A brush with cancer discovered after a bike accident led Tom Stanis to co-found Verily in 2013. He served as head of software for Alphabet’s healthcare division, working to create a digital health platform for diabetes management, called Onduo, among many other projects.
Six years later, he left the company. After his dad had a stroke, Stanis was determined to fix the challenges he had faced in his care.
“It was pretty severe. He eventually came out of the hospital,” Stanis said “He was at home. He was no longer at a place where a specialist could come day-to-day, but it was too complex for primary care.”
Stanis’ newest company, called Story Health, is focused on bridging that gap. The idea is to provide specialists with digital tools to help improve their patients’ outcomes. For instance, making sure their medications and dosage are working for them.
“The time it took us to find the right medications for my dad was on the order of months,” Stanis said.
Some drugs brought an increased fall risk, and others had their own side effects. There was also the challenge of juggling six, seven, eight different medications.
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.
“I watched what the latency was between a new prescription coming in, and feeling it out,” he said. “There’s no hard and fast rule about a lot of these things.”
His work with Story Health is to develop a system that can help specialists create a care plan and execute it. Stanis shared the example of pulling in data from medical devices to see how a patient is doing at home. For instance, many medications affect people’s blood pressure. If it drops too low, something might need to change. Heart rate, oxygen saturation and spirometry are some other indicators to watch, he said.
Stanis is also developing a care plan suggestion engine that can pull in information from a patient’s health record and pharmacy data, and pair that with evidence-based guidance.
So far, two partners have joined Stanis to help start the company: Nikhil Roy, who worked with Stanis at Verily and led project management for Onduo, and Dr. Ashul Govil, a cardiologist who previously worked with the Food and Drug Administration on medical device safety.
Story Health is kicking this work off with $4 million in seed funding, led by General Catalyst and Define Ventures.
“We believe that the virtualization of care from hospital to home was a strategic imperative for healthcare long before Covid,” Define Ventures Managing Partner Lynne Chou O’Keefe said in a news release. “Having invested in virtualizing primary and chronic care, we see the virtualization of the specialty layer as the next growth driver to redefine healthcare. Story Health is the epitome of this next evolution.”
