Want to get pregnant? There’s an app for that. Looking for a new physician? The information is just a click away. Want to improve your health with the input of your doctor? Pretty soon, you’ll be able to do that from your phone, tablet or computer. Meet Kindara, Healthgrades and Datu, three of many Colorado companies revolutionizing the way patients make healthcare decisions.
These companies are part of a seismic shift that is breaking the old information asymmetry – where doctors had all the information and patients had very little – and using data to give patients an easy way to access key facts and gain knowledge for decisions about health. For these tech-savvy, data-heavy companies, it’s more than just eating kale and wearing a Fitbit. They are transforming three of the most important parts about health: getting the right doctor, making better decisions after a medical diagnosis and gaining control over fertility decisions.
Enabling better decisions post-diagnosis
[ibimage==26408==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-left]Kevin Dodson, SVP of Boulder-based Datu, was worried about the disconnect between diagnosis and treatment. He witnessed a man being diagnosed with diabetes – a life-threatening but treatable chronic disease – and saw the doctor reach over the bed, grab a pamphlet and hand it to the patient. He knew what would happen next; the patient would go home, google diabetes, find thousands of articles on the topic and most likely be very scared. Without a trusted advisor telling him how to control his disease, the patient is left “hungry for the health system to provide them guidance,” said Dodson. But the chances that a Google search will provide tailored and smart information to his specific case were low. Dodson saw a way to incorporate diagnostic information with personal data to encourage healthier behavior in patients.
And for Datu, success is helping nudge consumers to make smarter decisions about their healthcare. The company can’t wait for the day when a customer writes in to tell them that their product helped save a life. Early on, the company saw “an opportunity in convergence of data and healthcare,” said Dodson. Datu’s clients are large healthcare systems; they work in collaboration with them to develop a platform that is best for the healthcare system’s patients. What may work in LA may not work in New York, said Dodson. The end result is a system that gives patients content and context about a diagnosis, social integration into existing communities and a place to integrate personally collected data with clinical information. For doctor and patient, this provides real-time information on the patient’s health status. This allows the doctor/system to send specific recommendations to patient via push notifications on their phone. Having a doctor check-in and recommend a certain activity, even over an application and not in person, can have tremendous results.
Datu is growing rapidly, adding at least two new employees a week to their staff of 55. The company’s programs aren’t live yet, but they are slowing rolling out over the country. By the end of this year, Dodson expects five to eight programs up and running on their platform. They plan to add five large healthcare systems as clients over the next 18 to 24 months, adding onto their largest client, St. Joseph’s health system in Southern California. The company doesn’t compete with all the great health apps, instead, they integrate the innovative work of others into their platform. As Dodson puts it, they are "application agnostic." Their job is to provide the healthcare system with the best applications for their clients needs, not to push a particular product.
