Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Mobile health startup Go2Nurse wants to help nurses make house calls

One interesting digital health trend is the updating of traditional physician house calls with apps […]

One interesting digital health trend is the updating of traditional physician house calls with apps and online tools. Companies like Pager, Medicast, and Curbside Care are part of a group of companies offering concierge care services. Go2Nurse wants to add nurses to the mix by making it easier for patients to connect with them for services in urgent care and non emergency situations.

CEO Meg Kubiak, a registered nurse, started the company. Its first customer was an Illinois Medicaid-funded HMO — a coordinated care entity. Go2Nurse provides registered nurses who serve as case managers and are the central point of contact for enrollees in Medicare, Medicaid and ACA-created healthcare organizations.

Its app includes concierge care service using private duty nurses targeted at adults taking care of children and seniors. It provides transportation for disabled individuals in wheelchair-adapted vehicles owned or leased by nurses. It also uses Practice Fusion’s electronic medical record platform. Patients can access a personal health record.

Among the services it provides are pre-natal and post-natal care, wound care, pain management, physical therapy, and medication and disease education.

In a phone interview with Edward Ben-Alec, Go2Nurse’s technology business strategist and co-founder, he said the company began developing the app three years ago. Its business with HMOs accounts for 90 percent of its business, although it would like to balance that with more direct-to-consumer business.

A language tool automatically translates questions nurses have for their patients from English into Spanish. It claims to have 50 languages in its catalog. The translator feature is based in the Google Translate API. It also added a library of medical terminology. “One of the cooler, geekier things [we are doing] is archiving all of the textual interactions as part of future A.I. database. But we need about three years of profitability before taking all the related risks on implementing A.I.”

Ben-Alec said the business hopes to attract nurses who feel abused or taken for granted in the current system. He thinks nurses will like the idea of coordinating care with patients. Kubiak said in a statement that its service is designed to respond to the shift that is happening in healthcare in which nurses are taking on more responsibilities for patients.

The company plans to use some of the proceeds from its $1 million financing round to make Go2Nurse available for iOS network smartphones, tablets and potentially Apple Watch. It is working with Healthios Exchange to connect with accredited investors.

A service that gives nurses more responsibility for patient care reflects a growing trend in healthcare so adding a digital service seems like a good move. Although the company sees an opportunity to employ people trained as nurses who since fell out of love with the profession based on attitudes of physicians and other reasons, it’s uncertain how successful it will be at luring this group back to medicine or how well-equipped they will be for the task.

 

 

Shares0
Shares0