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In this edition, we caught up with Dr Raza Toosy, Medical Director at General Practice Software Solution.

Pictured above: Dr Raza Toosy, GP Principal at Park Road Medical Centre and Medical Director at General Practice Software Solution

Tell us about your innovation in a sentence.

PatientLeaf is a real-time clinical decision support tool that adds intelligent patient-level dashboarding by integrating NICE or local pathways on patients long term conditions in their medical notes to give the user a one screen view in order to make quick and safe clinical decisions during the consultation.

What was the ‘lightbulb’ moment?

During consultations I found myself spending too much time searching through different screens to get the information I needed to make a clinical decision on patients and felt there must be a better way. I was also constantly searching NICE guidance and medication libraries and felt the popups EMIS offered were not rich enough for me to be able to make the correct clinical decision. In other industries there are plenty of solutions which help the user visualise the data in a better format and I thought why can’t we do this in primary care?

What three bits of advice you would give budding innovators?

1. Persevere with your vision and don’t give up. It will take time and nothing happens overnight and you will get knockbacks.
2. Keep iterating and don’t stop developing your solution. Following this be aware that the 1st release only represents five to 10 per cent of a product or solution’s life cycle so don’t expect the first release to be perfect.
3. Enjoy the journey rather than the destination. Really enjoy what you are doing in the here and now to let your passion for your invention enthuse others.

What’s been your toughest obstacle?

Getting your products visible. As a SME it’s very hard to get it under the noses of the right people. You might believe you have a good idea but if no one knows about it, it won’t be seen.

What’s been your innovator journey highlight?

Getting so much positive feedback on our latest version of PatientLeaf is my biggest highlight and really makes all time it took to get to where we are worth it.

Best part of your job now?

Creating code with my developers to see the vision turn into reality.

If you were in charge of the NHS and care system, what’s the one thing you’d do to speed up health innovation?

Separate the data from the front end to give us access to the data managed centrally and let us innovate on the business logic and presentation layers.

A typical day for you would include…

• My day is a game of two halves
• 06.30 – Get up and take children to school
• 08.00 – Start Clinical work in my surgery or remote local IT meetings
• 16.00 – Pick up Children
• 17.00 – Power nap (very important!)
• 18.00 – Start working on local projects, emails and attend to software development
• 02.00 – Go to Sleep

Where can we find you?

For more information, visit their website at patientleaf.com or follow them on Twitter @razatoosy