Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

ER doctor’s solution to make clinical pathways part of physician workflow grabs spotlight

A clinical decision support tool designed to make it easier to integrate clinical pathways into […]

A clinical decision support tool designed to make it easier to integrate clinical pathways into workflows walked away with $50,000 from Ben Franklin Technology Partners as part of a University of Pennsylvania mobile app development competition. Decnut was one of five mobile health teams selected by Penn’s Uptart incubator as part of the Technology Transfer office at the Center for Innovation to compete in pitch event.

Each of the teams had been partnered with app development firms that liked the teams’ concepts and helped them develop an app to support it.

Kathleen Lee, DecNut founder, is an emergency medicine resident and a senior fellow with Penn Social Media and Health Innovation Lab, which researches social media, mobile tech and health, and uses digital tools to improve population health.

The idea behind clinical pathways is to standardize patient care to avoid having a lot of variation in treatment. Oncology is the biggest source of it. There’s been a lot of activity by startups and more mature companies to provide big data analysis for clinical decision support tools that offer evidence-based treatment options depending on the type of cancer, the patient’s medical history and other factors.

Developing an app to support the delivery of children’s eye tests to spot potential problems earlier also generated interest among some investors. Vifant’s app measures vision in infants with moving screen patterns and evaluates visual responses. The user can change pattern size to measure patients’ visual acuity threshold. It evaluates things like preferential looking, ability to fixate and follow an object. It also intersperses images of interest to kids between steps in the test to maintain their attention.

It was developed by doctors including Monte Mills, a clinical ophthalmology professor at Penn and director of pediatric ophthalmology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But the company said in its pitch that the operator needn’t be a skilled eye doctor to implement the test. That raises the possibility of nurses or retail clinics delivering the test, should the app gain acceptance.

[Photo credit: Photo from Flickr user Craig Cloutier]

Shares0
Shares0