The Toronto company helping doctors stay at the top of their game
Think Research has developed digital tools that let health care professionals quickly access the latest best practices
Time and resources are things many health care professionals have less and less of — especially as health systems strain under the weight of increased demand. But Think Research CEO Sachin Aggarwal believes data and digital software can help bridge some of those gaps.
“Healthcare is a hard area and it’s getting harder,” he says. “The amount of information doctors, nurses and pharmacists must consume and then apply to patients is growing exponentially.”
To keep pace with the rapidly shifting landscape, Think Research provides doctors and nurses with up-to-date knowledge and standards for clinical best practices.
Founded in 2006 by critical care physician Chris O’Connor, Toronto-based Think Research began by bringing some of the daily processes of ICU care into the 21st century, offering digital checklists to replace handwritten orders and reduce the likelihood of errors. Over a decade later, the cloud-based service has extended its purview beyond the ICU to support providers across the spectrum of health care, from oncologists to pharmacists to long-term care workers.
Here, Aggarwal shares his views on how technology will help shape health care in the future and how doctors and nurses can keep up with rapid scientific breakthroughs.
Can you walk me through the services Think Research provides?
We are the top provider of medical education for doctors and nurses. To keep up-to-date on their practice, they must take a certain number of accredited courses a year, and we’re the provider of choice for those. We also provide workflows. So, let’s say you go to your primary care doctor and need a referral to a specialist. There might be certain protocols or standards that the doctor needs to follow before making that referral — we would tell them exactly what they need to do.
We also put new evidence and new information into the hands of those clinicians so they can practice up-to-date medicine. Our mission is to organize the world’s health knowledge so everyone gets the best care.
I imagine COVID showed the need for these kinds of resources.
Most people didn’t really have an appreciation for how quickly medicine was changing until COVID. Then they saw in real time how the knowledge around one disease and one virus changed almost daily. Think about extrapolating that to the many thousands of other diseases and conditions. Well, the truth is, knowledge is changing very rapidly, in respect to all of those as well.
The pandemic really opened the eyes of the whole health system and governments and patients to the need for knowledge-based solutions that make the lives of doctors and nurses easier.
You studied biochemistry and then got a law degree and MBA. How does your background come together at Think Research?
I’m not a health care practitioner but I speak the language of science, and understanding knowledge translation is something that I have some history in. Healthcare is a highly regulated field and you must take many privacy considerations into account. My background in law certainly helps there. And, of course, with the MBA you learn how to be a bit of an entrepreneur. I’ve been able to pull all those pieces together in what I’m doing today.
One of Think Research’s founders was a critical care doctor. Can you talk about what issues the company originally hoped to address?
Critical care was a natural place to start. If you’re a patient there, you have many things wrong with you and it’s hard for doctors to keep all those things in their heads. Keeping that knowledge current was a real problem in critical care. That’s why our solutions — our knowledge-based checklists and protocols — made a lot of sense in that area. It worked to improve the lives of patients, it reduced the cost of delivering care, reduced duplication, and reduced errors. Then we expanded out from critical care to the whole hospital. And today, we’re across many sectors.
We’ve got many, many clients in the U.S. We’ve got clients in Ireland, the U.K., the Middle East. We have doctors and nurses accessing our knowledge-based solutions and our education right around the globe.
What are the biggest challenges you face?
In health care, it takes time to adopt new solutions. A lot of time and effort goes into making decisions. They have to be careful and deliberate and it takes a lot of planning.
What are you working on now?
We are a big part of Health811, the new digital front door for the province of Ontario, where you can reach a nurse by phone or online chat if you’re sick. You can also search for a care provider or you can get right into a virtual visit; it’s essentially a way for all patients to come in and access the health care system and find the right place for their particular health need. This fits in with our product set because it connects the needs of the patient with the part of the health system that is best suited to provide them with care.
What’s your vision for the future of health care?
We see a future where all doctors and nurses are connected to the latest knowledge. And they get it in their workflow, in their day-to-day practice while they’re treating patients. This is not something that they have to go out and search for; it’s readily available to them and is presented in an easy manner. And they can consume it very quickly, so it saves them time and energy and makes their lives easier when they’re treating patients.