Introduction

Anatomate is a privately held company that was founded in June 2001. Anatomate's purpose is to create software that improves surgical quality of care and reduces practice cost by empowering patients with informed consent, increasing the patient's satisfaction with the consultation, and simultaneously decreasing the practitioner's time commitment during the consultation. This is achieved by:

• helping patients and their families be part of their care by interactively showing them their care path and making the patient and their family active participants in the healing process
• reinforcing good health care behavior by providing information across the care path continuum 
• managing the patient's expectations of their treatment to eliminate misunderstandings and unrealistic outcome expectations
• providing practitioners with a tool to improve their patient care and meet their informed consent audit trail legal requirements
• having an affordable solution for practitioners, purchased through a monthly subscription, with content that is internet accessible and regularly updated

By allowing the practitioner to shift the education component out of their consultation time while still having control over its content, the consultation can be shorter. This translates to more patient's seen in a given period. Practice experience has shown that the practitioner's consultation can be ten minutes shorter whilst the patient is more satisfied with the process. Patient satisfaction is the major protection against medico-legal litigation.

There is a public health need to improve communication between the surgeon and their patients. This will result in improved surgical outcomes, more satisfied patients, less practice litigation, shorter consultations, and increased practice income.