The Optimized Care Network (OCN) is a provider of digital healthcare that merges high tech with high touch. OCN’s technology enables medical providers to digitally connect with patients in a life-like manner that is changing the delivery of medicine via non-traditional sites of care. Their highly equipped digital exam room, which includes a specially trained, registered nurse, is the 21st century model for digital healthcare with a personal touch.
Elevator Pitch
OCN’s digitally personalized technology makes it easier than ever for patients to connect with the most qualified medical expert anywhere in the world.
Founder’s story
Brian Slusser is the CEO of Optimized Care Network. He brings decades of healthcare industry experience and successful entrepreneurship into this new venture.
Imagine every world-class specialist available in one office. That’s what Slusser did when he began formulating the concept of OCN. He realized he could assemble a digital healthcare platform that focused on delivering convenient and affordable patient care without geographic boundaries. No longer does a patient have to drive for hours or wait weeks for an appointment with a specialist. They simply make an appointment online and go to their local CareSpace.
Marketing/promotion strategy
OCN actively engages in healthcare discussions with other thought-leaders and innovators in the industry. For instance, OCN recently participated in TEDMED’s the Hive in Washington, D.C. and Slusser served on a featured panel at athenahealth’s More Disruption Please Conference. Opportunities like this give OCN the chance to share our CareSpace services with other forward-thinking entrepreneurs and companies who are also focused on improving the state of health care. We employ brand journalism and social media tactics to help expand our reach to providers and patients. Participation in community events that bring together providers and potential patients is also part of the strategy. Open houses will be held to allow patients to see the CareSpace for themselves before a medical need arises. This will provide a level of familiarity and comfort when they do need to see an OCN provider.
High-demand healthcare providers have no good system in place to drive differentiating value at the time of patient scheduling. With an increase in demand and reduction of time, doctors need to be smarter about how they run their business. Some doctors need to prioritize based on completing a specific surgery. Others need to prioritize based on the greatest opportunity for high reimbursement. But through it all doctors need to maintain a full schedule and optimized revenue while keeping their patients happy and loyal.
Opargo focuses on delivering incremental value to healthcare providers through schedule optimization. Opargo’s patent pending solution takes into account healthcare insurance payment rates, office and procedure activities, historical practice demand and availability to calculate incremental value. This perishable inventory model is similar to how scheduling and payment has been managed for many years in the travel industry to optimize yield for airlines and hoteliers. The Opargo SaaS system seamlessly integrates with a practice’s existing calendar and revenue management systems to make it easy to install and manage.
Elevator pitch
Dr. Aaron Lloyd, co-Founder, president and chief medical officer
Opargo delivers incremental revenue to healthcare providers through schedule optimization. Opargo helps healthcare providers optimize the value of time.
Product/service description
Healthcare providers have previously used a “first come first serve” or “look and book” calendar approaches to schedule patients. This is also how airlines booked passengers in the past. However, as airlines started to incorporate revenue management principles at the time of booking, they saw significant increases in revenue and long-term corporate value.
Opargo is a patent-pending solution that integrates reimbursement rates, reimbursement timing, referral sources, visit types, historical demand and more to determine the value of each visit for healthcare providers. High-value visits are given prioritization to ensure patients don’t look for other providers, as wait times greater than two weeks cause patients to “shop around.” By ensuring high value patients don’t leave, healthcare providers have seen up to a 20 percent increase in annual revenue.
However, there are benefits to the patients of healthcare providers using Opargo, too. First, all patients are seen and no one is denied medical care due to type of insurance. Opargo ensures all patients are seen at the right time. Second, Opargo leverages its proprietary algorithm to ensure patients are seen by the most qualified provider. This helps patients get the most optimal care from the optimal provider as soon as possible.
Bookings made in Opargo’s cloud-based application are automatically passed into practice management systems to ensure all down-line processes remain in-tact. Currently, Opargo integrates with GE Centricity practice solution, Greenway PrimeSuite and AthenaHealth.
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.
Prime allows users a way to make sure their friends, family and emergency contacts have access to their health by granting them full access at every hospital they visit. With Prime, users can stop worrying about keeping everyone up to date, and “tell the people that need to know, what they need to know.” Verifying that all HIPAA requirements are met, Prime secures information with bank-level security: All information is protected by state-of-the-art encryption. Access to the information is always monitored, and every member of the Prime team has been fully HIPAA trained.
Elevator pitch
Prime’s free mobile app helps patients aggregate their healthcare information from multiple sources into a single view on the go. Prime helps patients and their loved ones achieve a better healthcare experience by putting all their health information in one place.
Product/service description
Prime empowers people to take control of their personal health records on the go. Users can apply information from multiple sources into a single view giving them complete access to important data. The end result is individuals and their loved ones achieve a better healthcare experience. Prime is a free, HIPAA-complaint mobile app available for download in the Apple App Store. The company launched out of Techstars in 2014. We have helped users connect to more than 50,000 personal health records.
Hyginex is a patented wearable hand hygiene improvement technology that is saving patient lives by preventing the spread of healthcare associated infections that cause nearly 100,000 deaths in the U.S. annually. The patented arm-based system provides real-time feedback to help staff remember to wash their hands and also collects highly accurate data on both duration and frequency of hand hygiene events.
Elevator pitch
Hyginex is a patented wearable information technology that generates big data to drive change and save lives in the healthcare industry.
Founders’ story
Hyginex was founded when Efrat Raichman lost her uncle to a healthcare associated infection (HAIs). After researching the problem further, she realized better hand hygiene was key to preventing these terrible infections and that there was no technology solution available on the market. She developed the Hyginex system, the first electronic hand hygiene improvement and monitoring technology to save patient lives and help hospitals improve their hand hygiene culture.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Hyginex reaches customers through conferences, tradeshows, webinars, email marketing and social media. Hyginex is also developing strategic partnerships with thought leaders and patient advocacy organizations to increase public awareness of the importance of hand hygiene for patient safety.
CrowdMed is a website that uses the “wisdom of crowds” to solve medical cases quickly and accurately online. We provide a place for patients to post their symptoms and broadcast their cases to our medical detective community, which includes doctors, med students and patients themselves. Our medical detectives collaborate to solve each case and suggest possible diagnoses. Our system assigns a probability to each diagnosis based on our research and the behavior of the medical detectives who worked on the case. Once enough medical detectives have participated in a case, we deliver an extensive report to the patient. Just like that, we’ve gotten a patent a second, third, 50th opinion without any invasive tests and unnecessary doctor visits.
We tested our system on cases with known diagnoses that cost patients hundreds of thousands of dollars, lasted many years, and taken dozens doctors to solve—my case included. We were able to solve these cases in a matter of weeks, at a fraction of the cost.
Now we’ve helped diagnose 200 of the world’s most difficult medical cases, and that’s only the beginning. By designing a site that simplifies complex medical data, connects patients with the people who understand this data, and uses statistics and technology to uncover answers, we’re making medical diagnoses more accessible to everyone.
Elevator pitch
We’re crowdsourcing medical diagnoses.
Founders’ story
During my junior year of college I got sick. My appetite disappeared. I had difficulty remembering things. I always felt cold, and I started losing my hair.
I visited the university health center. They sent me to a doctor, who sent me to a specialist, who sent me to more specialists for testing. I was biopsied, scanned and blood tested—often multiple times a month. The uncertainty, stress and financial burden this placed on me was crippling—especially as a college student.
After months of poking and prodding, I finally got my diagnosis: a thyroid disorder with a very simple treatment. I take one pill in the morning, every day. Compared to all the terrible possible diagnoses and treatments my doctors were considering, this was a huge relief. The process of finding the name for my condition, so that I could get the proper treatment, turned out to be far more painful than the treatment itself.
MobileSmith is an online app development platform, enabling hospitals and health organizations to create custom, native apps, across iPhone, Android and iPad devices, without any coding required.
Elevator Pitch
We have a platform that allows a marketing department with no development experience to create custom, native mobile apps. With us, any hospital can enhance their patient engagement strategy, without coding, and without the cost of hiring developers.
Founders Story
The earliest foundations of the company that would become MobileSmith, were laid in 1993. Back then, the company, known as SmartOnline, sold software to assist small businesses. SmartOnline became one of the early pioneers of the SaaS (Software as a Service) model that we use today. The company worked to adapt to the constantly changing technology. In 2010, the company hired Bob Dieterle as senior VP and general manager. He advocated and orchestrated a complete overhaul of the company services, and focused the company, instead, on the budding industry of mobile applications. The company wanted to deliver organizations a means to quickly create and manage apps to connect to their consumers, without having to rely heavily on an IT department. Working to that end, the MobileSmith online platform was developed, and in July 2013, the overhaul was complete, as the company rebranded itself as MobileSmith Inc. and has since focused entirely on delivering quality and cost-effective mobile apps to organizations.
Market Opportunity and Strategy
There are several app development platforms out there, such as Appcelerator or Kony. These platforms still require a programmer or developer to write code for the apps. Our platform requires no coding whatsoever. A designer or marketer can easily come to us and use our platform to design, prototype, build and deploy an app. While we have clients from a variety of fields, healthcare providers have found our platform particularly useful. With healthcare IT departments swamped with EHR implementation and marketing desperately trying to enhance patient engagement options, our platform has been able to fill their needs without placing any further burden on their IT, and avoiding the higher labor cost of developers. As only 35 percent of healthcare providers offer mobile apps, according to the HIMSS Analytics Survey, there is a clear need in the healthcare industry for our platform, and several organizations have found us to be an excellent means of enhancing their patient engagement via mobile apps.
Elevator pitch