

CloudMedx (YC W15) Helps Doctors Spot Patients Who Will Need Expensive Treatment - tashfeens
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/17/yc-backed-cloudmedx-helps-doctors-spot-patients-who-will-need-expensive-treatment/

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idiot900
tashfeens, I'm always skeptical about healthcare startups. A few questions:
How accurate are your predictions, and how do you assess accuracy? (Do you
have any prospective studies?) How is this better than the nanny reminders in
current EMRs such as Epic? How does your platform deal with missing data when
a chunk of a patient's visits are not transmitted to your platform?

Does the software parse free text, depend on someone taking the time to curate
a list of "problems" or "diagnoses", or just look at lab values? What is the
explanation given by the software when it makes a recommendation, other than
deference to a statistical model?

Why would I, a physician, want to spend time or money on this rather than
depend on my own sensibilities and training? (I am not going to watch the demo
video on your website because I will not agree to an NDA.)

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brandonb
I'm not tashfeens, but given that you have a CS degree and an MD, I'd be
curious as to what makes you skeptical about healthcare startups. Or,
conversely, what should a healthcare startup do to earn the respect of you and
your colleagues?

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idiot900
Overall, make a case to truly be worth the time and effort.

Anything that second guesses my clinical judgment, and/or requires extra
paperwork to do so, had better be able to show its justification in an
intelligent manner. There is a lot involved in evaluating a patient that is
not encoded in machine-readable form, so some percentage of things software
reports is going to be wrong or pointless. (Trivial example: The K is 3.4. Is
the patient hypokalemic?) The time spent ignoring nuisance notices may render
the whole thing useless, even if there is useful information somewhere.

Have practicing physicians intimately involved in the UI design process, so
the resulting product is usable to physicians and actually saves time. Billing
software in disguise such as Epic has a terrible user experience and could be
so much better.

There's more, but I have to head to work...

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brandonb
Thank you! That's helpful. If you'd ever like to talk further feel free to
email me (email on my profile).

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illini123
I can probably echo some similar thoughts that we heard when we talked with
providers. I'm not tashfeens nor do I work for his company, but I run Varsa
Health, a data analytics company for behavioral health providers. We "earned"
the respect of clinicians to a certain degree by spending a lot of time
(months) learning about their workflow before we started even writing code. My
co-founder used to work on similar work in a research setting, so user
experience was particularly important to us. I noticed you were working on
Healthcare.gov - that's a massive undertaking and kudos to you for having the
civic duty to help clean up the mess that it was. Would love to chat further
about some of our lessons learned and share our experiences.

[https://varsahealth.com/](https://varsahealth.com/)

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sitkack
Spot expensive patients so they can be denied and reap more profit.

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tashfeens
Thanks for your comment. The platform helps identify the high risk patients so
that physicians can spend more time and effort on providing better care and
coordination to improve their outcomes. A majority of heatlhcare utilization
is being consumed by high risk patients due to redundancies, gaps in care,
lack of data sharing. We are addressing those concerns by using insightful and
actionable analytics. So that the financial burden is not felt by the patients
:).

~~~
sitkack
No problem.

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illini123
From one healthcare entrepreneur to another, congrats. It's difficult to clear
that hurdle, especially with the two-sided approach of doctors and patients.
What's been your biggest challenge with patient adherence / engagement?

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tashfeens
We got patients engaged through an app delivery method that integrates a few
key features of messages and engagement. Would be happy to connect with you
and discuss more :)..

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illini123
Would love to hear some of your thoughts, especially since engagement tends to
be an issue we've seen with patient-facing apps after a period of a few
months. We're exploring what levels of engagement tend to work best with
patients, especially as the length between provider visits increases. I'll be
sending you an email and would love to discuss more / share some of our
insights.

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tashfeens
I'm one of the co-founders of CloudMedx. I wanted to thank all the people who
commented. Its certainly very encouraging.

The premise of the company is to help organizations identify the high risk
patients so that their physicians can spend more time and effort on providing
better care and coordination. We are addressing this by using insightful and
actionable data. The physicians and organizations that are using our system
are making efforts to make costs more manageable for patients.

Our algorithms help predict readmission rates, comorbidity, and financial
outcomes using evidence backed data and statistics from renowned institutions.
In the end, we are not looking to remove physicians from the equation, nor are
we replacing EMRs. Rather we are augmenting both with our actionable insights.
When healthcare organizations are managing an entire population health, it
provides opportunities for errors or sometimes even gaps in care. This is
where we are looking to improve the process for physician organizations and
hospital groups.

I hope these comments were useful. And I would love to talk to you
individually. Please write to me and we can further discuss this in detail and
talk about opportunities in this space.

Best, Tashfeen CEO CloudMedx

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salimmadjd
Congrats! As an healthcare entrepreneur I appreciate the hurdles and
challenges of this space. I run AsthmaMD [1]

Our app and hardware is distributed in every 15000 CVS and Walgreens in US.

I'd be happy to meet and discuss any opportunities for partnership.

1: [http://www.AsthmaMD.org](http://www.AsthmaMD.org)

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flowlikeh2o
This is very interesting. As a med student with a programming and CS
background, these efforts are particularly appealing to me. It seems that
(polling healthcare workers, mainly docs) technology (EMR) is more of a
hindrance than a benefit, which to me has always seemed like poor design,
gamblers fallacy + overwhelming costs associated with changing software in a
large hospital. I don't see how this can change unless there are standard
protocols that allow for flexible data entry and analysis. The problem I see
with this new system is that it doesn't (at the surface) appear to offer
anything new, whereas asthamMD is creating objective data and a unique
pipeline between healthcare teams and patient. It seems like we are just
waiting for some software revolution that actually saves doctor time and
improves patient outcomes - rather than generate data for administrators and
bureaucrats at the cost of inefficiency.

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JshWright
That's one ugly EKG in the logo...

