Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson are just two of the investors seeding a startup that turns a doctor’s orders into easy-to-digest, personalized care plans.
Rock Health grad Wellframe just rounded up $1.5 million to grow its team and business development efforts, according to CEO Jacob Sattelmair. Bush and Draper were joined by former Accenture managing director Russ Nash, Fidelity Biosciences partner Carl Byers, president of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, and other angel investors in the round, Wellframe said.
The Boston-based company has spent the past three years building out and testing a digital platform that breaks down clinical protocols and delivers them in the form of daily to-do lists for patients after they leave the hospital. Instead of having to process and remember all of the instructions the doctor gives, with Wellframe patients get day-to-day guidance on their rehabilitation plan delivered to their phones.
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Wellframe’s first commercial deployment at South Shore Hospital focused on keeping patients who have had a cardiac event engaged in their care after leaving the hospital, and nudging them to start good habits like taking their medications, tracking their physical activities and recording their symptoms.
“The idea is that, like a GPS navigation system, the tasks that a patient receives are contingent on how they’ve been interacting with the program on previous days,” Sattelmair said.
Back at the hospital, a clinician can use Wellframe’s online dashboard to see how patients are doing and send messages to them if necessary. Predictive analytics and intelligent alerts let a clinician know when a patient might need attention or follow-up.
Many hospitals have upped their efforts to stay in touch with patients immediately after they leave the hospital in an effort to prevent unnecessary re-admisisions. Welframe and other startups like Axial Exchange and Infield Health leverage mobile technology to help.
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Before commercializing the platform, Wellframe ran several pilot clinical trials in patients with coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure, pulmonary disorder and mental illness, Sattelmair said.
“The results of our first trial were very positive and will soon be published,” he said. “We now have a growing number of commercial implementations with large health plans and health systems underway or upcoming.”
Sattelmair, a public health scientist, co-founded Wellframe in 2010 with primary care physician Dr. Trishan Panch and MIT-trained data scientists Vinnie Ramesh and Archit Bhise.
[Image credit: @wellframe]