The challenge of deploying clinical decision-support tools is not new to the medical industry, but it is now being magnified by the influx of COVID-19 patients. As such, we are excited by avoMD, a platform that aims to provide on-demand decision support for clinicians at the point of care. The company, which joins our first virtual accelerator program, is tackling a real concern in healthcare, using technology to address a growing need.
The Nuts & Bolts
Problem: Even as the healthcare industry becomes increasingly digitized, physicians have to often digest clinical knowledge by reviewing guidelines in PDF form or static HTML pages at the point of care. Furthermore, medical knowledge is growing rapidly, doubling every 73 days, making it nearly impossible for clinicians to access and stay abreast of best practices.
Solution: avoMD could provide a better way for physicians to use and learn evidence-based protocols at the point of care by enabling hospitals to deploy decision support tools across its provider base.
When 500 Met avoMD
We met the avoMD team through an introduction by a former 500 employee. We felt that the team’s background made them qualified to build a solution in the healthcare space.
Joongheum (“PJ”) Park, Co-Founder and CTO, originally wanted to build a tool to improve his performance and education as a practicing physician. PJ is a practicing internal medicine physician and clinical informatician, and served as an Associated Harvard Medical Faculty at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Internist/clinical informatics fellow at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center.
His vision was supported by a friend, current Co-Founder and CEO Yair Saperstein. Yair served as the Chief resident at NYC Health + Hospitals, Inpatient Medicine Chief Resident at Kings County Hospital Center, and Co-Founded two non-profit organizations, StartScience and Teach4Kids.
The two brought on a third Co-Founder with additional business strengths and software building experience. Laurence Coman, COO, holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, where he studied entrepreneurship and healthcare, and worked on the investment team at Vector Capital, a private equity firm focused on software investments.
As our startups begin implementing ESG criteria, avoMD helps achieve the third goal of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”
Why Now?
The pandemic has pushed healthcare needs to the forefront as we search for innovative and useful solutions. In the US, 45% of adults do not receive the standard of care. This gap leads to $52.3 billion in wasted healthcare spending.
COVID-19 highlighted a critical flaw that has existed for some time in hospital-protocol creation and its utilization. Physicians are given PDFs of clinical protocols that comply with hospital policies and have to implement them, which can lead to confusion.
At the same time, medical knowledge is multiplying. While COVID-19 treatment and best practices change quickly, other care standards are also quickly evolving, and physicians need a way to stay on top of treatment protocols.
Medical knowledge at the point of care can at times be inaccessible. Physicians must deal with unwieldy interfaces and poor clinical workflow integrations. Consequently, physicians and patients suffer. Whereas research shows a correlation between protocol utilization and higher quality metrics and cost savings.
Technical solutions are changing healthcare, thanks to regulations such as the 21st Century Cures Act, which mandates electronic health record vendors to open up their APIs to third party software vendors, such as avoMD.
Future of avoMD
Because of their medical field experience, avoMD’s founders understand what physicians and hospitals need to improve performance and patient care. Among the many platform upgrades and new features, the team plans to provide hospitals with a complete analytics suite to understand user behavior and provide a dashboard to institutional customers to help measure ROI.
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If you would like to connect with the company directly, you can learn more at https://www.avomd.io/.
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