Hi, my name is Oakkar Oakkar, and I’m the president of Keona Health. Yes, you can go ahead and make fun of my name, since every one has been doing it the whole day, actually my whole life. We are a spin-off company from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, we develop a web/mobile app called online nurse advice, which allows patients to reach out to their care provider to get advice, the moment that they need it.
The current industry solution for this problem is the telephone triage. What are the problems with telephone triage? They cost about $16/call on average and there are 950 million of those calls. So they are really expensive and they are not reimbursed.
Did you know that 1/3 of the patients in the ER don’t have to be there. Also, 1/5 of the patients go to the wrong doctor at the wrong time.
We all know that we currently have 7% shortage of physicians, and by 2020, it will be 20%. That is the reason why, 73% of patients with the regular primary care physician said that they could not easily get to their physician over the phone. Based on the recent studies, 62% of patients said that they would switch doctors for online access. What all this is the indication that we need a solution that provides quality care at low cost, and that is precisely what we do:
It cost us $600 billion last year for those inappropriate care.
We provide intelligent and personalized way for patients to report their symptoms using the web and mobile. We also extract their health history from the provider EMR. And then we have our patent pending Decision Engine recommending the level of care – Go to ER, Go to Urgent Care, Set up the same day or next available appointment, or stay home and self-care. The recommendation is based on the industry standard triage protocols and reviewed by the nurse, before it is sent out to the patient via email, text message or even phone call. It also does emergency screening to add additional safety for patients.Before, from the nurse perspective, they normally have to ask you all the questions one by one on the phone, and it takes forever. With our solution, they get the prioritized clinical summary in one snapshot, which allows them to quickly respond back to patient. There are a lot of symptom checkers like WebMD, but there is no other solution out there that combines patient symptoms based on the industry standard triage protocols and nurse interaction quite like this.
Now, let’s dive into the demo of our software.
We have a lot of interests from Health Systems, Payers and Call Centers. The industry shit towards Accountable Care Organizations and Patient Centered Medical Homes, really aligned ourselves working with the large health systems. Payers love our reduction in ER visits and the increase of appropriate care. I talked to the executives at BCBS NC and they got really excited about our product and we are now in discussion to collaborate with them on their mobile app. Reduction in nurse time reduces the overhead cost for the call centers, and that’s the reason why they are chasing us.
We are building our mobile apps, and just like you see in the demo, we have the personalized recommendation for the patient and care instructions. In addition, we also give you the nearest facilities and cost estimates based on the recommendations.
This is a success story from one of our clients. Kim is a nurse at UNC, what she loves about our solution is the preparedness. Having all the information about the patient in a snapshot, she feels like she is giving the best care advice. Eva is a student at UNC, and she loves the fact that he gets the response back from the nurse as quickly as 15 minutes without having to go in, if she doesn’t have to. It saves her a lot of time.I know we have the most brilliant minds sitting here in this room. So your feedback and comments are very important, so that we could constantly improve our product and turn it into something that every one loves.