HealthTech Entrepreneurs Brenda Schmidt & Blake Marggraff Discuss Purpose-Driven Innovation in Business of Healthcare Interview
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (PRWEB) January 25, 2018 -- In “Purpose-Driven Healthcare Innovation,” the latest episode of the Business Of Healthcare (BOH) interview series, Solera Health founder Brenda Schmidt and Epharmix (http://www.Epharmix.com) founder Blake Marggraff explain how they achieved rapid business growth through purpose-driven innovation.
Marggraff’s Epharmix helps keep complex patients with several chronic illnesses engaged in the management of their disease and in touch with their care teams. Epharmix, through rigorous clinical trials, has proven it can keep 61 percent of patients engaged for over a year. Long term engagement is necessary to improve outcomes in patients with chronic diseases.
“Epharmix now is posting engagement rates of over 60 percent for a full year every week, and that's for patients. Some of whom are in the lowest socioeconomic quintile,” Marggraff said. “These are the individuals who are with multiple chronic conditions, who are very expensive and who are reticent to engage, even with the most talented care managers.”
The idea is to allow outpatient care teams to focus on the patients who need the most attention and support. The service prioritizes patients based on how they respond to automated text messages or answer questions during a phone call. Clinicians can then see who they should be checking in with on any given day and who doesn’t need to be contacted at all. Patients can report their current symptoms, providing helpful information to care teams who can intervene in a timely manner to avert crises.
“It's a perfect alignment - really textbook - of defining a problem clearly, creating a solution and proving that it works beyond a shadow of a doubt, really with the gold standard of research and then making sure that as you apply the solution, incentives are aligned for everybody involved,” Marggraff said.
Solera Health enables health plans to give members access to evidence-based prevention programs provided by local community organizations and digital apps. These prevention programs can help consumers at risk for diabetes, falls and more. The innovation solved a market dysfunction amongst four stakeholders with aligned goals: consumers, physicians, health plans and community programs.
“There needed to be a marketplace that connected the 86 million Americans at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes,” Schmidt said. “There are now well over a thousand organizations delivering the Diabetes Prevention Program and a payer that wanted to pay for it and a doctor who wanted to refer his patients. But it was very congested, and someone needed to organize all of this into something that made it easy.”
Both companies were founded in 2015 and focused on evidence-based technology and research. They worked with several thousand patients each to improve their solutions. Engagement and evidence are key as healthcare providers won’t use solutions that lack evidence or that patients chose not to use.
For example, Schmidt described to Business of Healthcare a trial of over 3,000 people who avoided transitioning to Type II Diabetes. Maggraff said Epharmix proved its results with trials of over 6,000 patients. One trial demonstrated the ability to help patients with uncontrolled hypertension become controlled within a relatively short period of time.
Watch the interview at http://www.BOHSeries.com.
About Epharmix
Epharmix is the leader in evidence-based remote patient monitoring that accelerates the communication process between care managers and their high and rising-risk patients. Automated SMS text and phone-based messages specific to a patient’s medical condition, are sent to the patient’s own device including smartphone, pay-as-you-go phones and land lines. Epharmix collects key patient biometrics and self-reported data to provide actionable alerts to care teams for timely outreach to prevent unnecessary hospitalizations or exacerbations. See how we help providers succeed in value-based care at http://www.epharmix.com or try a self-guided demo at http://try.epharmix.com.
About Business of Healthcare
BOH is an interview series serving the top decision makers across healthcare. Each episode brings together healthcare executives and innovation thought leaders to explore proven solutions to healthcare’s most complex problems. An editorially-independent and non-partisan media service, each BOH episode advances healthcare Mission and Margin. Published interviews are free to access at http://www.BOHSeries.com.
Media Contacts
Epharmix
Jason Roche
Growth Engineer
(314) 272-2586
jason(at)epharmix(dot)com
Kristin O’Neil
Media Relations
Business of Healthcare
(636) 537-5454
insight(at)BOHSeries(dot)com
Alyssa Jackson, Business of Healthcare, http://bohseries.com, 704-508-9211 x 3, [email protected]
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