In 2013, while searching for a telemedicine solution, Brandon Welch thought that his only options were expensive and complicated telemedicine systems or video conferencing solutions that were not HIPAA compliant. He wondered where he would find simple and free telemedicine solutions. He said he felt, “The world needed a simple and secure telemedicine solution that was freely available to all healthcare providers.”
So he created Doxy.me.
Elevator pitch
Telemedicine will revolutionize the delivery of healthcare by making it more convenient and accessible for patients to access qualified healthcare professionals, and reducing unnecessary expenses. Unfortunately, current telemedicine technologies are expensive and complicated to use, limiting its widespread impact on healthcare.
For telemedicine to change the world, we believe that telemedicine technologies must be simple and free to use. That’s why we developed Doxy.me — the simple, free, and secure telemedicine solution.
Product/Service Description
Doxy.me is a simple, secure, HIPAA-compliant and free telemedicine available to an clinician in the world. They can use the platform to provide care to their patients, or use it for clinical research or clinical trials.
Origin Story/Founder’s Story
Brandon Welch
Doxy.me was founded at the University of Utah by then Biomedical Informatics PhD student Brandon Welch while working on a research project within Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The goal of the study was to develop and evaluate a novel prenatal care delivery model that replaced several in-person prenatal care visits with telemedicine visits with pregnant moms from home or work. Initially, he wanted to use Skype or FaceTime for the technology, but the institution wouldn’t allow it because these popular and free conferencing solutions were not deemed to be HIPAA-compliant. So he set out to find a good, simple and free telemedicine solution. However, he was surprised upon reviewing HIPAA-compliant telemedicine technologies that the only options available were complicated and expensive; none were deemed practical to be used by patients at home. Being familiar with the technology, he set out to build a simple and free telemedicine solution. He first submitted the idea to a medical invention competition at the university and won the “Consumer’s Choice” award, and he used the winnings from the competition to build the first prototype of Doxy.me (which was used in the prenatal care study). Over the next year, he continued to improve the Doxy.me features based on clinician and patient feedback, but with a guiding principle of simplicity and ease of use.
Marketing/Promotion Strategy
Since it was officially released to the public, it has grown exceptionally over the past year with little marketing efforts. Networking with organizations and word of mouth has been the largest marketing tool.
Market Opportunity
Competitors include snap.md, telehealth.org and vsee.com. Market opportunity really focused on the fact there were no telemedicine solutions that were HIPAA-compliant, free and easy to use. This gave us a leg up on our competitors, as most other solutions require downloads, plug-ins, or are expensive.
TapCloud creates a real-time stream of data that enables care teams to quickly grasp whether a patient is getting better or worse, assess the effectiveness of treatments and medications and identify the onset of emerging complications. TapCloud is currently being used in settings from single practitioner to national hospital systems.
Elevator pitch
TapCloud allows patient’s and provider’s to communicate in ways never before possible to improve the doctor/patient relationship, focus clinicians on patients that need the most attention and insure that the patients that require services receive them in a timely manner to maximize health benefits to the patient (including quality of life, not just physical issues) and minimize the expenditure of health resources.
Product/service description
TapCloud is a solution for gathering key patient information in between clinical visits. There are two parts to the TapCloud solution: a patient facing instructional and information collecting APP and a web-based clinician dashboard. Typical use is for patients to follow/consume their provider-based care plan/educational info and enter their well-being, pain levels, symptoms, side effects, medication compliance and vitals into the APP (unique design allows patients to complete this in less than 1 minute per day). This information is then presented in a comprehensive dashboard that allows clinicians to rapidly interpret key insights into a patients overall well-being. Based on this patient reported information, clinical protocols will dictate if any specific patient needs to be seen, have a home health visit or meds adjusted, etc.
Origin story
Tom Riley
Our CEO, Tom Riley, is a former health insurance executive who spent the past 25 years living at the intersection of healthcare and technology. A few years ago, after his mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, his experience with the healthcare system became much more personal as he became a primary caregiver for her. During that time he attended office visits with his mom on a regular basis, and discovered that there is an inherent gap in communications between the way doctors organize/accept information from patients, and the way patients organize and deliver information to their doctors and other clinical staff.
Over and over again, he found himself serving as a translator between his mom and her doctors. He would help his mom by creating easy to understand checklists of things she was supposed to be doing each day, activity, medications, etc. And he would help the doctors by keeping track of his mom’s symptoms and watching for developing complications and then making sure that the information was shared during her appointments. It frequently made a significant impact on the diagnosis of issues, and the assessment of treatment effectiveness. It also helped his mom regain a measure of “quality of life” by making sure that even non-critical complications like chronic constipation were identified and addressed.
After his mom passed away, he decided to devote his time to taking what he had learned first-hand and developing a solution to improve patient-doctor communications in acute-care settings like post-surgical recovery and chemotherapy and since has morphed into a chronic disease management solution as well. TapCloud runs on smart-phones and tablets and includes personalized services for the patient, helping them organize and customize generic discharge/care plan instructions into a personalized daily plan for them to follow. At the same time, the technology uses a sophisticated, but incredibly easy to use, interface to probe for indications of developing complications and/or medication side-effects. It allows clinicians to effectively monitor patient progress remotely and focus their attention on the right patients. It also ensures that doctors are aware of all of the issues affecting a patient, not just the life-threatening ones that have their patients end up in the ED or admitted to the hospital without them even realizing their patients were experiencing any issues.
Healthchat is a communications platform that allows patients, physicians and medical staff to communicate and collaborate in a more efficient manner through the use of short videos sent through their mobile phones. This simple and secure application is available to physicians for a low monthly fee and free for patients and medical staff.
Elevator pitch
Healthchat is a HIPAA-compliant video-sharing app to connect healthcare providers and their patients – with speed and convenience.
Founders’ story
Chris Chowquan
Founder and CEO, Chris Chowquan, is an IT veteran, who has spent much of his career managing technology for healthcare payers. After many years of interfacing with physicians and patients he saw the need for a simpler, more efficient communications solution. Healthchat was founded in 2015.
Origin story
As a father and full-time employee who has to take time for doctor visits, he figured there must be a better way.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Healthchat’s sales team will be marketing to physicians directly. In addition, Healthchat will launch an integrated marketing campaign aimed at reaching all three groups who can benefit from this product: physicians, medical staff and patients.
Market opportunity
Despite mandates to improve the patient experience, accessing healthcare services remains highly inefficient. Healthchat addresses the problem – and stands alone as the only HIPAA-compliant, mobile-friendly communications platform for patients and their providers to connect about their healthcare.
Physicians can now get reimbursed for the coordination effort that is involved in managing a patient following a hospital discharge. ACT.md’s TCM-specific Health ACT Sets facilitate a structured, standardized, and proven process for optimal care coordination to reduce hospital re-admissions and support TCM billing. The ACT Sets are structured in a way for providers to assess complexity, complete care actions required by CMS, and follow specific time sensitive requirements for care delivery and billing. ACT.md takes the complexity out of the TCM Billing process and pays for itself within months.
Elevator pitch
ACT.md is the platform for team-based care. Care teams need a way to jointly manage medical conditions in concert with behavioral, social, and functional needs. With ACT.md’s high-tech, high-touch platform and project management-like approach, healthcare organizations can engage in collaborative care planning, efficiently manage in-between visit care, and make safe, reliable handoffs across the care continuum. Our customers have seen a 30 percent reduction in the time spent on care coordination activities and improved compliance to care plans through meaningful caregiver and patient engagement.
Product/service description
Through an elegant and intuitive cloud-based technology, the web-based solution connects all members of a dynamic care team, including the patient and their trusted caregivers. We enable our customers to efficiently develop, reliably execute, and securely communicate a patient-centered care plan across their teams. The technology is complimented with a flexible care coordination workforce service offering to ensure nothing falls through the cracks and clinicians are working at the top of their license.
Origin story
Ted Quinn
“At ACT.md we are patients, caregivers, physicians, nurses, public health professionals, engineers, and operational leaders. We have personally experienced the significant challenges associated with managing complex care and are working to make life better for patients and everyone supporting them,” said Ted Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder, ACT.md.
Founder’s story
The company was founded by Ted Quinn along with Ken Mandl, MD and Zak Kohane, MD, both nationally-renowned healthcare informatics experts. The company was incubated at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Innovation Lab.
“We were inspired to launch ACT.md after observing for decades the constant dropped handoffs across the various providers caring for patients. So we created ACT.md as an operating system for team-based care that drives action toward improved outcomes and reduced costs,” said Dr. Kenneth Mandl, co-founder, ACT.md, professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Kenneth Mandl
Every healthcare entity is dealing with change management around care delivery and care coordination. We’re sharing our vision of team-based care and it is resonating with the market.
We’re proud to work with our world-renowned advisory board – including John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Troy Brennan, MD, CMO at CVS Caremark – who help us share our vision with the nation’s leading providers and payers.
Market opportunity
According to Frost & Sullivan, the care coordination software market is expected to grow at a 26.1 percent compound annual growth rate between 2015 and 2020.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition
EMR/EHR vendors are the incumbents in the market, but they are not designed to do this job. Up to 70 percent of provider/patient work is conducted in the informal region outside the EMR, especially work related to the coordination of care. We have heard directly from healthcare organizations we are working with that with the leading EMR there is no way to track the status of handoffs, connect with outside providers and family caregivers, and that they really need a Care Coordination Record. This is the job that ACT.md is being hired to do, and we are getting traction with large health systems across the country.
ACT.md shines in complex care settings. The company is focused on powering team-based care for high-risk, high-cost patients.
HealthLoop connects doctors and patients with timely and actionable information, improving patient satisfaction and driving better outcomes. HealthLoop is a cloud-based platform that automates follow-up care; keeping doctors, patients and care-givers connected between visits with clinical information that is insightful, actionable and engaging. Its peer-reviewed follow-up plans automate the routine aspects of care while tracking patient progress and monitoring clinical areas of concern. Its analytics engine sifts through and filters the deluge of patient-generated data in realtime; focusing the care team’s time and attention on patients who need them the most.
Elevator pitch
HealthLoop automates physician and patient connectivity to create an empathetic engagement reducing patient readmission rates by half. It is a technology leader in the field of patient engagement.
Product/service description
HealthLoop’s sophisticated, HIPAA-compliant messaging platform automatically delivers timely check-ins to patients during an episode of care. For example: a knee surgery patient receives daily check-ins from their doctor helping them prepare for surgery and follow pre-op instructions. After being discharged from the hospital, the patient gets daily follow-ups reminding them to change their bandages, work on exercises and watch for signs of infection. This personalized patient experience is delivered with no extra work from medical practice staff. Complications are caught and resolved early through the platform and patient outcomes and physician ratings improve as a result.
Origin/founder’s story
Jordan Shlain MD
Practicing physician Dr. Jordan Shlain was looking to solve a communication problem he encountered with his own patients. As much as he wanted to deliver a caring, VIP experience to each patient, he simply didn’t have the time or the tools to do it automatically. In what Dr. Shlain calls “innovation by irritation,” he had been painstakingly tracking patients between visits in an Excel spreadsheet before hiring a developer to turn it into easy technology. HealthLoop was founded in 2009 based on this original concept.
Marketing/promotion strategy
HealthLoop works with medical practices, departments and hospitals across the country. The company is active at conferences including HIMSS and AAOS. Word-of-mouth from physicians who are able to save time while also delivering personalized care is also a significant driver.
Market opportunity
The rapidly changing reimbursement landscape has created a boom for HealthLoop’s technology. With mandatory bundled payments for hip and knee surgery (CCJR) on the horizon for 2016, increasingly healthcare providers are looking for solutions to provide personalized, responsive service to patients. The patient engagement market is expected to surpass $13.7 billion by 2019.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition
Compared to the typical passive “patient portal,” HealthLoop offers a much more sophisticated and personalized experience to patients. The company tracks an industry-leading patient engagement rate (more than 70 percent). By delivering timely, empathetic messages, HealthLoop has created a platform that is truly useful to patients, physicians and staff.
Sherpaa connects employees directly with doctors and insurance guides online to reduce healthcare costs. Founded in 2012, Sherpaa has redefined the healthcare experience for companies and employees across the country. Sherpaa powers its medical practice in the cloud with dedicated board-certified physicians and insurance navigators. It saves time and money by solving 70 percent of issues without routing them through the traditional healthcare system – fewer interactions with the healthcare system means greater efficiency for the individual and savings for the employer, Sherpaa currently “takes care” of more than 120 companies including Tumblr, Etsy and GLG.
Dr. Jay Parkinson
Sherpaa was co-founded by Dr. Jay Parkinson MD, MPH, trained in pediatrics and preventive medicine at St. Vincent’s and Johns Hopkins. He’s given talks for TED and The Clinton Global Initiative. He’s been referred to as “The Doctor of the Future.”
Marketing/promotion strategy
We are a B2B company selling into the HR and C-suite. Our founders are a doctor and an experienced HR expert leading up a proven sales team. We know firsthand what companies need, how they make decisions, and how to sell into them. As one of the few employer-driven healthcare services actually founded by a physician, our thought leadership in the space enables us to speak at conferences, produce interesting content, and truly have a respected voice in what the future of healthcare looks like.
Market opportunity
Our sweet spot is companies with 100 to 1,000 employees. Every single company of this size is struggling with out of control healthcare expenses without the in house resources to do anything about these skyrocketing costs. They’re being sold wellness plans that don’t work to control costs and traditional telemedicine services that can’t control costs when only 3 percent of a company uses them. They need a better solution that people will actually use. Without meaningful usage, costs can’t be contained. Unfortunately we’re lumped into the telemedicine space and people confuse us as being in competition with TelaDoc, American Well, Doctor on Demand, and MDLive. Sure, they sell into the same HR departments, but offer a service that nobody uses, and therefore can’t move the needle on healthcare costs. Presently, there is no other service in America available to companies that operates like Sherpaa, gets 70 percent of a company to use our services, and delivers the kind of results that we do.
Interoperability in healthcare is critical for doctors to coordinate care for their patients and improve their health. However, if physicians are using proprietary software in their offices, interoperability becomes a very difficult and very expensive challenge. Without interoperability in healthcare, doctors cannot guarantee the data they sent to a specialist will be received or interpreted properly. Today, doctors have to rely on fax machines to exchange patient information. This is an outdated and un-secure form of communication to exchange patient information.
At the center of all this is the patient, whose medical records containing their most sensitive information is traversing across fax lines. ELXR Health will change healthcare by giving physicians a new way to coordinate care and exchange information. With the platform, patients can create and manage their medical consents anywhere on a smartphone or tablet. ELXR Health can transform and translate health data into multiple formats; doctors can seamlessly exchange patient information regardless of the EHR software they sent to, or receiving from.
Elevator pitch
The ELXR Health platform is cloud-based engine that translates and restructures electronic health records into a format easily readable by any doctor’s office. We center our solution around the patient by providing them a responsive web application to create and manage their consents. This doctor-patient collaborative system will improve coordination of care systems and dramatically increase patient outcomes.
Founder’s story
Paul Emanuel, HCISPP, is the co-founder and CEO of ELXR Health. Emanuel has worked in healthcare technology for many years as a technician, a systems and security administrator, an EMR consultant and an HIE Engineer. His years of service in health IT enabled him to receive 14 IT certifications, and is a certified healthcare information security and privacy practitioner. He started his first company in 2008 helping rural health clinics adopt electronic health records and connect with state health information exchanges. He came up with his idea for ELXR Health from his years of experience in Health IT. ELXR Health was created to be the solution for doctors and patients to better coordinate care.
Marketing/promotion strategy Behavioral health organizations, managed care organizations, hospitals and private practices are looking for a cost-effective way to exchange patient data electronically while improving patient outcomes while adhering to their state laws. Our engine allows doctors to translate, restructure and validate health data so the data being sent is the data being received.
ELXR Health gives the patient the ability to manage their consents at their convenience from their smartphone or tablet. We also give developers the ability to integrate with our API to improve their software and provide better care systems for doctors and patients.
Healthspek is a free tool that manages personal and family health records by using an easy-to-use iPad app and mobile website to track, collect and safely disseminate healthcare information. Patient data is duplicated and stored on Healthspek’s secure cloud server — making it accessible 24/7 from multiple devices, anywhere in the world.
It helps users “take ownership over doctors’ electronic medical records, legal documents and automated refill reminders, insurance cards and more. Plus, account holders can manage medications, medical charts and images, track vitals, access care, and record physician, insurance and emergency contacts, among other features.”
Healthspek also receives medical records and facilitates electronic communications with providers. With the patient’s permission, doctors can access records through Healthspek, providing convenience for both you and your physician.
Elevator pitch
Healthspek is a complete tool available on any mobile device that can be used to track, collect and safely disseminate personal healthcare information from anywhere in the world, 24/7. It’s your personal health record—*you* should have access to it when you need it.
Randy Farr
Product/service description
Healthspek is a free platform available on the mobile Web—accessible from any mobile device including PCs, tablets and smartphones—and iPad app that’s helped thousands of families and individuals across the country manage their healthcare records and provide access to all of their information 24/7. By creating an account at www.healthspek.com or on the iPad app and filling in the information relevant to you and your family, you instantly have unlimited access to everything from allergies, vitals and medication information to a repository for legal documents like your living will and power of attorney.
Founders’ story
Randy Farr is a healthcare industry veteran with a passion for allying healthcare and technology to improve physician practices and patient experience.
In 2001, Randy saw an opportunity in applying software technology to doctors’ offices to help physicians realize greater workflow efficiencies and a better bottom line and launched EaseMD, which grew to be one of the largest re-sellers of eClinicalWorks software in the country.
Out of his experience with EaseMD, Randy partnered with Bruce LeFew to develop Healthspek—a free tool that gives patients the ability to track, collect, manage and safely disseminate personal and family health records from any device—12 years later. Similar to EaseMD, Healthspek utilizes technology to better an important part of the healthcare system; but with Healthspek, the focus is on patient experience.
Randy is the energy behind Healthspek, and his excitement and enthusiasm for his work is immediately apparent when you meet him. Randy’s enduring drive to promote Healthspek’s mission has positioned himself and the company as driving forces behind a national demand for more access to and control of personal health records.
Bruce LeFew
With 30 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Bruce LeFew knows physicians, patients, hospitals and their data. He knows their needs and has dedicated his career to providing enhanced operations for better population health management services.
In early 2013, Bruce and his partner, Randy Farr launched Healthspek, a free tool that gives patients the ability to track, collect, manage and safely disseminate personal and family health records from any device. They saw that the simple concept of shifting power from doctors to patients has the potential to reduce healthcare costs, eliminate unnecessary tests and procedures and motivate patients to pay more attention to their personal health.
At Healthspek, Bruce is the momentum. His unwavering dedication to the company’s mission has helped earn them national attention, with recognitions and awards such as one of 10 finalists in AARP’s Health Innovation @50+ LivePitch, Apple’s Best New Medical Apps of 2013 and winner of *MediaPost*’s 2013 Apply Award in the medical category to show for it.
Bruce knows good customer service and support is the best business practice, and in turn communicates with Healthspek users daily. Whether it’s an email or personal phone call, he ensures every customer concern or comment is addressed.
Telemedicine will revolutionize the delivery of healthcare by making it more convenient and accessible for patients to access qualified healthcare professionals, and reducing unnecessary expenses. Unfortunately, current telemedicine technologies are expensive and complicated to use, limiting its widespread impact on healthcare.
TapCloud creates a real-time stream of data that enables care teams to quickly grasp whether a patient is getting better or worse, assess the effectiveness of treatments and medications and identify the onset of emerging complications. TapCloud is currently being used in settings from single practitioner to national hospital systems.
HealthLoop connects doctors and patients with timely and actionable information, improving patient satisfaction and driving better outcomes. HealthLoop is a cloud-based platform that automates follow-up care; keeping doctors, patients and care-givers connected between visits with clinical information that is insightful, actionable and engaging. Its peer-reviewed follow-up plans automate the routine aspects of care while tracking patient progress and monitoring clinical areas of concern. Its analytics engine sifts through and filters the deluge of patient-generated data in realtime; focusing the care team’s time and attention on patients who need them the most.
Interoperability in healthcare is critical for doctors to coordinate care for their patients and improve their health. However, if physicians are using proprietary software in their offices, interoperability becomes a very difficult and very expensive challenge. Without interoperability in healthcare, doctors cannot guarantee the data they sent to a specialist will be received or interpreted properly. Today, doctors have to rely on fax machines to exchange patient information. This is an outdated and un-secure form of communication to exchange patient information.
