When Orca Health CEO Matt Berry set out to develop apps to improve health literacy, he saw them as a useful tool to stimulate interactions between physicians and patients. The nine apps use 3-D animation and other stimuli to help people comprehend the complexities of procedures and treatments across specialty areas such as orthopedics, cardiovascular systems and eyesight. They have been downloaded a total of 2 million times since they the first ones were rolled out in 2011.
The majority of the downloads — 1.3 million — have been this year and 40 percent are outside the U.S.
Healthcare professionals from physicians, physical therapists and nurses to support staff account for the majority of their customers. They prescribe the apps to their patients to improve the quality of their interactions. Since the company was launched in 2010, its apps have undergone several updates and tweaks.
Earlier this year, it began a collaboration with Harvard Medical School to power a series of iBooks on the heart for which it provided 3-D animation.
In the latest set of updates, medical professionals can personalize medical content. They can use photos and videos such as MRIs, X-rays and images of wounds. It also helps specialists create profiles that helps patients access information about specialists and their offices. It also adds software-as-a-Service for medical professionals.
The Sandy, Utah-based company came about after a conversation between Berry and his dad, a spinal surgeon. He talked about the need for patient education and the problem of patients retaining the complexities of the surgery. It led to Berry developing an app for his father’s business that included 3-D images to help people better understand the procedures they would undergo.
It is also in the process of adding an analytical interface, presumably so medical professionals can better understand how their patients are using the app. Berry declined to get into specifics. New apps coming out next year will focus on the brain and hip.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Health literacy is seen as a critical area to improve adherence and yet physicians only get a limited amount of time to interact with patients. There’s no nice, round number to estimate the cost of poor health literacy. Pfizer has a pretty wide stretch — $100 million to $236 billion. The expectation is that time will be even more limited when previously uninsured people are added to the healthcare system as part of the Affordable Care Act. And yet patients can’t be expected to absorb in a few minutes the complex procedures they are to undergo and even more importantly why they need to follow the recovery protocol.
