A Day in the Life of Chris Barakat from Healthshare

Chris Barakat is the Director of Business Development at Healthshare, a digital health company that develops products to enable greater efficiency for healthcare practitioners and tools to help patients manage their health. As part of his business development role, Barakat meets with healthcare practitioners, hospitals, health funds, pharma, medical device companies and corporates to help solve their health system issues through technology.

5:30 Wake up, check any emails that have come through overnight and head to the gym for a quick workout.

6:30 Back home to my wife and our 11-month-old son before it’s time to get ready and head to work.

8:30 Meet with a specialist looking to become a customer to explain the benefits of Healthshare Referrals, our directory product that features detailed profiles of Australian specialists. The product is embedded into GP clinical software and helps generate GP referrals.

Barakat at work on customer solutions.

10:00 On a call with a government agency to discuss the 2017 Productivity Commission’s report to confirm patients do not require a new referral letter if they want to find an alternative specialist. The agency confirms the specialist can still charge Medicare as usual.

11:00 Off to a meeting with Healthshare’s CEO Rami Weiss to discuss where we’re at with our new proprietary software, BetterConsult. This platform captures patient history and symptoms before they see their GP. The information is sent straight to the GP so they can spend more time diagnosing and talking to the patient about the best treatment options.

13:00 Next meeting is lunch with the Head of our Practitioners Solutions team, Rhys Staley. We discuss the latest customer feedback to ensure we’re delivering what’s really important to them, and note what’s working well, what we can improve and the possibilities for future features.

Barakat meeting with Rhys Staley, Head of Practitioner Solutions.

14:00 A sit-down with a private hospital group. We discuss how partnering with Healthshare can increase the number of GP referrals to their specialists and demonstrate how easy it is to create a profile for each of their specialists within GP software.

16:00 Time to check in with our Development team. We recently added patient ratings functionality to the specialist profiles in the referrals directory, and it’s going well. We do a test search on a random specialist’s name to make sure their Healthshare rating is appearing on their Google Search result.

17:00 On the phone with a health insurer discussing solutions to help their privately insured customers find specialists that can see them quickly.

18:00 Head home to spend some quality family time with my wife and son before we put him to bed.

20:00 A last email check for the day and then it’s time to switch off.

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Connecting the specialist dots

When it comes to finding a specialist, a Google search is not always enough. Patients want to be able to find a specialist who meets their needs, which may include their location, what language they speak, and whether they’re affiliated with any hospitals. GPs face the same dilemma during consultations, and in addition may also need information about a specialist’s expertise when it comes to specific subspecialties.

Healthshare’s Referrals Directory is accessed by over half a million Australian patients and GPs per month. The directory lists thousands of specialist profiles, each containing:

• the specialist’s name
• contact details
• medical qualifications
• practice locations
• special interests
• affiliated hospitals
• spoken languages
• pre-consultation forms.

For GPs, a benefit of this directory is that it’s integrated into GP clinical software, MedicalDirector. GPs can search for a specialist from within the referral workflow and auto populate referral letters. Alternatively, they can access the directory through Healthshare’s web platform.

Last year, Healthshare released a patient feedback platform enabling patients to leave feedback about their doctors’ bedside manner, treatment communication and how well they felt their conditions were understood, ranking each one out of five stars. The overall rating comes up on a specialist’s Google search result.

Healthshare is working with over 30 health insurers to develop solutions that help their private patients find specialists quickly to resolve their health concerns.

For more information, visit www.healthsharedigital.com.

Top image: Barakat working with the Development team. Image credits: ©Healthshare.