Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 5)

Robin Wiener: The next phase, which is very exciting, is to push that patient information back into the hospital so that they can get better care. We have an alert system. Let’s say your blood sugar gets out of whack, an alert is sent out to let the doctor know what’s going on with you. If your blood pressure is slowly creeping up, they can see that and can get you a doctor’s appointment versus bringing you into the emergency room at an acute time. We’re in the right place and the right time in the United States.

One of my first large clients is the province of Alberta, Canada, which had 3.2 million people. They’re rolling out because their social medicine is totally different from the US. They want to pull down the cost of healthcare. How do you do that? It’s by engaging those patients and making sure those patients know what’s going on with their healthcare and making sure they’re taking their medication. That’s another one. It’s a different model from the US but it’s a large one. We will be working with another province in Canada too. We have a partner out there called Telus Health. Telus is the second largest telecommunications company in Canada. They started in the healthcare area. We are their patient engagement tool for all of Canada. That’s the Canadian market.

Then I go over to our friends over at Microsoft who brought in two deals. I have two households in England. One is focusing the application on mental illness. It’s interesting that outside the US, they have a better view of mental health than we do. They’re more likely to work with you. I was really surprised because I thought everybody is going to do heart disease or diabetes. It’s been extremely fascinating how that has worked. We’re connected to their EMR.

Then down by the shores, Southampton University started with IBS but now they’ve spanned it out in the hospitals. In England, one of the biggest problems is the high cost for gas and parking. They’re trying to catch people when they’re sick before they have to come in so they can do telehealth with them. The patients are not going to come in because they can’t afford to pay for the parking.

Sramana Mitra: You have the telehealth modules in your toolkit?

Robin Wiener: No. We have secure messaging. We have something that we call health journals. With the health journals, we have a lot of engines. For IBS, a patient gets a reminder everyday on their phone to fill out a little survey. How are you feeling today? Have you had any flare-ups? How many times have you gone to the bathroom? They can be answered very quickly. That goes in and if they start to see a trend of a problem, they can pick up the phone and call them, “It looks like you are about to have an attack. I want you to take this medicine and do this.” It’s preventive health. We’re seeing that a lot across the world.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health
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