Don Quixote Had It Easy
Imagine the frustration if he tried to solve problems in healthcare…
Why Write This Article?
With the new year comes reflection on our HealthHive journey. In March 2021, I first wrote about My Health-Tech Startup Journey. As I said at the time, I witnessed three close family members’ care management as they deteriorated from good health through illness over more than a decade. I was astounded by what I saw. Three very different paths (pancreatic cancer, congestive heart failure, and dementia) but, unfortunately, with many similar challenges. Bouncing between medical offices, hospitals, SNFs, home aides, and many other market participants — the health system was not designed to allow efficient and effective care delivery that met its users’ needs. Attacking this problem called to me and my colleagues.
Our Original Thoughts
When we began, we thought: Let’s build something that makes healthcare better for all participants, starting with the patient and their family. Let’s be sure to respect existing systems and workflows. And let’s not just think about the clinical. Let’s consider social, communication, education, resources, etc.
Let’s make HealthHive usable and approachable for all, regardless of education level or knowledge. (We’re currently working on extending our languages.) Let’s also invite other health-tech solutions to join us. Let’s create a B2B and B2B2C model that generates an ROI for the healthcare system to subsidize our desire to help the underserved consumer market already drowning from the cost of care.
Which Path Should We Take?
Our initial goal was quite audacious. Since we were self-funding, it gave us the flexibility to invest in an approach we believed was the best path for impact rather than just providing the quickest ROI. While we want to build a large and profitable company, we also focus on addressing a massive societal problem.
Trying to achieve our broad-based goal in healthcare takes time, patience, capital, and lots of grit. We decided to slowly build our solution with market feedback while contemporaneously learning and using that education to inform our path forward. As we built, we had cornerstones of patient ownership and control of data, patient and family dignity, multi-party engagement within a Hive, data security (we’re now SOC2 certified), and a scalable infrastructure to support our dreams of partners and integrations.
Our education began with Jon Warner’s Silver Moonshots program, which focused on the importance of a beachhead market. Jon’s program helped us solidify our initial market entry point of Skilled Nursing (benefitting from our back-end integration with PointClickCare). From there, we were selected to participate in VentureCrush, a fabulous program focused on supporting the startup community (sponsored by LowensteinSandler). Our next step was selection by the Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator in partnership with Pivotal Ventures (a Melinda French Gates company).
Techstars allowed us to explore a range of strategies, leveraging the knowledge and expertise of nearly 100 mentors familiar with the space from various perspectives. After that, we had the good fortune of joining the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP, which was formed to accelerate collaboration throughout the sector. I was also invited to join the American Society on Aging Board of Directors, representing the largest, most diverse community of professionals working in aging in America.
These learnings and relationships became foundational for our next steps (and it highlights the burgeoning collaborative community exploring how to serve the market better).
The Outcome of Our Investigation
After talking to thousands of people during this journey, we concluded that we were on the right path (provided that we had the humility to acknowledge the challenges to success and an openness to pushback and objection). At least 96% of those we spoke with loved our unique approach and felt it was needed in the market. However, at least 99.99% of those we spoke with considered it a monumental challenge. (That’s just a slight exaggeration of the statistic.)
The hardest part of being an entrepreneur is to remain committed to solving the problem you believe exists, notwithstanding all of the roadblocks that stand in your way, but reflective enough to assess whether the goal is achievable.
Here are some of the market drivers that made us comfortable with our approach:
- Staffing across the entire sector is the “hair on fire” problem. We would be noticed if we could address that challenge in our solution.
- Many conversations were beginning to consider a patient as a consumer. CMS announced that their voice should be heard and they should play a role on the care team.
- COVID refocused the market on the move to home and community, and “the market” would need to evolve to support that trend.
- Payment models were [painfully slow] evolving to empower and compensate family and informal caregivers, chronic care management, home care, care management for patients with dementia, and a range of other “wrapped” services. Clearly, at-risk models would continue to evolve, regardless of what they were called.
- Caregivers were becoming a significant part of many discussions. How would we support them? How would we help to reduce their burnout? How would we include them in the health system?
- Technology advances and regulatory changes (e.g., FHIR and all forms of AI) are improving data liquidity, usability, and accessibility for patients and providers. Workflows would eventually benefit from AI.
- Community-based organizations were forming Community Care Hubs and beginning to see their value in the health system instead of solely within the social welfare system.
While all of this is promising and supports the goals of HealthHive, these are all trends, and many, many roadblocks stand in the way. The current system still needs to be redesigned to align interests. That’s why we see healthcare as a community of caring. We must bring these pieces together!
So How Do We See HealthHive Today?
Our goal is unchanged from two years ago — HealthHive aims to support a more connected, equitable, and accessible healthcare experience throughout life’s journey.
Our platform seeks to create a “community of caring” for aging adults and their informal care team while integrating providers’ existing workflows and systems to address gaps in care planning, coordination, understanding, and long-term care management.
We continue to expand and bring together health records, care plans, social information, resources, documents, and communication to ensure everyone involved in the patient’s care can access the information they need when needed.
And we will continue to grow our healthcare, data, and service integration, as well as healthtech partners to support our goals.
What Do We Need?
Having a tangible impact on the market is a collaborative effort. Our goal is to connect with anyone with an aligned vision. Whether you’re an older adult, a caregiver, a provider, a social service provider, a physician, a health plan provider, or another health tech company, we want to talk to you. How can we help?
In terms of expanding HealthHive, we are looking for:
- Innovative
- Geographically concentrated
- Multi-dimensional
- Outcomes-driven
- Long-term oriented
organizations that want to work with us so that we can better understand and help address your challenges as we broaden our platform to lower costs, improve health outcomes, and empower the entire formal and informal care team.
Reach out and connect.
Stephen Farber, SFarber@HealthHive.org