Marcel Napierala – Robots can help physiotherapists achieve greater success

Co-founder and chief executive officer of Medbase Group highlights the importance of technology and artificial intelligence in physicians’ inter-human activity

Finding a balance between the business administration side of things and patient care isn’t always an easy task. For Marcel Napierala, co-founder and chief executive officer of Medbase Group in Switzerland, it comes with the territory of his position. No matter the challenges, he faces them head-on.

As a member of the 2017 cohort of Sciana: The Health Leaders Network, Napierala is in a position to provide a Swiss perspective to his peers. He acknowledged Switzerland’s health care systems are “quite privileged” in comparison with Germany or the UK. Having missed the meeting in November 2017, Napierala spent time pondering ways to offer insight into some of the success stories of Swiss health systems.

Speaking on how Medbase innovates health care, he said, “I try to motivate my colleagues in the context of digitisation, or even in the introduction of new concepts. I try to work directly with my colleagues as to involve them in all these innovation projects. That’s quite difficult because my time is not enough for all those things to treat. Treatment of chronic patients for us, it’s quite interesting and important to challenge because we have to have new tools and new ways to coach them.”

Medbase has two advisory boards consisting of physicians, therapists, and external specialists. Ideas and methods in prevention, acute care, and rehabilitation are created by these board members. Napierala explained their business development team then collaborates to move forward with ideas. “We are also working bottom up…ideas from our employees who try to get these ideas and to go further with them,” he added.

However, financial aspects can often tip the scale for these undertakings, Napierala noted. “In the outpatient sector… the prices are sinking… It’s quite difficult to maintain our quality and to improve for our patients, so to find a balance between business administration and… patient care is quite difficult. Also, here the chronic patients are not very well [positioned] in this sector… Many coordination work from our doctors, nurses, or from our therapists is not paid. So we have to look for other incoming streams for these scenes. That’s quite a big challenge for us.”

Elaborating on the point of digital solutions, Napierala highlighted physiotherapy as an example. He suggested technology and artificial intelligence will support physiotherapists’ work in the future more efficiently and will help them become more engaged. While recognising the value of this robot revolution, Napierala said human interaction must still be central.

“Administration should be simplified… Robots can also help us in the one to one therapy to achieve even greater success in therapy… Physiotherapists or even physicians are able to have faster… information for the therapy. I think there is a big gain of artificial intelligence if you are looking [at]… radiology…the indication, of the diagnosis, [it’s] much more efficient by computers than by humans. So I think also in therapy you have the possibility to have a good database and be faster in all diagnoses and concept for therapy. But still, the work one to one is still an interactive, inter-human activity. It’s a supporting process.”

Drawing off this concept of inter-human activity, Sciana has inspired Napierala to identify the positives in Switzerland’s health care services. He said their problems were “quite little compared to other countries,” where the pressure is much higher to be innovative.

“I recognised this very well and fast… We have a big opportunity to learn from other countries… and I think also we can contribute our efficiency, our processes to other countries perhaps. It could be a good exchange,” he concluded.