For many years, MedCity’s INVEST conference in Chicago has hosted a pitch contest — INVEST Pitch Perfect — where more than 40 novel startups present their vision to solve healthcare’s myriad problems to active investor judges in front of a live audience.
That will continue in 2020 of course, but we are adding a new dimension to the conference: Top hospital innovation executives will present two problems they would like solved with the help of technology. Then, selected startups will present potential solutions.
The first two provider organizations who have confirmed participation are Houston Methodist, — a health system and academic medical center comprising seven hospitals and is part of the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the world — and Geisinger Health System, the marquee integrated health system based in Pennsylvania.
Problems requiring solutions at Houston Methodist
In a phone interview, Roberta Schwartz, chief innovation officer at Houston Methodist, highlighted two problems within Houston Methodist that are top priorities to solve:
- Doctor’s ETA for Hospital Rounds
- Family-Doctor Video-Conferencing from Patient Bedside
Both problems get to the heart of the patient and caregiver experience in a hospital environment. Many patients and their family members spend hour after interminable hour waiting for the doctor to show up.
“They have no idea when the doctor is coming. And the nurses can basically tell you, ‘Well they usually round in the afternoon.’ That’s the only thing my nurses can say – they round in the evening or they round in the morning. But if you ask, “Are they likely to be here at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. so I can tell my family members to come, the answer is, ‘I really don’t know, it’s generally in the morning.’”
And so often it happens that just when the family member leaves for the cafeteria to grab a bite, that’s precisely when the doctor enters the patient’s room.
“We hear it all the time,” Schwartz explained of the deep frustration felt by family members. “As more and more of us start to look at geolocation inside a facility or tracking or phones, it would be good to be able to say the doctor is on the floor. Figure out a way to be able to give the families and idea of when the physicians are coming.”
Schwartz is careful to explain that while people are demanding more from healthcare given that they are able to track when their bus will arrive or when their app-ordered food, she is not looking for a minute-minute tracking of physicians.
“No one wants to have a little tracking device on them that says I am going to follow you around and know when you are in the bathroom,” she said. “But if I tell doctors that I want to figure out a solution where I can generally tell families that you are coming to the floor or we can look at AI and follow your patterns enough to know generally about when you are likely to be coming, then doctors are OK with it.”
She added that doctors themselves have to field multiple calls from concerned family members when the latter aren’t present during the round having waited hours.
“They go to the room and then when they leave the patients they get five phone calls afterward from the family who needs to know,” Schwartz said. “They’d rather take care of this at once.”
The second problem Schwartz is trying to solve is also about efficient communication. What happens when multiple family members are scattered across the country and their loved on is in a hospital room at one of Houston Methodist’s seven hospitals.
“Dad is in the hospital in Houston and you are able to get in the room. Dad’s later in life or has just been in diagnosed with cancer, confusing situation and you are having to make decisions. And we play a game of telephone with the family. We tell you, you tell your sister, sister tells your brother. And family dynamics are complicated. The idea of having a video conference with everyone when the doctor walks in the room so that everything can be discussed at the same time would be amazing,” Schwartz said.
She added that she hasn’t found any solution that is HIPAA compliant today.
“I have been looking to solve these two problems for at least two years and there’s a lot of people in the innovation space now which is incredible but there are some problems where I feel like no one is attacking them,” she said.
If you are a startup with a solution for Schwartz, please apply here. Deadline to apply is Jan 24.
Problems requiring solutions at Geisinger Health System
At Geisinger, Emily Lafeir, senior director of innovation operations at the Steele Institute for Health Innovation, is focused on interoperability, better patient experience and cost reduction to name a few. Here are two specific issues Lafeir wants to help solve:
- Single and Seamless Platform to Manage Chronic Disease Patients with Co-Morbidities
- Increase Fill Rate for Canceled Appointments with Employees
As chronic diseases account for the lion’s share of overall healthcare expenses, health systems are scrambling to manage patients battling diabetes and heart failure better. Many companies — established and new — are developing tech platforms to manage them better. But the problem is that there are many patients that have comorbidities and they are battling multiple chronic diseases. To manage them, both Geisinger and patients have to juggle different tech solutions.
“For instance, let’s say a digital disease management program could be a solution for diabetes patients and a separate organization could be managing heart failure patients. With that example, patients would have two different systems, potentially three different systems depending on the number of chronic diseases they have that they will be accessing or we will be sending them notifications or be requesting them to use their apps,” Lafeir explained. “So what we are looking to develop is a platform that has pathways and protocols for patients that are polychronic and allows for decision support and triaging of patients based on a holistic view of the patient’s needs.”
This one-stop health IT platform would also help to solve the problem of interoperability and data from different devices/sensors that the patients may be using to manage conditions like diabetes and heart disease.
“If you had a seamless platform, then it could link to these devices and be device agnostic. If you are wearing a heart monitor from Medtronic, this device would use Bluetooth or connect in a way that would stratify the data appropriately and then if your scale is a Bluetooth scale from Livongo, [the platform] could still pair that data from the heart monitor from Medtronic with the scale from Livongo,” she explained.
It would be convenient for patients and clinicians, and cost-effective for the health system.
The second problem that Lafeir wants to tackle involves throughput for appointments. Last-minute cancellations of appointments or no-shows are an eternal and costly problem for hospitals and health systems. So, Lafeir is looking for a tech solution – most likely through text messaging – that would let employees of Geisinger know when an appointment near them has been canceled allowing them to choose to come in and be seen by a Geisinger doctor that day instead of having to wait for their own previously-set appointment.
“We have about 33,000 employees so they would have the option to be seen that day — if they are available and looking for day-of appointments,” Lafeir said. “So employees back-fill from missed appointments or canceled appointments and they would get a text message cue and that would allow us to increase our fill rate for those appointments when we have last-minute cancellations with our employee base. It’s also a cool incentive for our employees to get first dibs on appointments when available.”
If you are a startup with a solution for Lafeir, please apply here. Deadline to apply is Jan 24.
Aside from Schwartz and Lafeir, we will be adding two more hospital executives to our reverse pitch session at INVEST in the near future.
Photo: Adam Taylor, Getty Images
