Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Damgaard, CEO of MatrixCare (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of home care centers utilizing technology, what are the trends?

John Damgaard: On the caregiver side, there are tools to drive operational efficiencies and to match the caregiver labor force to where they’re needed. Think of the concept of Uber for home care where you’re able to see what home care agent assets are in a given region. That’s on the operational side of things. The tele-health monitoring device is interesting.

The one that is just beginning to be talked about is virtual reality technology. Under a recently announced technical partnership, MatrixCare and Microsoft are exploring  the use of virtual reality technologies to provide digital encounters with patients. One of the challenges today with caring for seniors in home-based settings is senior care plans generally involve a fairly heavy use of different kinds of physical therapy. The challenge is getting therapists in home-based settings. It’s inherently inefficient. The therapists can only see 4.1 patients per day if they have to drive around to see them whereas they can see dozens in a facility-based setting. That creates a math problem.

How can we get enough therapists out to the home which is a low-cost care setting otherwise. One of the ways that you may see that happening here in the not-too-distant future is if your therapist is not real. Your virtual therapist comes to you in an Xbox-generated image through a VR headset that costs $99 with a Kinect motion sensor. The therapist can walk into Grandma Betty’s living room, engage them in a conversation, all the while collecting data points and taking them through the elements of the therapy plan.

All of that motion is being tracked and appearing in the field of view. Perfect digital documentation and the therapist isn’t real. Those are the kinds of things that are going to radically bend the cost curve. There is all kinds of work that needs to be done to make them accepted and deployed en mass. Imagine the power of that economically and imagine the power of that from a patient engagement and experience standpoint. The possibilities for that are endless.

Sramana Mitra: What are the areas where you think new entrepreneurs should be working given the trends of huge numbers of seniors coming into the system who need care? Where do you see this going?

John Damgaard: Putting the entrepreneurial hat on, what you’re looking for is gaps to create a mass market solution and brand that’s going to go viral from scratch with limited capital. The reality is what entrepreneurs need to look for are gaps in the solution, and there are many, many gaps in the solutions that are provided by even scale players like MatrixCare and the information backbone side of things or scale players on the device side.

It’s the connection of the information that is either contained or created by those ecosystems with other datasets like location-based data and government claims data. It’s the clever combination of those information assets to solve gaps in the value chain around healthcare delivery. Those are the kinds of things where if you can really hit the target on one of those, you will have a company that will catch the eye of a core vendor who will help you scale that company and ultimately provide an exit for you as well.

If I were an entrepreneur in the healthcare space, that would be the approach I would be taking to attempt to create a scale player from scratch. You see this once in a blue moon.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Damgaard, CEO of MatrixCare
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