Twine Health first came on our radar as a participant and then winner of a Brigham and Women’s digital health pitch competition. Nearly two years later, with a few clinical studies behind it, the health tech company is poised to go to market with its health coaching platform for patients with chronic conditions.
In an interview with Co-founder and Chairman Frank Moss, a serial entrepreneur who is also a veteran of IBM and MIT Media Lab and a co-founder and chairman of Matter, he talked about how Twine Health drew on some of the feedback from its studies to tweak its approach.
“Now that we have the clinical results we are putting the pedal to the metal,” Moss said.
Among the 18 customers it currently has, self-insured employers are the biggest. Yet, it’s excited about primary care practices looking for tools like the ones Twine can provide and sees this as a big potential market. Accountable care organizations also figure into their plans as well. Although Moss acknowledges the business is going after a broad customer base with, he said it’s important to experiment so it doesn’t limit its customer base.
So given that the company has been knee-deep in clinical studies to refine its platform, I asked Moss to share some of the insights and lessons they picked up along the way that have helped it hone its approach and tweak its products. Here are few of them.
Keep it simple. One of ways hypertension patients track their health in its program is by taking their blood pressure on a regular basis. But Moss is not a huge believer in making all of these processes digital and automated for patients. From his point of view, just getting patients to stop and take the time to get their bp, record the results and email them is important specifically because it’s not a passive exercise.
“There’s nothing wrong with using electronic devices but you want to keep it simple. Early on, having experimented with wireless devices, you don’t get as good results.” Just getting patients to take and record their blood pressure can improve patient engagement.
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.
Make it mind-bogglingly easy to download.
We have to provide content and tools so that users felt comfortable downloading and accessing the apps. That required a lot of attention on product development and content development to make the user experience as intuitive as possible.
Create a platform that can be geared to a broad range of preferences
“A major issue we learned in the past couple of years is unless we could cover every chronic condition we would not cut the mustard,” said Moss. “We started with diabetes and hypertension but we had to design a dashboard so we could incorporate any condition.” He believes that if the business limited the chronic conditions it covers, it would not have done as well.
Taking stock of the myriad health IT companies in this sector, Moss believes few have the critical mass and produce results that will support the shift from fee-for-service to outcomes-based care. He sees 2016 as a year of reckoning for many of them.
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