One thing that tends to get lost in the flood of fundraising news and financial milestones in the digital health sector are the human stories behind the companies’ technology — the patients and healthcare professionals and how they benefit from it. As a way to take stock of the impact its portfolio companies have had, Rock Health has launched the Impact Project to illustrate how digital health startups are making a difference in the lives of the patients and providers they touch.
Mayo Clinic and the VA Center for Innovation and other institutions are supporting the project. Providers, organizations, academia, and investors will also share stories about how they want to see healthcare improved.
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“Though the venture community has regularly measured impact in terms of dollars raised, that’s obviously the wrong metric of success,” said Bill Evans, Rock Health CEO in a statement about the program. He also talked about the project on the phone.
Given how much hype digital health gets — 1,000 companies have received investment since 2011, with annual investments surging from just over $1 billion 2011 to $5.8 billion last year, some investors believe there are many companies in that are overvalued.
Evans regards this project as a helpful exercise to quantify and illustrate the differences these companies are making in the work of providers and the lives of patients.
“We really wanted to ask the question: Are we on track?” We wanted to look for hard measures,” Evans said in a phone interview. But he also believes these companies are on track to have strong exits.
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One example of the kind of stories Rock Health is highlighting to refocus the conversation from investment to impact is Ambient Clinical Analytics and its work with sepsis detection.
The story of Kevin Kronmiller, a computer scientist with the Air Force, who was rushed to a branch of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida a couple of weeks after he had a liver transplant, is an example of a patient who benefited from the company’s analytics tool.Developed by the Mayo Clinic’s innovation team, AWARE is designed to detect sepsis. It uses electronic sepsis detection by monitoring patients at risk of sepsis in a hospital—especially in the emergency room or intensive care unit. It uses algorithms to analyze a patient’s vital signs and can determine very quickly if they go into the range of sepsis—then alerts doctors.
Although patients don’t survive sepsis in 30 percent of cases due to factors like its sudden onset, Kronmiller was diagnosed with severe sepsis pushing that figure to 70 percent. But once Kronmiller’s severe sepsis was detected, AWARE triggered a treatment protocol, making sure fluids and antibiotics were given at very specific times in response to his status.
The program, which secured FDA clearance as a Class 2 medical device, also cuts the length of stay in the ICU in half and reduces errors by 50 percent reducing preventable medical errors that cost the healthcare system billions each year, according to data cited by the report. Ambient’s tool also reduced the costs of hospital stays by 30 percent—or $43,745 per visit. But AWARE also generates data such as how responsive they were to patients and how each patient reacted to treatments. Not only can that data be used to improve how the hospital responds to future cases but it can also be shared to help other institutions.
Rock Health expects to highlight more stories in the coming months through the Impact Project on its website.
Image: DrAfter123, Getty Images
