, they also should feel that they can get the right advice at an early stage.

Nevertheless, for Erica, that does not mean that the role of healthcare professionals fades into the background or behind closed doors. Erica adds:

If we think that we need to remove things from clinicians, that won’t solve the problem – we need to change the way we do things. When I was in medical school, we were told that people will know more about their condition – that was 20 years ago; today people know even more about their condition. But this statement is repeated as the truth and we rarely reflect on what it really means or face the problem head-on. We keep saying that people want to manage themselves – but sometimes they don’t and that’s because they need help and want to be able to request! We need to enable them to come to us at the right time. It’s a mix – we need to meet halfway.

Erica stresses that technological advancement needs to go hand-in-hand with the reality of healthcare professionals. She tells that ‘if the pathways are too advanced, we will run ahead and leave our users behind’. That’s why her team comprises of practising clinicians, with different backgrounds, experiences, and competence. Erica says about the team of medical advisors:

There wouldn’t be a product without this team! Whatever we do with patients, comes from medicine. The team is brilliant, with different profiles and all of us still work with patients – we are not former clinicians, we are not tied to an office chair. We are clinically competent in different fields and we are experiencing the same reality as our peers on an everyday basis.