Dr. Alexander Dobranowski
Co-Founder & CEO, MCI Onehealth
Saleema Khimji
Chief Innovation Officer, MCI Onehealth
Don Watts
President, Khure Health
The future of medicine will be personal.
Faster and more accurate diagnosis. More effective and more precise therapies and treatments. Earlier disease intervention. Clinical decisions informed by data — the patient’s and the population’s.
The goal of personalized medicine is to enable health care providers to quickly, efficiently, and accurately determine and deliver the most appropriate course of action for an individual patient. The goal of MCI Onehealth is to make that possible, for patients in its high-performance health care network, and, ultimately — through example, collaboration, research, and knowledge sharing — for patients everywhere.
Just a year after its founding, MCI Onehealth is well on its way to fulfilling the promise of personalized medicine, building a fully integrated health care and health-data ecosystem piece-by-piece. Its building blocks include:
- An integrated clinic and research network with virtual care options
- An innovative health care delivery model
- A “personalized intelligence” platform
- Decision support tools powered by artificial intelligence
- Partnerships and collaborations
Building Block 1: An integrated clinic and research network with virtual care options
Fully integrated health networks support better coordination of care and optimize the delivery of treatment for individual patients.
MCI Onehealth is Canada’s leading integrated clinic network, seeing more than a million patients per year through its 25 primary urgent care clinics and its virtual care platform — MCI Connect. Staffed by more than 600 family practice and walk-in medical personnel and over 50 in-house specialists, MCI counts among its patients as those who come to it via more than 500 corporate health customers.
An in-house clinical research organization, a team of data scientists, and an expanding range of AI-powered technologies — including remote and real-time patient monitoring solutions — reinforce the network’s capabilities for delivering personalized health care.
MCI Onehealth is Canada’s leading integrated clinic network, seeing more than a million patients per year through its 25 primary urgent care clinics and its virtual care platform — MCI Connect
Building Block 2: An innovative health care delivery model
At its flagship clinic, MCI Polyclinic, an integrated care model enhances access, quality, and efficiency of the health services provided to MCI Onehealth patients through the convenience of integrated virtual and centralized in-person care, integrated patient record, and referral systems, as well as improved quality control and responsiveness.
“MCI Polyclinic is centralized physical example of the personalized health care model we’ve strategically built across the MCI ecosystem both digitally and physically. It’s our centralized hub for the type of care that patients want and deserve — the highest quality, the most convenient and efficient, with the greatest access to services, ongoing attention to their individual diagnoses and treatments, and more-readily available access to in-house advanced clinical treatment and research opportunities,” says Dr. Alexander Dobranowski, Co-Founder and CEO of MCI Onehealth.
Building Block 3: A “personalized intelligence” platform
With a 30-year history operating as MCI The Doctor’s Office, MCI Onehealth currently stewards more than 2.5 million patient records. An underlying objective of building this high-performance health care network is to enable an end-to-end personalized patient journey that also captures a more holistic and accurate 360 degree view of the patient’s profile. MCI has built a platform that securely collects and integrates high-quality personal health data essential to personalized health care — from medical records to real-world evidence, whole genome analysis to information captured by wearable technology. MCI refers to this as “personalized intelligence” as in “intel,” information from which you can identify — even predict, and thus prevent — major health concerns such as risk of chronic disease or complications.
“The MCI Onehealth model of care provides personalized care pathways for patients today, and personalized intelligence for their future care,” says Saleema Khimji, Chief Innovation Officer at MCI Onehealth. “With integrated systems and data-driven tools, we believe we can further unlock meaningful insights from consistent and high-quality structured clinical information. As we generate insights through research, we can provide a data-driven, deeply personalized patient profile, accurate and faster diagnosis, and expanded treatment options. Also, by building a richer and deeper patient profile, MCI is simultaneously leveraging this directly into research initiatives and clinical trials, which is a key factor in advancing personalized medicine.”
Building Block 4: Decision support tools powered by artificial intelligence
Through the use of clinical data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, MCI Onehealth’s Khure Health tool is enabling primary care physicians to rapidly screen and identify patients with rare diseases and chronic diseases, bringing average diagnosis time down and facilitating more personalized treatment including clinical trial recruitment.
“Linking Khure’s functional clinical intelligence platform to our existing databases is an integral step in redefining the way that technology is used in MCI’s health care network. Identifying undiagnosed patients with rare diseases empowers primary care doctors with the essential tools and technology to take meaningful steps forward towards a future of preventive care,” says Don Watts, President of Khure Health, an MCI Onehealth subsidiary. “This is also a very exciting time with Khure recently launching its new clinical trial offering that utilizes its AI-enabled clinical intelligence platform to accelerate patient recruitment for clinical trials and speed scientific discovery. This platform will help bring much needed new precision medicines and clinical knowledge to benefit patients in need faster than ever before.”
Integrating multiple tools like this into an easy-to-use interface to support physicians during the delivery of care is an important outcome of MCI Onehealth’s personalized medicine vision.
Data sharing and collaboration are crucial for advancing personalized medicine and being able to extend its benefits across health systems.
Building Block 5: Fostering innovative partnerships and collaborations
Data sharing and collaboration are crucial for advancing personalized medicine and being able to extend its benefits across health systems. MCI Onehealth is collecting and linking higher-quality data points from more diverse sources, and structuring it to share with the key stakeholders that require such data to advance personalized medicine research, technologies, treatments, and therapies.
The precision-medicine ecosystem has provided new ways in which health care providers, patients, research enterprises, health information technology players, and other industries are intersecting, interacting, learning, and collaborating. These “feedback loops” ensure that what is learned from research can quickly be adopted in practice, benefiting patients sooner, with insights that are relevant to their individual health.
MCI Onehealth is developing real-world, evidence-based approaches to collaboration and creating unique feedback loops with the pharmaceutical and life science sector and world-class academic and research institutions. These efforts will create a foundation for a continuously learning health care system model and, eventually, one in which the feedback loops between the various information centers will be shared in real-time.
MCI Onehealth is collaborating with the Stanford Healthcare Innovation Lab as a founding member of its Affiliates Program, a newly established health care collaboration centered around innovation in health care and personalized medicine. With Stanford, MCI Onehealth is also participating in a COVID-19 wearables study, and will embark on co-authoring research publications and exploring further research studies related to chronic diseases, mental health, genomics, and multi-omics.
At MCI Onehealth, the pieces are coming together to deliver on the enormous potential of personalized medicine to give better clinical outcomes, improve access to care, make it higher quality, and ultimately — through earlier intervention in disease and preventative care — reduce health system and societal costs. For MCI Onehealth patients, health care providers, and leadership — it’s personal.
