Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Gautam Sivakumar, CEO of Medisas (Part 2)

Gautam Sivakumar: The handoff process alone is responsible for about 300,000 to 350,000 deaths every single year in the US. Medical errors are the third biggest killer in the US killing about 440,000 people every single year. 80% of that is estimated to be because of this handoff problem. We built software for people to manage their tasks.

Another example of a workflow that we try to improve is the discharge process. One of the most painful aspects of being in a hospital is getting discharged. You’ll have a doctor come in the morning and says, “Your father is ready to go home.” Then nothing happens for a day or two. The reason for that is that the communication in that workflow is incredibly broken.

The doctor will only get a chance to communicate the discharge by the afternoon. We built a workflow that allows a doctor to check a box to trigger a checklist of tasks that go to people so they can do all the things they need to do.

A third example is the virtual care huddle. The time when care is most safe is when all of the various people looking after you in a hospital are rounding on you at the same time. Many hospitals call this a multi-disciplinary care round. It happens either once a day or once a week. That’s the time when everyone is around you as a patient. Everyone has all the context. Everyone is communicating freely.

As soon as that round is done, everyone is going in multiple directions and people are not on the same page. We created software that virtually connects everyone.

Sramana Mitra: How penetrated into the hospital system is your technology or technology such as yours?

Gautam Sivakumar: That’s a good question. From a workflow application standpoint, we look at the different workflow tools out there. I don’t know the exact stats but I would imagine that most major hospitals have some workflow tools that are integrated with their existing systems that tackle communication or task management. We have, at any given time, about a million patients on the platform.

Sramana Mitra: What do you find in the adoption cycle? Are the hospitals reluctant? Are they ready? Are they aggressively adopting?

Gautam Sivakumar: I think we are still pretty early on in the cycle, to be honest. I always say that if you take the technology adoption bell curve distribution, it’s skewed to the right in hospitals. It’s not a bell curve distribution.

There are a lot of challenges for hospitals adopting technology. It’s no surprise that hospitals are amongst the most conservatives. The reason for that is, in a typical business, if you try something new, the worst that can happen is you lose money. In healthcare where you’re dealing with sick patients, the worst thing is, you kill someone. That shifts the culture to be a lot more averse to taking risks and innovation.

You need to have compelling use cases and you need to find innovative people in the beginning to see the vision. In our case, we’re not going to make anything worse. The worse case situation is, things remain exactly the same.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Gautam Sivakumar, CEO of Medisas
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