Electronic Health Reporter

Wellframe delivers a mobile experience featuring a secure two-way communication channel to connect patients with care providers. The company also offers a mobile data collection system that is, cloud-hosted and scalable to any number of users. Wellframe’s artificial intelligence engine for health state modeling, prediction and dynamic clinical protocol optimization uses data from a patient’s interaction with the care plans to optimize the system, and the company has developed a lightweight cloud-hosted care management EHR that has been successfully integrated into clinical workflows.

Elevator pitch

Wellframe’s mobile platform for care management and patient engagement extends therapeutic relationships to promote patient adherence and improve financial outcomes for health plans and systems.

Product/service description

Wellframe enables organizations to extend the reach of their existing care management services, while providing a higher quality of care to members and improving patient outcomes. Wellframe’s intelligent system engages high-risk patients and creates a personalized patient experience, which is delivered in a simple daily health check-list via mobile technology.

Wellframe has demonstrated success working with the health system’s most socially and medically complex —and costly— patients. These are the individuals for whom payers and providers most desperately need additional insights. The insights gleaned from the Wellframe platform enable clinicians and care managers to better manage their patients’ health and keep them engaged in their care. Wellframe amplifies rather than replaces therapeutic relationships and is re-engineering an antiquated market by using mobile technology to put a care manager in every patient’s pocket.

Founders’ story

The Wellframe founding team is comprised of individuals with a diverse set of skills and whose backgrounds include clinical medicine, public health, systems engineering, data science and consumer engagement. By leveraging their different areas of expertise, the founding team was able to identify a gap in the way care is delivered in the US.

The CEO, Jacob Sattelmair, who is an epidemiologist by training, was focused on using technology to engage people around managing their own health. The chief medical officer, Dr. Trishan Panch, who is a primary care physician and a lecturer at MIT, had been focused on using technology to reengineer care delivery and lower cost settings. Vinnie Ramesh and Archit Bhise are both MIT-trained computer scientists who were researching new ways to utilize low cost technology to improve access to healthcare.

Utilizing and merging their diverse backgrounds, the team developed the idea behind Wellframe: An effective solution to re-engineer care delivery.

Marketing/promotion strategy/market opportunity

Wellframe’s target market includes any organization or plan that has a financial stake in improving patient health outcomes. As more payers and providers share the financial risk of meeting healthcare quality goals, there is growing incentive to invest in prevention and disease management initiatives to keep patients healthy, out of the emergency department, and satisfied with their care; failure to do so can lead to excessive care utilization, poor retention, and lost revenue.

Payers and providers collectively spend $40 billion annually on care management, but this amount is steadily increasing due to an aging population, higher prevalence of chronic diseases, and growing pressure to contain costs. Nevertheless, existing approaches fail to reach the vast majority of patients in need, and when they do, it’s often with inconvenient, intermittent phone calls or visits, with little or no support in between.

Wellframe aims to dramatically improve the way patients interact with the healthcare system and to enable risk-bearing healthcare stakeholders to expand the capacity of their human resources to promote patient adherence and improve clinical and financial outcomes.

Wellframe is a B2B2C company that is dedicated to building sustainable, long-term relationships with its partners. Additionally, Wellframe continually works to validate the efficacy of the solution by conducting clinical trials in the academic, clinical and commercial settings.

How your company differentiates itself from the competition

Competitors in the burgeoning health IT marketplace have low touch, tech-heavy solutions focused on the fitness vertical that do not adequately address patients’ core medical needs. Others are high touch solutions focused on complex patients, but delivered through in-person visits or phone calls that do not scale.

Wellframe is where clinical medicine, mobile technology, and data science meet. We are tackling one of the country’s most pressing problems: How to deliver and scale high-quality primary care for people with chronic diseases. Our unique approach is proven in clinical trials with leading academic medical centers and has been recognized by Merck and the Heritage Provider Network’s 2014 Health Data Challenge as the best approach to using technology to re-engineer care plans.

With more than 30 years’ experience at the front lines of care delivery, the team understands how and why the needs of complex patients are substantially different from those of users of other health and fitness products. Patients need information, but they also need context rooted in caring relationships. In short, if patients feel cared for and in control of their health, they are more likely to be concordant with their care plan and seek help at an early stage if they have questions or things go wrong.

We use technology to support caring relationships rather than replace them, to empower the individual, and to focus care resources on the people that need them most. This patient and clinician centric approach that is simultaneously high tech and high touch is novel for a technology company in the healthcare industry.

Business model

Wellframe licenses its platform directly to health plans and healthcare providers, and also works with service providers to those markets. Wellframe has developed foundational programs that cover nearly all the high-prevalence, high-cost conditions or combinations of conditions that are the focus of most care management programs. These programs are available to Wellframe customers. However, if an organization has an existing care plan in place, Wellframe will work with them to inject the clinical protocol into Wellframe’s structure. The result is that we’re able to deliver your programs and content through our channels, while maximizing patient engagement.

Current needs (if you are currently looking for new employees, looking to raise another round of capital, etc.)

Wellframe is growing and always on the lookout for talented individuals who want to take a thoughtful approach to care delivery.

Founded

Wellframe was founded in 2011

Number of full-time employees

17

Headquarters

Boston, MA