Startup looks to be ‘eHarmony of health care’
ADDISON: For some patients, getting released from the hospital is just the beginning of their recovery. The question of where to receive care, whether that’s at a nursing home or in-home services, is one many don’t think about until those services are needed.
This was a question that Dr. Kathryn Jarvis wrestled with at a young age, when she found herself needing brain surgery for a rare condition while attending the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. The question came back around years later, when she found herself working as an internal medicine doctor and needed help placing patients with the right care provider.
Using medical- and care-related data from healthcare facilities and patent-pending algorithms, Bed Beacon was created to help solve this problem and improve patients’ access to the right type of care and institution.
“As I have helped patients in the hospital, I have seen this moment where they’re weaker than they’ve been before, they can’t get up to go look at a nursing home for themselves, they’re sending a family member to go look at the facilities for them… it’s literally the first time they’re delegating out the responsibility of finding them a place,” Jarvis, founder and CEO of Bed Beacon, said. “It turns out that what is good for the patients is actually good for the bottom line of hospitals.”
Based in Addison, Bed Beacon is a healthcare-focused platform that aggregates data about in-home care, nursing homes and other in-patient treatment facilities, helping patients and their families find the right facility. Users of the platform are able to sort through facilities based on a number of options, including quality, lifestyle, availability, and location factors. Currently, information about these types of facilities is spread between hospitals, social workers and other healthcare organizations. Bed Beacon puts it all in one place, helping patients find better care faster and helping hospitals save money by freeing up space for other patients more quickly.
Jarvis said that only about 52% of patients are satisfied with their care transition, after being released from the hospital. She said that based on a study Bed Beacon conducted on a local hospital found that the startup’s platform has the potential to save a single hospital more than $22 million per year by decreasing readmittance rates and increasing efficiency.
“What you actually see in a lot of these hospitals and a lot of these conferences that look at post-hospital care, is they’re all wanting technology because they’re seeing that there’s a big problem and big gap that exists right now, and they’re encouraging technological innovation because they see that they’re behind the times,” said Kyle Ness, CMO at Bed Beacon. “Incorporating incorrect technology can also be a problem, but when you implement the right technology that actually helps the entire continuum of care and the speed of which things are done, you’re seeing more hospitals that are very open to that.”
Bed Beacon is set to launch in late January 2020, after changes in Medicare happen at the end of this month. Jarvis said they have already found a lot of interest in the product in the healthcare community and that several hospitals have expressed interest in taking the platform national after it launches and has a few proven clients. Because of this, Bed Beacon is expecting high growth.
She said that the five-member team has encountered some challenges along the way. One of the most difficult, and likely the reason for other similar products not existing on the market, was adhering to the rules and procedures that different healthcare facilities use when aggregating their data, Jarvis said. However, she added that North Texas has been a great market to start in, due to a large local industry that is highly focused on the quality of care.
“We believe very strongly in our value to the hospitals, we also very strongly believe in our value to patients… I think I look at patients from the perspective of if I was a patient, what would I want; now I’m a doctor, what do I want for my patients, what kind of care do I think they deserve?” Jarvis said. “What we’re really talking about is creating more efficiencies and getting rid of waste in the system… every one of these groups has an interest in getting the patient to where they belong.”
In addition to the platform, Bed Beacon is also planning on launching an apprenticeship program to help it recruit the talent it expects it will need as it grows. The company will offer a learn-to-earn style program to help train data scientists and analysts on things like health data analysis and health information privacy and security. In addition to providing top talent to the company, Jarvis said she hopes the program can benefit the larger community by creating a highly skilled and specialized workforce.
While the company prepares for its launch in the coming months, Bed Beacon is offering to let local hospitals trial its technology for free. Jarvis said she believes the platform will be a game changer in the industry and it has the ability to be deployed rapidly, almost anywhere.
“We are the eHarmony of healthcare,” she said. “Geography, gender, your goals of care they all matter as far as the availability of the bed so we first sort on that so that you’re not even looking at all these other ones. Our guarantee is this we won’t sell you something if we don’t believe you’re going to benefit from it more than we do… you and your customers.”
