Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Damgaard, CEO of MatrixCare (Part 2)

John Damgaard: The US government pays for over 50% of the total bill of long-term post-acute care. In case anyone’s noticed, we borrow about a trillion dollars a year to do that. By the way, that population is living longer so that translates to enormous problems. The innovation opportunities are also enormous. We have to bend dramatically the cost quality and access curves for healthcare in our space. The only way to do that is to use different technologies as levers.

For example, one of the things that is being done is attempting to shorten the length of stay in facility-based care settings because they’re very expensive and get people back at home sooner. The challenge with that is the care plan management and oversight is difficult when you have individuals in a home-based setting. Are you really aware that they’re complying with their physician’s instructions or their longitudinal care plan? Do we know whether they’re doing what they need to be doing?

Home care agencies and different kinds of supplemental services are helpful but they’re people-based businesses and they’re logistically challenged because the US is an enormous country with all kinds of remote rural areas where home care services aren’t available.This is where tele-health comes into play – the ability to have monitoring devices of all kinds that are available at consumer price points. Now we can see whether Grandma Betty who was discharged from a joint displacement episode is following her care plan.

Today, maybe she’s supposed to take 10 steps independently. Did she really do that or not? It takes a very manual labor intensive process today to find that whereas we can, with device integration, know for a fact that she either didn’t make it off the couch or maybe she was a little too zealous and took 200 steps. Either of those facts are not good facts. Ultimately that will lead to a very expensive readmission to a facility-based care setting. The ability to fill in the blind spots through tele-health and tele-health device aggregation is enormous.

Those opportunities are the land of the giants. Where the entrepreneurial opportunities are is to take the basic data points that come from those monitoring devices, combine them with data that lives in electronic health record systems and other publicly available data including location-based data, and do really clever correlations and analysis of that data to suggest interventions or patterns that can be used to further improve care plans treatment protocols.

There are enormous opportunities for very clever folks to do those kinds of analysis with the data that’s provided by these devices as well as other data sources. It provides an endless field of opportunities for entrepreneurs to come in, understand the workflows, and develop a prototype solution. It’s a fertile field.

Sramana Mitra: What is the penetration of these trends like tele-health monitoring, wearable device monitoring in your universe?

John Damgaard: Adoption always starts slow as the first generation of devices tend to be very expensive and very clunky. The ecosystem around them is ill-formed. We started, for example, in senior living care settings with very expensive fixed proximity monitors that would track people’s motion, or toilet sensors. They were very fixed and proprietary.

They provide good learning but it’s only when you get to large scale consumer price point devices that you begin to see the adoption take off. We are beginning to see that. We’re one of the hottest areas of healthcare in general but certainly post acute care is this tele-health device integration at the home as well as in facilities. We’re now seeing the price points forced down by the proliferation of these consumer-grade devices. We no longer need a proprietary sensor in the toilet. We have a location-based sensor and we know where the toilet is.

By having the patient in the proximity of the toilet, we can make a pretty good guess that they’re using it. That is a couple of orders of magnitude more economical from a mass deployment standpoint. We’re beginning to see that take off just as the original cellphones weighted 10 pounds and came in a bag. Now we have what we have.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Damgaard, CEO of MatrixCare
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