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July 14, 2024 • 15 mins

Vino Ramayah is the founder and CEO of Manage My Health, the largest secure healthcare portal in New Zealand. Vino believed there was an easier and clearer way for patients to access medical information and their own medical records, so he helped create Manage My Health. Vino describes Manage My Health as an electronic bridge between doctor and patient, giving them a way to easily communicate and share information.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We Need to Talk Conversations on Wellness with co CFMS
Tony Street.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hello, welcome to We Need to Talk and our series
on Managing Illness. We're constantly being told, aren't we, that
prevention is the key to good health, to stay on
top of any symptoms, to take regular trips to the
doctor for checkups, and to take ownership in managing our
own health. While the pressures on the New Zealand healthcare
system are immense, there are things we can all be

(00:27):
doing to make life easier for ourselves. Once upon a time,
you relied wholly and solely on your GP for every
piece of information, but technology has meant we now have
immediate access to our own health information and we are
actively encouraged to be part of the solution. I first
started using an online health portal at my local GP

(00:49):
about eight years ago now because I was newly diagnosed
with a serious autoimmune condition. I was instantly impressed at
the control I could have. It was a game changer
for me in terms of booking appointments and checking on
near daily blood test results. Veno Remaia is the founder
and CEO of Managed my Health and online health portal

(01:11):
that allows you to do just that, and as I've
recently found out, also has a background in law and
engineering and a family full of those in medicine. Veno,
It's lovely to have you here and thank you for
creating something that is so valuable to Kiwi's what made
you get into this line of work?

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Well, I was in my previous role.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
I was involved as a chief executive of Medtech, which
was a medical software company involved with became the largest
in New Zealand before I left that company that dealt
with doctors software enabling doctors to manage their patients. And
when I went into it and read adapt I found

(01:58):
that doctors were doing a physical communication with their patients
when technology was available to make it convenient for patients
to engage with their physicians electronically. So we created that
electronic bridge where patients could interact with their doctors, and
that spawned off Manage my Health.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
How have keyws responded to having a health portal where,
like I said, you can message your doctor instantly now
without having to make an appointment, which is very very
hard these days.

Speaker 4 (02:29):
Yes, Well, I think it's the demographics are different. Each
segment of the demographic response slightly differently. I mean, we've
been in this we're the first manage My Health was
the first portal which came into the country, and when
we first started, there was a lot of skepticism amongst

(02:50):
providers who didn't want to change their all have it
and didn't want to share their health record or their
nodes with the patient. That's changed. People are more willing
to look at the democratization of health or data. So
your data is your own and therefore access to that

(03:11):
data has been made available. Now we've got greater take
up in the country. We have always seven hundred practices
or doctor groups or health or care organizations in New
Zealand who use it. And on top of that, we
also have close to one point eight million patients who
are registered on it, active users one point five and

(03:36):
we're growing that by about thirty thousand since COVID. So
it's taken off in a very nice way and I
think it just is good for people and it improves
their lives.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
I remember the first time I saw the section on
the portal that allowed me to look at the notes
that the doctor had written, and I found that quite
empowering that I could then go away and actually try
and underst stand at myself rather than kind of the
cloak and dagger approach that used to be when my
parents were younger, where you didn't get to you didn't

(04:09):
get to look at any of that. Does that make
healthcare providers more accountable as well?

Speaker 3 (04:13):
I guess yes.

Speaker 4 (04:16):
I think it does, and I think there's a greater
acceptance of this.

Speaker 3 (04:21):
We have gen y gen z who will navigate.

Speaker 4 (04:24):
Health in a slightly different way than what my generation
or your generation would have done. And while with doctors
are still the cornerstone of our and the most trusted advisor,
people are now willing to navigate the system, find other
sources of information so that they are well informed about

(04:45):
their illness. For that matter, lifestyle choices and habits they
can make, or choices they can make in terms of
their nutrition, they exercise, their sleep, you know, supplements or
whatever they take.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Tell me about management health and what excess people get,
what do they use it for? For those that aren't.

Speaker 4 (05:05):
On it, the basic functionalities have managed my health is firstly,
you get your health record, which, like you said, you
get immunizations, You get your past lap test results. You
also can chart yourself in terms of where you sit
and we've got things like BMI, which is a body
mass index, and in New Zealand we have an epidemic

(05:27):
of obesity, and this is a good indicator for other
chronic diseases. So invariably you're able to use it in
a proactive way to be aware of your health in
the first instance. But apart from that, there are the
functionalities where you can make an appointment with a doctor,
you can get your repeat prescriptions if you're on long
term medication, and you can get also timely reminders about

(05:53):
your prescription running out. And we're putting it in quite a
few innovations coming in there to remind you and prompt you.
The other extensible things we have done recently is to
increase the amount of content you can access and making
that content relevant to your health record, so you know,

(06:13):
if you're pre diabetic, you know, giving you information where
you should be looking at things where you might want
to make nutritional changes or you know, exercise or address
some of your challenges.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
I love that because I feel like then you're still
giving people the information that is from a trusted source,
as opposed to getting on doctor Google and finding several
different articles and not really knowing which one to go
for absolutely.

Speaker 4 (06:40):
And I think what we have done is who have
got brought in a lot of help professionals together kind
of guarnered a kind of editorial in a curation of
the data which is out there. And if you're an
individual today and if you wanted to get a data
on a particular subject, you're trying to navigate doctor Google
and you're trying to also go to the ministry website

(07:02):
or other you know a lot of nefarious sites out
there which don't really give you accurate information.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
So one of the key things about how we feel about.

Speaker 4 (07:14):
This is to make sure we get authenticated, validated things.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
Which are reliable.

Speaker 4 (07:20):
We also work with other providers who provide content who
are ready well established, so it's not you know, we
provide our own content, but you know, we're open to
enabling and all we are putting is a patient at
the center of the whole thing and saying how do
we better serve them and make their journey easy rather

(07:42):
than difficult and complicated.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Now that we need to talk with Tony Street.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Would you say these any parts of the current site
that are underutilized that you'd like people to know about
and to use more.

Speaker 4 (07:58):
I think the Health and gators, uh, and we just
recently introduced our own content which covers nutrition, well being,
women's health, men's health, even things mothers would be interested
in nutritional information whether you know, we've got a lot
of people who have children who have celiacs or gluten

(08:21):
intolerant and understanding what this means and what dietary changes.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
You can make.

Speaker 4 (08:28):
That is an area where we are hoping to promote
and get more awareness and utilization. But I think the
awareness side and following the indicators is very important and
that you know, we've got a cohort which will use that,
especially the elderly who are on long term medication. The

(08:49):
younger ones use different types of app in our focused group,
we've studied you know, people who use fitbit, use Apple Watch,
sampsum watch. So we're trying to converge that data into
Manage my Health. So there's a level of convenience so
they don't have to use tree ads, they can use one,
but yet get the data from fitbed or Apple.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah. Do you think having the online portal like Manage
my Health is helping our healthcare system? Because on the
one hand, I look at it and I think, oh,
thank goodness, I can order my repeats with I've got
three children and I'm a full time working mum. I
don't want to have to make an appointment every time
I want to repeat script. And I love that function
of the online portal. But I still notice it's really

(09:32):
hard to get appointments at your GP. So we're still
really stretched, don't we. Is there a way to utilize
the online portal more so that we can help ease
that burden.

Speaker 4 (09:42):
Yes, I think the number of fronts we can address
that problem. The main thing is really about access to
GP and healthcare information or services. Now, people always look
at help as illness, and the system is pretty much
tailor it to illness. And as I say, you know,

(10:02):
it's like running an ambulance at the bottom.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
Of the cliff.

Speaker 4 (10:06):
What we need to do build good fences prevent people
from falling over. And that's in the continum of wellness.
Wellness includes nutrition, exercise, mental health. I mean, we've got
five hundred to six hundred suicides a year, We've got
twenty five thousand patients diagnosed with cancer every year, one

(10:28):
hundred and seventy five thousand heart disease patients with cardiovescular diseases.
One in three people die of heart disease, so we've
got a serious problem.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
We've got one of the fastest.

Speaker 4 (10:41):
Growing obesity issue as well. So if you don't confront
the wellness side, you end up in the sickness side
of the continum. So how do you ensure you stay
well long enough? Good for the country, good for you,
good for your fun out and it just promotes a
level of general wellbeing and a state of happiness. And

(11:05):
I think that's where you look at help more holistically.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, so having less people burdening the system, that's the answer,
not just getting more manpower.

Speaker 4 (11:15):
Yes, well, we need to balance because we've got a
changing demographic. We've got aging population, so the level of
care is invariably going to put a lot of demand
on the system. And I think we've got a declining
workforce as well. A lot of doctors are retiring, nurses
are going to retire and can't replace them fast enough.
So we've got to address bode. We've got to make

(11:36):
sure we've got a level of services which can sustain
the standard of care at the same time promote If
you really look at countries across the world, like the UK.
I take this example, it spends ninety seven percent of
its budget on illness, hospitals, nurses, doctors, medicine, pharmaceutical drugs,

(11:59):
only two to three percent on wellness. And if you
look at the OECD countries, this is not unusual.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
What would New Zealand be? Do you know what our
split there is?

Speaker 4 (12:11):
I really haven't done that analysis, but you know, I
think that's a greater awareness that wellness is important. Mental
health is important in all of that. But we're looking
at it still from the perspective of illness and trying
to manage the volume as opposed to, Hey, how do
we prevent if you look at the number of children,
especially in the low docile communities, who suffer from that

(12:36):
all hygiene that impacts your physiology mental health. You know,
there's no longer a debate your mental health affects your
physiological health. So how are you addressing your mental health?
Your stress, your anxiety.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
You know that leads to poor.

Speaker 4 (12:54):
Nutritional choices, substance abuse, so they're all interconnected related. So
unless we can't just as I said, run the ambulance
at the bottom of the clip, how do we ensure
there's enough emphasis on prevention, on awareness and education, especially
investing in our younger people to have healthier choices or

(13:20):
make healthier choices.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
And it makes you think there must be ways to
incentivize that as well so it doesn't become a burden later.
I'm just interested, finally around you as a businessman. You
could have gone down any avenue. You know, you've got
your own plane, you're a pilot, you've been a lawyer,
you've been an engineer, and yet here you are with
such a great interest in trying to improve New Zealander's healthcare.

(13:44):
That's really admirable. But why did you decide to do
that specifically? You could have done anything.

Speaker 4 (13:49):
Well, that's a thank you for that question. It's a
difficult one to answer, but ask myself that sometimes. I
think the real core of me is I want to
make a difference of people's lives. If I can improve
someone else's live and impact them in a positive way,
I think I feel good and that's meant a lot

(14:11):
to me, my family and my commitment. I've got very
supportive family who really like what we're doing. And as
an organization, we're a purposer of an organization.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
We want to take.

Speaker 4 (14:23):
Part of our profits and put it back in society,
and we support quite a few charities and organizations where
we want to give back. We've supplied free software and
stuff to needy groups and I think that's a.

Speaker 3 (14:40):
Very fulfilling thing to do for me personally.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Well, I have really enjoyed Heaven you on the podcast.
Our big focused is health and wellness, so the fact
that you are highlighting wellness is something that really needs
to be emphasized. Wonderful fit to be on here with us,
So thank you, Veno.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Right, thank you, my pleasure.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
We need to talk with Coast FM's Tony Street. If
you enjoyed the podcast, click to share with family or friends.
To get in touch email We need to talk at Costonline,
dot co dot MZ
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