Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Health IT spinout from UNC raises $1.9M for smarter patient experience survey generator

A company that wants to help hospitals improve response rates and generate more targeted feedback […]

A company that wants to help hospitals improve response rates and generate more targeted feedback for surveys on the patient experience has raised a Series A round led by Excelerate Health Ventures, according to a company statement. The $1.9 million raised by Bivarus will help it boost staff levels as it seeks to expand hospital customers for its patient survey analytics tool.

Dave Levin, CEO explained that the company’s approach revolves around an algorithm that prioritizes the survey questions. Each patient receives no more than 10 questions. If it determines that it has received enough responses for certain questions, it pushes a new batch of questions it has not yet received enough data to be statistically significant. That means patients targeted for surveys may receive entirely different questions.

But because they are each asked a manageable portion of questions, Levin said the response rates are much higher, ranging between 30 percent and 60 percent, depending on clinical setting. “Our software dynamically presents survey items for which more information is required. Once statistical certainty is achieved for a given measure, other measures in the item bank are presented more frequently.”

Levin said the company would use the funding to increase staff levels from four to 10 by the end of the year and to scale the business.

Although hospitals have been doing surveys for insights on the patient experience for 40 years, according to Levin, they tend to be paper based and archaic and are dismissed by patients, for the most part. An approach that allows patients to respond by email or text has helped boost response rates. He also notes that its surveys are increasingly focusing on outpatient services — traditional surveys were more interested in the in-patient experience.

The point of these surveys is not only to give hospitals more insight to affect the outcome of patient satisfaction survey scores, but also to improve patients safety and spot potential problems in the making. The kind of responses they trigger vary from the mundane to critical. Levin cites one example in which a hospital earned low scores for comfort. It added volunteers to offer pillows and blankets to patients waiting for a room and waiting to be seen in the ER. The hospital saw a sharp increase in positive feedback on comfort.

In another instance Levin said a hospital received a compliant on a survey that it took five hours for its pharmacy to allocate a drug to a recent transplant patient. It immediately investigated and remedied the problem. The same patient came in a month later and was struck by the difference and noted that change in a comments section.

“There is a prevailing wisdom that these comments tend to be negative but that’s not the case,” Levin said. “What makes patients reluctant to respond to these surveys is the perception that their voice doesn’t matter. It does.”

In yet another case, a hospital used the survey to identify 240 safety events, only five of which were captured by the hospital’s safety event management system.

Levin said although it has a strong presence in North Carolina, it also has customers in California, Delaware and Maryland and is growing its national footprint.

The company’s technology was developed at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and adopted by the Office of Technology Development.

Update: This story has been updated from an earlier version to include clarifications of the technology by Bivarus CEO David Levin

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