Guest post by Fizzah Iqbal, content writer, Incubasys.
After a number of initial coin offerings being launched in the cryptocurrency market, blockchain development companies plan to introduce blockchain technology to the health records (EHR) industry. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a digitised version of patient’s medical history maintained by their doctors over a period of time. It includes information on demographics, diagnosis, vital signs, past medical history, progress over time, lab tests and more.
Owing to the de-centralised nature of blockchain system, it securely stores health records and maintains a single version of the truth that cannot be tampered with. This is of significant importance to different medical organisations and individuals like doctors, hospitals, labs, and insurers who can request permission to access a certain patient’s record from the blockchain without involving an intermediary. It offers two-way benefits; first, doctors and medical organisations get access to patients’ details and history without losing any precious time waiting for approvals from any intermediary and provide better patient care based on more accurate data, second, patients have more control over who sees their data.
The Challenge?
The biggest challenge faced by healthcare systems throughout the world is how to share medical data with known and unknown parties for different reasons without violating patients’ rights and ensuring data security. Creating a trusted environment for decision-making regarding EHRs is challenging for medical community since each EHR stores data using different workflows which makes tracking data recording rather ambiguous. The growing focus on care coordination and EHR access across the care continuum has raised questions about ways to ensure that multiple providers can view, edit and share patient’s data without violating their rights and privacy in any way.
It’s not only about the problem of data sharing logistics in HER instead every solution that requires serious contemplation in a national healthcare system needs to put patient’s privacy and rights first in their list of priorities. And although laws have made health care data more accessible, vast majority of hospitals and doctors still cannot share data safely and securely. The time has arrived where solutions are needed in which patients themselves control whom to share their data with and where to remain pseudonymous.
The Solution?
Healthcare data is inherently sensitive in nature. Besides that the constant challenges of interoperability, patient record matching, and health information exchange have created opportunities for blockchain development companies to come up with a blockchain-based solution.
Once a blockchain solution is deployed to manage EHRs, it becomes a unified and common backbone for digital health. The biggest advantage of using this backbone is that each hospital or care provider no longer needs a specific version of databases or software to access patient data. Any information presented by EHR on the distributed ledger of a permissioned blockchain would be perfectly reconciled community-wide with the assured integrity throughout without any human intervention.
The use of blockchain technology to manage EHRs reduces the time it takes any medical representative to access patient’s information, enhance system interoperability and improve data quality. It also enables a reduction in overhead costs especially for development and maintenance of legacy health record systems. What blockchain does for everyone in healthcare system is that instead of relying on a designated intermediary for information exchange the de-centralised nature of blockchain allows any approved party to join in and either access information, share or exchange without the need to build data exchange channels between certain organisations.
MedPilot uses patient demographic data and payment historyinformation from the practice management system to categorize accounts in order to tailor content, frequency and message medium, boosting engagement rates and patient satisfaction.
Elevator pitch
MedPilot transforms patient financial care through technology-enabled services.
Founders’ story
Jacob Myers
When Jacob Myers, our CEO, worked as a revenue cycle management consultant he noticed numerous solutions to help providers work with insurance companies, but saw a huge void on the patient side of the equation. MedPilot was founded to help providers more efficiently and effectively work with patients to help them understand and resolve their medical expenses.
Marketing/promotion strategy
MedPilot partners with practice management softwares and revenue cycle companies to help them add value to their provider clients who are interested in better patient solutions.
Market opportunity
Because of changes in the health insurance landscape, patients now account for more than 30 percent of healthcare payments. Providers used to overlook patients and only focus on collecting from insurance companies, however now patients can no longer be ignored.
Who are your competitors?
Most healthcare providers engage revenue cycle companies who specialize in insurance billing to also manage patient balances. The old school manual methods of working with patients is time-intensive and laborious, so these vendors don’t put a lot of effort into helping patients.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates MedPilot?
Typically, revenue cycle teams only utilize costly patient statements and occasional phone calls. Now close your eyes and picture the exact opposite …
MedPilot pulls in patient demographic information and billing data from the practice management system into our platform. Our software then uses data science and behavioral targeting to inform our specialized Patient Services team on the best times and frequencies for phone calls, texts, emails and statements to drive patients to our proprietary online bill pay.
For example, if a patient drops off on our help center, we would pause statements and prioritize their account to receive a call from our smart dialer, saving money, resolving the account quicker and increasing patient satisfaction.
Business model
MedPilot’s business model is a percent of successful transactions on our platform when working with healthcare providers directly. We utilize a licensing fee-model when engaging with RCM and practice management companies.
GlucoMe enhances the way diabetes patients and medical teams work together by changing the traditional face-to-face diabetes care paradigm with an AI-enabled digital diabetes clinic.
Elevator pitch
The number of diabetes professionals has remained flat over the last decade. Conversely, the population of those with diabetes is growing. GlucoMe makes it possible for diabetes professionals to successfully manage this growing population by treating the right patients, at the right time, at the right cost, no matter their location and provide effective and continuous care to up to 10X more diabetes patients than with the current standard of care. The solution encourages a combination of face-to-face in-clinic and digital (virtual) visits enabling ongoing communication, treatment changes as necessary and immediate intervention as required.
Dov Moran is one of Israel’s most prominent hi-tech leaders, entrepreneurs and investors. He is known as the inventor of the USB memory drive (sold his company M-systems to SanDisk for $1.6B). In addition, Dov was the Founder and CEO of Modu, which developed a revolutionary modular phone (acquired by Google in 2011. Modu’s assets are the basis for Google’s modular phone Project Ara).
Yiftah Ben Aharon is a technology executive. He was head of R&D for the machine learning investment fund and led software development at Modu after serving in the IDF’s elite 8200 intelligence unit.
Moran is diabetes T2 patient and faces the challenges of diabetes management daily. Ben-Aharon has a parent with diabetes. He is a primary caregiver and is deeply involved in the diabetes monitoring loop. One day they were discussing how it was possible that in the era of smart technologies, diabetes patients were still facing the challenge of clinical data availability. Some of the smart monitors that were available in the market were expensive and practically available to only around 25% of diabetes patients globally. That was the starting point for solving the connectivity issue to ensure the continuum of clinical data for professional analysis and for all patients.
Yiftah Ben-Aharon
Moran and Ben Aharon started with developing smart monitors for their own use. They shared their invention with others. The feedback was so encouraging and enthusiastic that they started a company. GlucoMe began with providing clinical data, thereafter analysis functions and later developed its AI platform. Today GlucoMe is an end-to-end solution that includes diabetes monitors, a mobile app and a digital diabetes clinic with software for healthcare professionals.
Marketing/Promotion strategy
GlucoMe provides healthcare providers and insurance companies with new digital capabilities to easily review and assess massive quantities of data – real-time information, trends, analysis, treatment recommendations – and treat for up to 10 times more patients than they could with only face-to-face office visits.
Market opportunity
In 2017, diabetes expenditure came to some $727 billion, and is expected to increase to around $776 billion during the coming two decades. In 2017, an estimated 8.8 percent of the adult population worldwide had diabetes. However, the number of healthcare providers worldwide has either not increased at all in certain areas or not increased nearly enough to provide adequate attention to the growing number of patients who have diabetes. Until now, it’s been an uphill battle. GlucoMe’s technological advances have made it possible to make this ratio work.
Who are your competitors?
GlucoMe has several competitors on different aspects of the solution whether is it software or hardware. Companies like Glooko, Livongo, One Drop and alike can be considered GlucoMe’s competitors. All are US companies, which are for the most part not currently active outside of the US.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates GlucoMe?
Some of the competitors are mostly the device companies and some are coming from the software direction. There are several parameters that can differentiate GlucoMe from competition: affordability of the GlucoMe’s monitors, their universality, simplicity of operation and connectivity (GlucoMe’s BGM is the only one to transfer data to both iOS and Android through its microphone. It does this using audio connectivity), in addition to several software features where GlucoMe is leading the way.
By Gary Anderson, a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
When you “Google” your practice’s name, are you satisfied with the reviews that pop up? If not, chances are that your main issue has nothing to do with the patient care you give and everything to do with the patient service you provide.
You know the saying, “The customer is always right?” Patients especially feel that way. So, if you fail to give them the top-level treatment they seek when they’re feeling the most vulnerable, your reputation will suffer. And let’s face it: In the healthcare industry, your reputation is everything.
Make sure that your staff thinks more about why they are there, not just what they are doing. This is where proper training and management come into play. If each employee understands his or her unique purpose at your practice and sees it as important, this will have a positive impact on the patient service you provide.
See Your Practice through the Patient’s Lens
Take the necessary steps to experience what your patient does at your practice. For instance, park exactly where the patient does. Is it easy to reach your building’s front door, even for someone on crutches? And when you enter the reception area, do you automatically receive a warm greeting or a cold shoulder? Patients have already made up their minds about your practice before they even get to the exam rooms. So, be sure that what patients experience in the front of the office is just as favorable as what they’ll experience in the back.
Teach Employees How to Address Patient Complaints
Every one of your employees should know how to handle patients’ concerns or complaints effectively. For instance, your employee shouldn’t be quick to tell a patient “I don’t know how to help you.” Instead, he or she should eagerly say “I will find you somebody who can help you ASAP.” Then, the employee should follow through on what he or she has promised. This will make a huge difference in how the patient perceives your practice.
Get Comfortable with Saying “Sorry”
“Sorry” can be one of the hardest words to say. Nonetheless, it is a word that every employee in your office should learn. Your employees need to become comfortable with apologizing for any service lapses that a patient points out, rather than being apathetic or defensive. Using training devices such as role-playing can help to make “sorry” a more natural part of your patient’s language when appropriate.
Focus on Being Blame Free
Realize that if an issue crops up in your practice, your employee is not necessarily always to blame. Sure, if it occurs once, the employee might be at fault. But if the mistake happens twice, your system might be at fault. So, investigate the system, and fix any glitches you see. Your employee will be happier, and this translates to happier patients and ultimately a happier you.
Vyasa Analytics provides a highly scalable deep learning platform for organizational data, enabling conceptual querying and collaborative analytics to help inform key decisions derived from your most valuable information assets.
Elevator pitch:
Vyasa Analytics provides deep learning software and analytics for life sciences and healthcare organizations
Founder’s story:
Christopher Bouton, Ph.D.
Dr. Christopher Bouton earned his Ph.D. in molecular neurobiology from Johns Hopkins University and sold his first big data software company, Entagen, to Thompson Reuters in 2013. Living in India for four years as a boy, he developed a great respect for Vyasa – an important Hindu figure, storyteller and compiler of information – and believes that AI approaches will help us better compile and gain insights from our data systems. In 2016, he founded Vyasa Analytics to apply AI in life sciences and healthcare.
Marketing/promotion strategy:
Vyasa engages with life sciences and healthcare organizations to educate the industry about deep learning technologies, including speaking alongside executives at conferences and events. Dr. Bouton is also a frequent contributor and commentator to industry publications.
Market opportunity:
In 2016, the pharmaceutical industry spent some $157 billion on research and development. This figure is set to increase to more than $180 billion by 2022. The healthcare analytics market was $8.69 billion by 2016 and is estimated to reach $33.38 billion by 2022.
Vyasa is positioned to capture hundreds of millions of dollars in these markets by allowing organizations to conduct analytics on data relevant to their research. Other analytics companies in the space experiencing rapid growth include Lattice.io (acquired by Apple for $200 million), BenevolentAI (valued at $1.7 billion) and Exscientia (recent deals with GSK for $43 million and Sanofi for $273 million).
Who are your competitors?
While there are many deep learning companies, Vyasa is the only one applying deep learning to life sciences and healthcare specifically.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition?
Focusing in the life sciences and healthcare verticals is a key differentiator for Vyasa. In partnership with life sciences and healthcare organizations, we build software to help design better therapeutics, free up researchers for higher-level thinking and solve problems that matter for humanity.
Business model: Vyasa has a B2B business model. Every project is a blend of software licensing and services, provided to the life sciences or healthcare organization to advance their research goals. We are projecting upwards of $3 million in revenue in 2018.
Vaica is helping to solve the hundreds of billion dollar, global medication nonadherence problem with digital, medication management and adherence solutions.
Elevator pitch
Vaica helps get people to take their medications as prescribed — pills, liquids, inhalations, injections, etc — with precise patient support that optimizes medication adherence.
Founders’ story
Tomer Gofer
All of Vaica’s founders, including Tomer Gofer, its current CEO, started off in a different company that developed smart cabinets for medication dispensing in hospitals and addressed the medication adherence problem, as well as medication errors in the hospital environment. After a few years they realized that the true and more complex problem is actually at home, when the patient is suddenly left alone and is expected to cope with multiple medications, confusing prescriptions and absolutely no support. From that point they decided to address the bigger problem and find a solution that focuses on making it possible for even the most complex patient to take their medications as prescribed and lead independent lives at home.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Vaica’s distinctive solution includes a software/hardware combination that ensures accessibility to both patient and caregiver, the possibility to customize a product to the requirements of any therapeutic area as well as a particular patient’s needs and real-time notifications sent to select caregivers if a dose is missed in order to empower a relevant, proactive intervention. Vaica’s solutions have been tested at 15-world class medical centers, reporting a 92 percent to 98 percent success rate. Vaica’s solutions are commercially available worldwide.
Market opportunity
Vaica market opportunity focuses on three main segments: pharmaceutical companies, specialty pharmacies and Payers.
Specialty pharmacies are a rapidly growing segment. Medication adherence and patient education is right at the core of the specialty pharmacy operation. This new care standard drives specialty pharmacies to provide services beyond the ones that are typically provided at the retail level. In 2014, it was estimated that retail, mail, and specialty pharmacies dispensed about $78 billion in specialty pharmaceuticals in the US.
Different payers such as health plans and self-insured employers, are a main focus for medication adherence technologies due to their will to prevent complications that result from medication non-adherence and come with great cost.
Who are your competitors?
We have competitors, such as different adherence apps or dispensing devices that are available in the market. We compete over similar segments, but none offer a complete end to end solution that includes software, physical devices and customization.
By James Smith, blogger and researcher of latest technological trends in the fields of health and lifestyle. He has his work published on various authoritative blogs and is currently working on a telemedicine project at Mend Family. For all the updates follow him on Twitter @JamesSmith1609.
E-Heath, telehealth, telemedicine are different approaches towards accessible healthcare in remote areas or over a long distance. Technology has come a long way, opening new gateways for communication and transmission of information. To a certain extent, it has helped healthcare become more accessible, especially in remote areas.
Because of a lack of infrastructure, facilities, equipment and other factors, it is not always possible to offer quality healthcare in specific remote regions. Opening a healthcare facility requires time and resources, which would be challenging to amass in the remote areas due to lack of infrastructural development, lack of talent, lack of investors and so forth. However, due to efforts to make healthcare accessible to all, which is also a major Sustainable Development Program (SDG) objective, technology is used.
Healthcare service delivery has improved over the last few decades by adapting to new technologies. Terminologies such as e-health, telemedicine, and telehealth are all formulations of healthcare delivery, combined with communications technology. The initiatives taken towards developing the health service delivery is phenomenal. However, it is essential to establish an understanding of the differences in e-health, telehealth, and telemedicine. Most people would confuse them to be the same; however, they are quite different.
Telemedicine
In simpler terms, telemedicine refers to the use of electronic communications channel/mediums, as well as information technology to deliver clinical services to remote patients. While telemedicine is a part of telehealth, it is more concentrated towards the use of technology for clinical service delivery. The service delivery is the same as medical practice. However, the critical difference is that it is used towards reaching out to patients in remote destinations via electronic platforms. This usually works when a patient and medical practitioner interact using video/voice conferencing to offer professional advice on medication and clinical services.
Telehealth is a broader spectrum of delivering quality health care via online mediums. The primary aim of telehealth is to provide healthcare services in remote areas with lack of healthcare services. Telehealth operates on the same principals of traditional healthcare practice with the use of technology. Because of the practitioners’ inability to be physically present in the area, they rely on telecommunications, internet and other communication platforms to interact with the patient and offer professional guidance.
According to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), United States, telehealth is used to promote and support long-distance clinical health care. The use of telehealth helps with delivering professionalized clinical healthcare remotely. Furthermore, it also helps with developing and improving health-related education, health administration, and improving general public health.
Telemedicine can be delivered using various technologies, including the internet, still imaging, video conferencing, streaming media, wireless communications, etc. This means that it can be used in more than one way. For example, a patient can acquire professional consulting and diagnosis remotely.
Similarly, it can be used for educational purposes, for delivering quality healthcare education on recent discoveries, prognosis, diagnosis, and other evaluations. Telehealth is the primary method of providing quality clinical health care in underdeveloped regions. It is widely present in the African region and helps in offering quality clinical care to long-distance patients. In most cases, the practitioner would conduct examination using imaging devices, live video conferences, and by obtaining patient’s medical history. Moreover, doctors use telehealth to seek second-opinion or expert advice on complex medical cases.
In January 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services set a goal to tie 50 percent of the Medicare payments to value or quality by 2018. This transition has put physicians on the frontlines of healthcare, as they play a major role in the value-based roadmap of an organization.
However, on the downside, this shift is causing substantial physician burnout — PCPs are spending more than 50 percent of their workday in the EHR doing documentation, order entry, billing, and coding, instead of spending time with their patients. There is a need to reduce physician’s IT usage by giving them easy and quick access to actionable information such as care-, and coding- gaps, thereby allowing physicians to focus on things that matter most – delivery and improvement of care.
Regardless of how many patients physicians see per day, they have to put in an equal, if not more number of hours in front of the EHRs for logging in every single detail. Physicians are likely very interested in quality care and making the care processes efficient; it is important to understand the implications that would be created on their reimbursements with a solution that mitigates IT usage burnout. Physicians should automatically be updated instead of having to inquire about information they need at any given moment as it might be disengaging. It is possible to engage physicians so that they can take forward the quality improvement efforts.
Alternative Physician engagement methodologies and their adoption
Making improvements to the healthcare system are the top of the agenda but how does the current scenario of physician engagement compare to this? Addressing the problem of physician burnout, several methods for engaging physicians have surfaced over the past few years:
Adaptability
Cost
Outcome
Print / Fax PVP
High
Low
Medium
Push data back in EMR
High
High
High
Mobile App
Medium in young physicians
Low in older physicians
Medium
Medium
Another Web Portal
Very Low
Medium
Low
All of these methods are sub-optimal – either they are labor-intensive, or costly to implement, or require physicians to leave the EHR and go to another portal, thus decreasing the physician adoption rates. It is critical to engage physicians in a timely and effective manner to bring information transparency across the network and allow for prompt identification of low-quality care outcomes and unnecessarily high-cost events.
The solution: Engaging physicians with point of support for smarter and holistic care
Addressing above limitations, there is a dire need for a smart point-of-care support for physicians that is automated, easy to implement, and user-friendly. A support system that operates right besides EHR, pinpoints and surfaces only relevant insights, including care gaps and risk factors, which will help physicians right at the point of care without being overloaded with too much information.
Providing precise insights
Physicians require a solution that pops up just the precise insights like care gaps and risk factors to assist them in working with the patient within the EHR at the point of care. Moreover, creating a holistic picture of patients remains highly essential for physicians, however, it is still a challenge because of siloed data storage platforms in healthcare. This lack of a 360-degree view for every patient is a major barrier to collaborative and coordinated care efforts. These challenges can be addressed by integrating various patient-specific datasets, including clinical and claims and surfacing key insights on the physician’s screen in nearly real-time.
Personalizing patient interactions
Almost 80 percent of healthcare data is unstructured, and thus, to create impact at scale, physicians need pioneering analytic capabilities. For example, if a patient has visited the ED three times in the past two months, he needs to be tagged as a ‘frequent ED visitor.’ Giving physicians access to this information will guide them to revisit and optimize their care-programs for this patient such that the patient’s ED visits go down, which would further translate into decreased overall spend for the network.
When you “Google” your practice’s name, are you satisfied with the reviews that pop up? If not, chances are that your main issue has nothing to do with the patient care you give and everything to do with the patient service you provide.
Vyasa 
