Marcus Olausson, MD, completed his medical studies at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and practiced at children’s emergency as well as an addiction clinic and a postnatal children’s healthcare centre. He was set to start his residency at paediatrics and withdrew to spend time with the most important child in his life: His daughter. Paediatrics have always been his main interest and the area he thrives in. Since then, he has been a practicing GP at a primary care centre in central Stockholm.

Marcus joined Visiba Care’s medical team in 2020 and has since been contributing with his high productivity in the correlation between symptoms and conditions in Red Robin, as well as extensive literature review on AI and triage systems. Marcus tells us that digital health found him: During the pandemic, he became accustomed to virtual care – a contact that altered his perspective:

Witnessing the integration of digital health in our organic everyday work has been an eye opener. Red Robin and Visiba Care has amplified that: I see where healthcare will be in a couple of years.

Marcus has clear insights on the importance of this organic integration of virtual care in the clinicians’ everyday work. He highlights the importance of involving healthcare professionals in technological development:

Research shows that workflow integration is crucial. It is one thing to have engineers do what they believe in but if the plan is for a system to be part of a clinician’s everyday work, healthcare professionals need to believe in it as well. To get that, clinicians need to guide the development along the way. Otherwise, it will be difficult to add a system to a clinician’s workflow it due to lack of time, especially since the biggest challenge is getting started.

We asked Marcus what the most critical challenges are he sees digital health solving. He remarks that healthcare can be safer, more efficient, enable better care and aide clinicians with diagnoses:

From a GP point of view, it will be terrific when virtual care becomes integrated as part of our everyday work: it will spare resources, it will enable us to focus on really sick patients, and I really hope that we will see a much safer primary care. In the future, we may be able to integrate different tools and hardware.

Moreover, with potential system-suggested diagnoses we will be better at considering rare conditions that are usually in a specialist’s ballpark and become aware that it is an option. I hope virtual care will raise the bar, make my work easier – it will be a tool that will help us become better clinicians.

We also asked Marcus to envision an ideal scenario for virtual care in the future. The visionary strokes are both inspirational and tangible:

The patient journey will start a couple of days before. I will receive the medical history, what the main concern is, and what the patient wants out of the appointment – all this information will go directly into the patient record. I will receive diagnosis suggestions and maybe the system automatically schedules an appointment for the patient after an appropriate time. When the appointment takes place, I will be ready and prepared for what the condition may or may not be.