What You Should Know: 

– Healthcare technology leader DrFirst has joined forces with medication adherence company PatchRx to tackle a major healthcare challenge: medication non-adherence. 

– The strategic collaboration aims to improve patient health outcomes and reduce healthcare costs associated with patients not taking their medications as prescribed.

The Problem of Medication Non-Adherence

In the United States alone, medication non-adherence is estimated to contribute to roughly 125,000 deaths and nearly $250 billion in healthcare costs annually. This highlights the critical need for solutions that ensure patients are taking their medications properly.

Comprehensive Patient Medication Adherence

DrFirst and PatchRx combine their respective strengths to provide a more comprehensive picture of patient medication adherence. Here’s how it works:

• DrFirst’s Population Risk Management Solution: This solution offers the most accurate and up-to-date medication history for patients, including medications purchased outside traditional insurance channels.
• PatchRx’s Smart Pill Bottle Technology: PatchRx utilizes a patented, discreet smart cap that fits on any standard pill bottle. This cap gathers medication usage data securely, providing valuable insights for both patients and their care teams.

By providing a more holistic view of medication use, DrFirst and PatchRx empower care providers to deliver more targeted and effective care, ultimately leading to a healthier population and a more efficient healthcare system.

“Timing is everything when it comes to effective treatment of complex conditions,” said G. Cameron Deemer, CEO of DrFirst. “Combining our comprehensive prescription fill data with remote monitoring data from PatchRx will give providers the information they need to identify patients who are off schedule with their medications and to intervene early to provide support and prevent health complications.”

What You Should Know: 

– VieCure, a leading cancer care company, announced today that it’s integrating DrFirst’s e-prescribing and medication management solutions into its clinical decision support system. 

– VieCure is a well-established point-of-care intelligence system specifically designed for community oncologists. Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), patient data, and a comprehensive oncology knowledge base, VieCure generates personalized treatment plans for cancer patients, including medication recommendations.

Expanding Functionality with DrFirst

VieCure is taking its partnership with DrFirst, a health technology pioneer, a step further. They are adding DrFirst’s flagship electronic prescribing platform, Rcopia, to their existing use of EPCS Gold, a controlled substance prescribing solution.

Benefits of Rcopia Integration:

• Improved Workflow Efficiency: Rcopia offers a streamlined workflow for all e-prescribing needs, reducing administrative burden for physicians and clinical staff.
• Enhanced Patient Care: Rcopia provides access to the nation’s most complete medication history data feed, along with allergy and clinical alerts. This allows for better-informed prescribing decisions.
• Price Transparency: Rcopia integrates price transparency tools, enabling informed discussions about medication costs between patients and providers.
• Promoting Medication Adherence: Tools within Rcopia encourage patients to adhere to their medication regimens, leading to potentially better treatment outcomes.
• Comprehensive Pain Management View: Direct access to state prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) gives prescribers a complete picture of a patient’s pain management medications.

“VieCure’s integration of DrFirst’s Rcopia underscores our dedication to enhancing patient safety, optimizing clinical workflows, and satisfying customers,” said Fred Ashbury, PhD, MACE, VieCure co-founder and chief scientific officer. “We look forward to providing our clients with Rcopia’s advanced features for medication history, medication adherence monitoring, electronic prior authorizations, and real-time prescription benefit checks.”

What You Should Know: 

– Emory Healthcare, a comprehensive academic health system in Georgia, is collaborating with healthcare technology pioneer DrFirst to help patients access and adhere to affordable, appropriate prescription medications for their health conditions and ailments. 

– As part of the collaboration, Emory Healthcare will leverage three medication management services offered within Fuzion by DrFirst, a software platform that uses clinical-grade artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline clinical workflows to boost workflow efficiency and medication adherence.

Assist Patients with Medication Adherence and Affordability

Research shows that medication adherence is a primary determinant of success in patient outcomes, while non-adherence can lead to a worsening of diseases and disorders, increased healthcare costs and even death. Key benefits of the collaboration include: 

• Medication history with clinical-grade AI provides the most comprehensive information available and eliminates the need for manual data entry in workflows. This means patients will have less chance of adverse drug events, clinicians will have more complete data at the point of care, and pharmacists will save time on medication reconciliation, which is the process of making sure the list of medications for a patient matches what the patient is actually taking.

• Prescription price transparency allows providers to know patients’ pharmacy benefits, including their out-of-pocket costs, before they leave the doctor’s office or hospital. Knowing these costs up front, with options to switch to an affordable therapeutic equivalent if too costly, saves time and money for patients. This increases medication adherence and means patients are less likely to abandon high-cost prescriptions at the pharmacy.

• Coming soon: Automated messaging will alert patients when their clinician sends an electronic prescription to their pharmacy. The HIPAA-compliant functionality will allow patients to review their prescription and pharmacy information, as well as get relevant educational information and financial savings for their medication.

Patients will automatically benefit from the prescription messaging when they opt-in for communications from Emory. Additionally, patients can choose to opt-out of receiving text messaging alerts.

“The collaboration with DrFirst will put patients first in enhancing medication prescribing and management, from an encounter with the clinician to picking up the prescription at the pharmacy,” says Alistair Erskine, MD, chief information and digital officer for Emory Healthcare. “These clinical solutions will assist our providers with their decisions in providing a higher level of care for our patients.”

Staffing levels continue to plague health systems across all of the clinical and administrative areas, with no real signs of easing in the next several years. Employee retention efforts have never been more critical and leaders are looking to technology to help their staff work smarter. While AI promises to be everything to everyone, the use cases where it is successful are actually quite narrow. However, there has been great progress in automating administrative tasks, particularly in revenue cycle operations, that are producing meaningful productivity improvements and easing the workers’ burden. Collecting every dollar counts and these improvements are making a real difference for revenue cycle teams.

Burnout among providers is at an all-time high causing many to leave the workforce and a healthcare staffing crisis. Despite the promise of technology, to date technology has been more of a contributor to provider burnout than an aid. We must adopt health IT solutions with our providers in mind – implementing technologies that automate and augment repetitive provider tasks, freeing up valuable time for our workforce.

A powerful Master Patient Index (MPI) allows organizations to safely and accurately manage data with fewer resources. Many organizations employ a few to dozens of data stewards to eliminate duplications and resolve record overlays. The number of data stewards required can be reduced drastically through a powerful MPI and referential matching combined with machine learning capabilities.

Health IT is a misnomer. Very little of the health IT industry is focused on improving health; instead it is however focused on collecting codes, rather than innovating workflows that enhance patient care and support providers. The burden that the current state of healthcare IT places on providers directly leads to physician burnout and a reduced capacity to deliver quality patient care.

Imagine if a health system could partner with a tech-enabled virtual care team to offload routine and commoditized tasks. This would open up virtual care capacity for mild urgent and chronic issues, while also freeing up office-based providers to focus on more complex patients. This strategy would also improve clinician burnout by making the primary provider the head of a team that could manage a greater number of people, meaning they could increase their own revenue while ensuring better access for their patients.

Leading hospitals and health systems in North America are using virtual care technology that supports an augmented care environment where a virtual team doesn’t replace, but rather, provides support to the bedside team, enabling health systems to reduce labor costs while liberating their bedside nurses to provide elevated, hands-on patient care. For example, telesitting technology allows health operations staff to raise their patient management abilities from one patient per staff member to up to 16 with virtual monitoring. The solution also enables new Virtual Nursing models which provide health systems with a tool to help address clinician burnout and staffing shortages by efficiently leveraging their most experienced nurses to support bedside care teams and enable more efficient clinical workflows. At Trinity Health, falls declined from as many as 62 in the second quarter of 2020 to as few as 28 in the third quarter of 2021. Not only was patient safety better protected through virtual monitoring, but Trinity Health was also able to reduce its costs by $23M by avoiding non-reimbursed services for those injuries.

Hospitals face the challenge of increasing surgical revenue without adding OR staff or facilities. AI-powered automation in perioperative and inpatient settings, coupled with machine learning and behavioral science, allows systems to more efficiently schedule surgeries and reduce the length of stay. This drives OR growth and relieves overburdened staff of manual tasks.

Burnout threatens clinicians’ effectiveness, which ultimately can harm patients and contribute to costly readmissions. Health IT and intelligent automation that safely reduce the cognitive burden that repetitive and menial tasks place on already overloaded clinicians has never been more needed than it is right now. It also helps ensure certain processes are followed consistently and accurately since growing staff shortages force some hospitals to staff entire units or shifts with temporary or traveling clinicians. Technology can give time back to clinicians so they can focus on their patients – going beyond relieving burnout to reintroducing some of the joy in patient care that has been depleted for so many providers over the last several years.

Whether in a clinical hospital setting or a college campus counseling center, provider burnout is a massive problem touching every corner of care delivery. Fostering wellness in healthcare workers is key to addressing burnout, promoting well-being, and building resiliency among providers. A recent survey by CUPA-HR focusing on employee retention finds that supervisors’ top challenges on campuses are filling empty positions and maintaining staff morale, with almost two-thirds (63%) of supervisors indicating they find filling positions very challenging and over half (54%) facing low staff morale. The integration of medical and behavioral health technology for healthcare providers on college campuses can help relieve many issues, including fatigue and burnout, playing a critical role in fusing healthcare and technology that addresses these critical staffing shortages.

With clinician shortages and an overburdened workforce, healthcare organizations are turning towards digital health strategies to help streamline clinical workflows, boost efficiency, and reduce administrative burdens. Solutions such as remote patient monitoring (RPM) can enable providers to remotely manage patients’ health conditions outside the clinical setting, freeing up vital resources. RPM also allows for improvements in medication adherence, streamlining billing and reimbursement while enabling clinicians to spend more time on patient-facing and revenue-generating opportunities. Although there is no perfect solution for all the growing staffing challenges, digital health technology can help healthcare organizations reduce the burden of routine, manual tasks on clinical staff and deliver greater insights that allow them to focus more on patient care and enhanced outcomes.

In a recent survey, 30% of RNs and LPNs said that making a difference in people’s lives is the most rewarding aspect of the job. Yet, we continue to pile more tedious work on their plates, causing more burnout that results in more clinicians leaving the profession. It’s time to ask nurses to do less. By automating routine and mundane tasks, we can free up nurses to deliver more individualized care, spend time with those patients who need it most, conserve human resources, and reduce costs. Thoughtful automation that lets nurses work at the top of their licenses can have a lasting, material impact on attracting and retaining nursing staff.

With nationwide staffing shortages, budget crunches, patient surges, and the heavy burden upon nurses, physicians, and other healthcare workers during the pandemic era, health systems must make smart, well-informed decisions about staffing, resource use, and system capacity. Like evidence-based clinical decision-making, healthcare operations decision-making needs to be driven by innovative use of hard data and intelligent analytics. Healthcare IT tools, processes, and organizational models like the MDClone ADAMS Center help health systems use their human and physical resources wisely to optimize the care they can deliver to their communities while maximizing the support they give to their professional staff and preventing clinician burnout.

Persistent staffing shortages continue to exacerbate clinician burnout as stress and demands on their time mount. Medical NLP is one technology that holds promise to relieve some of that pressure by improving EHRs for their end-users. By turning the unstructured text in patient documents into succinct, searchable summaries, caregivers can have easier, faster access to the relevant information to patient care and spend less time searching for the ‘needle in the haystack’, reducing their screen time and improving the end-user experience.

Clinician burnout, ‘the great resignation,’ and pandemic-induced capacity issues have turned a glaring spotlight on some fundamental issues plaguing our healthcare system. It’s not a matter of ‘working smarter’ or throwing bodies at the problem, but of empowering our clinicians at the point of care. All too often, technology is a hindrance rather than an enabler. Physicians need immediate access to timely, detailed, and accurate information about a patient to inform therapy options. EHRs alone are not the answer, as they are heavily siloed and built for billing. To make deliberate, informed treatment decisions, clinicians need tools that unify and present relevant clinical data in a way that illuminates trends in real-time.

Most people who go into healthcare or behavioral health services are service-oriented, compassionate people. They’re focused on wanting to use their skills to serve people. Anything getting in the way of that happening creates dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, EMRs can increase burnout by forcing clinicians to spend excessive amounts of time navigating their screens and conducting data entry and administrative work. Telehealth is one of the keys to better work-life balance for providers because the setting gives them more control. It can also mitigate burnout by offering clinicians greater flexibility in how they work, enabling them to work on top of their license, and freeing up time to see more patients, all of which leads to improved job satisfaction.

Angie Franks, CEO of ABOUT Healthcare Inc., which provides access center solutions that enable hospitals and health systems to more effectively manage all aspects of patient transfers and optimize access center operations

The application of technology shouldn’t be limited to one health system or system of care. In fact, its impact can be much more profound when it extends to multiple systems under different ownership. The pandemic is a prime example. With it, we saw an exceptional surge in healthcare demand in a compressed timeframe. Moreover, many of these spikes were tied to geography. Information technology can help health systems load balance capacity across extended regional networks to ensure patient demands for care are met. When the boundaries to care are no longer limited to a specific hospital or health system, healthcare becomes more ubiquitous, and providers can ensure prompt access to care at every stage of the patient journey. And compressing the time to care promotes optimal patient outcomes, which is the ultimate objective.

Prior authorization remains a massive administrative burden for payers and providers, despite ongoing improvement efforts. Patients are frustrated by the care delays that result. Clinicians are experiencing burnout due to the extensive amount of paperwork associated with documenting and conforming to health plan policies. CMS aims to improve prior authorization with a recently proposed rule. It’s a step forward to ease some of the daily administrative workloads. As the conversation continues about reducing health worker burnout, more health plans will start by adopting new technologies to comply with upcoming regulations. Still, many will begin to think bigger and use AI and machine learning in real-time to automate prior authorization decisions – resulting in up to a 60% reduction in administrative work.

In the US alone, an estimated 1.9 million new cases of cancer were diagnosed in 2022, positioning oncology as a key subject of clinical research. Throughout oncology trial development, it is important that stakeholders acknowledge that only patients can fully understand the impact of treatment on their lives. Regulators are now looking beyond clinical indications such as tumor size and delayed disease progression. When evaluating the risks and benefits of treatment, they want to know whether the side effects are tolerable for patients and how these treatments could be improved from the patient’s perspective. Marrying the scientific rigor of clinical research and the human experience captured by patient-reported outcomes (PROs) is essential to the successful development and evaluation of drugs and treatments. 

Regulatory bodies, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), now expect PROs to be included in study protocols, objectives and even labeling claims. These insights help regulators, payers and providers understand treatments through the eyes of the patient, including how symptoms and adverse events impact study medication adherence and quality of life across patient populations. 

However, stakeholders must bear in mind that oncology patients often have limited time and stamina for extensive surveys. Therefore, a patient-centric electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) strategy will effectively capture the patient voice while minimizing patient burden. eCOAs provide patients with the flexibility to complete assessments on their own time from the comfort of their own homes, via a familiar device. This approach amplifies the patient voice across virtual and hybrid clinical trial models, equipping patients and researchers with a simple way to record and exchange data. 

The FDA has identified 5 core aspects of the patient experience to consider throughout the development of an eCOA:

1. Disease-related symptoms

When collecting patient responses surrounding the severity of common symptoms for oncology-related drugs, the FDA recommends using numeric or verbal (none, mild, moderate, severe) rating scales. If the assessment is intended to quantify occurrence, a frequency scale (never, rarely, daily, etc.) may also be considered. 

2. Symptomatic adverse events

To mitigate patient burden, sponsors should define a concise set of the most relevant symptomatic adverse events likely to occur and capture PRO data in both treatment and control arms. 

3. An overall side effect impact summary

To properly evaluate tolerability, regulators need to understand the overall impact of side effects on a patient’s life. For instance, extreme fatigue preventing a patient from leaving their home is a valuable insight to capture.  

4. Physical function

Regulators, payers and providers alike need the full picture when it comes to how treatment impacts patient mobility and other physical functions. The FDA recommends using a scale to measure levels of ability with clearly defined concepts. 

5. Role function

Perhaps one of the most critical aspects of the patient experience to collect is the overall impact of a treatment on a patient’s ability to work and carry on with daily activities. The European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer QLQ-C30 role function scale is one of the most commonly used assessments to capture this data. 

While each of these categories enriches regulatory submissions, they must be carefully chosen with the patient burden in mind. In a perfect world, sponsors would create assessments that capture many or all of these insights in a single tool to make the most of each patient’s time. 

In addition to these valuable assessment components outlined by the FDA, there are also several overall best practices for a patient-centric eCOA strategy:

1. Think outside the clinic

The pandemic propelled the clinical research industry to dramatically accelerate its approach to decentralization. While many COVID-19 restrictions have since been lifted, sponsors have continued to leverage technology solutions such as eCOAs to support virtual and hybrid clinical trials. 

Whether a trial is conducted remotely or on-site, eCOA data collection eases both the patient and clinician burden. Patients can complete assessments electronically between visits or as part of a remote visit when they are too ill to travel to the site, while clinicians have the flexibility to use an eCOA to collect appropriate Clinician Reported Outcomes via telemedicine. The same eCOA technology can also be leveraged to capture Patient Reported Outcomes and Clinician Reported Outcomes during on-site visits. 

2. Establish a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) approach

Another positive outcome of the pandemic was the widespread adoption of the BYOD approach in the clinical research space. This method allows patients to access all trial communications and alerts on their own devices, eliminating the time and cost of securing devices for each patient and ultimately accelerating study startup. 

Research also indicates that patients are highly receptive to using their own personal devices for a clinical trial. Given that trial adherence depends on ease of use for participants, empowering patients to use devices that are familiar to them is a great way to maximize retention. 

3. Prioritize ease of use

Another excellent way to increase trial retention is to cater the solution design itself to patient needs. For example, sick patients suffering from disease symptoms and treatment effects may require breaks while completing their eCOA assessments. Sponsors can proactively address this challenge by creating assessment windows that afford patients ample time for completion. Additionally, the eCOA solution design can be designed to accommodate breaks during and in between assessments as appropriate. 

4. Integrate caregiver assistance options

For oncology patients especially, completing an assessment can quickly become too taxing for a variety of reasons, including disease progression, fatigue and treatment side effects. To alleviate this burden, sponsors can establish caregiver support options to assist the patient with inputting their data into the device. With some solutions, it is even possible to offer a caregiver log-in feature to ensure transparency, security and data attribution upon point of data entry.

5. Patients as research partners 

In recent years, the clinical research industry has experienced a seismic shift toward patient-centricity. Patients are now viewed as collaborative partners in the research process and in their own care journeys. When studies are designed to prioritize both scientific rigor and the patient voice, sponsors maximize retention, enhance the patient experience and ultimately set the stage for the development of breakthrough oncology treatments. 

About Melissa Mooney

Melissa Mooney has over 17 years of experience in the development of IVQIA eCOA solutions for use in clinical trials. Melissa’s area of expertise is eCOA solution design where she has supported clients and eCOA vendors in developing robust and usable eCOA software solutions that meet eCOA protocol requirements. She also brings a plethora of experience in eCOA requirement gathering, leading eCOA User Acceptance testing, eCOA data management, and BD support.

What You Should Know:

– Health Gorilla, a Health Information Network (HIN) and leading interoperability platform launches Pharmacy Data, a new product enabling seamless access to complete medication history data from most major pharmacies.

– Pharmacy Data is powered by a new partnership with DrFirst and its MedHx Population Risk Management (PRM) solution to provide deduplicated medication history from local and national data sources, including prescribing data, pharmacy dispensing data, and pharmacy benefits manager claims.

Providing Healthcare Organizations With Seamless Access to Patients’ Complete Medication History Data

Research has shown that medication non-adherence causes 10 percent of all hospitalizations, and adverse drug events result in 1.3 million annual emergency department visits. High out-of-pocket costs, concerns about side effects, procrastination, and other factors lead patients to abandon up to 30 percent of new prescriptions.

Access to pharmacy and prescribing information reduces the data collection burden for healthcare organizations and addresses critical gaps in electronic health record (EHR) data – resulting in a more holistic view of patients and enabling better care. With this information, providers are empowered to address gaps in care, improve medication adherence, reduce readmissions and emergency room visits, prioritize at-risk patients, and perform medication reconciliation.

“It may seem obvious that patients’ medication records should be easily accessible to their healthcare providers,” said G. Cameron Deemer, CEO of DrFirst. “But that’s often not the case. In fact, gathering clinical data such as medication history can be a tremendously manual and time-consuming process. Our new partnership with Health Gorilla will ease this process for clinicians by providing complete and accurate data to timely inform healthcare decisions and care management.”

MedHx PRM is based on DrFirst’s award-winning MedHx, which streamlines medication reconciliation workflows by providing the most accurate and clinically actionable medication history for individual patients at hospital admission and in the emergency department. MedHx PRM extends the solution from individuals to populations of patients.

Through this partnership, healthcare providers that use Health Gorilla’s medical record querying engine Patient360 can gain access to complete medication histories for each patient to improve medication management and patient outcomes. Using a FHIR-based API or intuitive web application, care teams can access actionable, longitudinal pharmacy data for their patients, resulting in more informed care decisions.

Health Gorilla’s solution will surface key pharmacy data such as prescription fill, refill, renewal, and prescriber and pharmacy NPI for treatment purposes. Through an SFTP process, medication history will be retrieved, ingested, and de-duplicated, enabling streamlined workflows and operational efficiency.

Interoperability remains the Holy Grail in healthcare, the goal to which all organizations aspire. The urgency to remove silos and improve communication between various systems and organizations is paramount, as it promises to lead to greater efficiency and improved outcomes while at the same time lowering costs – and not a moment too soon, given the fact that the world’s population is aging and there is a growing shortage of clinicians.

More and more, blockchain – a secure, decentralized digital ledger most often associated with cryptocurrency – is being viewed as a pathway toward achieving interoperability, or building bridges between “data islands” – i.e., the organizations and systems where patient data might be stored (but not shared).

That’s how they were described by Sriram Bharadwaj, vice president of digital innovation and applications at Franciscan Health, a Midwestern organization, on the website Health IT Analytics. More often labeled data silos, the frequent inability to share information between them leaves clinicians in a position where they do not always have a full picture of a patient’s medical history, and thus unable to provide the best care. Blockchain can address this issue, and help create unified patient records (UPRs).

Additionally, wider availability of information would go a long way toward compiling population health metrics, a crucial element in establishing health policy and programs.

Finally, blockchain is a means of boosting cybersecurity and overcoming issues in areas such as supply-chain management, data management and transfer and medication adherence. 

From a clinician’s standpoint, blockchain makes information accessible in real-time, which goes a long way toward eliminating delays in care delivery and the duplication of services, improving patient outcomes while also curtailing waste. Duplicate healthcare services alone – much of it due to difficulty or inability to access test results or procedures – leads to $200 billion in needless spending every year. 

Beyond that, blockchain ensures clinician-patient confidentiality.

Small wonder, then, that the exploration of blockchain in the healthcare sector is “very widespread,” as Sean Manion, chief scientific officer for the blockchain company Equideam Health, told Becker’s Hospital Review in a July 2022 interview. That’s especially true among leading pharmaceutical companies and payer-provider organizations, he added.

Adoption has been much slower than in the fintech space, owing to greater regulatory obstacles and increased risk aversion – the latter not without reason. As Manion put it: “If you mess up something with regard to fintech, money can be lost. But if you mess up something in healthcare, people can die.”

The healthcare sector has traditionally been slow to innovate, but the pandemic and accompanying surge in patients accelerated digital transformation by organizations around the globe. More and more of these facilities adopted state-of-the-art technology, including blockchain, to meet the needs of their patients, while at the same time reducing burdens on staff.

That is only expected to continue. Allied Market Research forecasts that the market for blockchain technology in healthcare, which stood at just over $531 million in 2021, will mushroom to $16.3 billion by 2031, a robust compound annual growth rate of 40.8 percent. Allied further notes that while the largest market share by application was in supply-chain management, there will be a shift over the next decade toward data exchange and interoperability.

Giang Tran, founding director of akaChain at FPT Software, told the website Information Age that blockchain can indeed “solve the problem” of interoperability. As he put it: 

“To facilitate better health outcomes for patients, sharing medical records amongst different health systems is becoming popular. … Through the joint effort of establishing an industry standard, blockchain can help preserve privacy, as well as facilitate the joint coordination amongst health systems at an affordable cost, hence, improving health outcomes.”

Put simply, there are those who compare blockchain to a highly encrypted digital spreadsheet that can be shared across several computers. Any time any of these parties attempts to make a change, it must be approved by all the others in order for information to be added in the form of a new block. That means data will be more secure, a vital consideration in light of the fact that healthcare cybersecurity breaches reached an all-time high in 2021. They impacted 45 million people, according to a report by the cybersecurity company Critical Insights, 11 million more than the year before.

Moreover, there were 692 large data breaches (i.e., those impacting 500 or more records) between July 2021 and June 2022, according to the HIPAA Journal. Blockchain’s decentralized nature makes such cybercrime far more difficult, and creates a level of trust that is not available via other technological means.

Blockchain could also make the transfer of a patient’s data, whether from an organization to the consumer or to a place of the patient’s choosing, more efficient and safe. Such transfers were mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act, which was passed by the U.S. Congress in 2016 and prohibits organizations from inhibiting the flow of such data, which is most often included in electronic health records (EHRs). 

Blockchain also makes it possible to identify, verify and track medications at every stage of the supply chain. That could go a long way toward stopping the flow of counterfeit drugs, which cost pharmaceutical companies as much as $200 billion a year, while also ensuring medications’ quality and effectiveness and, ultimately, the safety of the consumer.

The drug’s point of origin is marked in the ledger, and at each step in the supply chain data is added – notably who handled the medication and where they did so. Transparency is, as a result, ensured.

Then there is the issue of medication adherence. It is estimated that 75 percent of Americans do not take their medications as prescribed, which leads to roughly $300 billion in unnecessary expenditures each year, including $100 billion in unnecessary hospitalizations. Blockchain-based platforms like MyPCR make it possible to track and verify patients’ usage.

It is important to note that there are barriers to widespread adoption of blockchain in the healthcare sector, the first of which was mentioned earlier – the hesitance to adopt new technologies. There is also a dearth of vendors who deal in blockchain. But the advantages are as obvious as they are numerous. In an age where the accent is on efficiency and ensuring the best possible outcomes, few technologies show more promise.

About Dr. Rekha Bhandari

Dr. Rekha Bhandari is Chief Medical Officer for the Allure Group, a coalition of six New York City-based eldercare facilities. Dr. Bhandari is board certified in internal medicine, geriatrics and palliative medicine. Since 2001, Dr. Bhandari has served as the vice president at Glenridge Medical Associates, a medical group of physicians in Ridgewood, Queens, providing internal medicine, family medicine and geriatric services. Dr. Bhandari is a member of several medical societies such as American College of Physicians, American Geriatrics Society, Center of Advanced Palliative Care and American Association of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

What You Should Know:

– Arrive Health, a provider of real-time benefit tools and integrated solutions that improve patient affordability, today announced the acquisition of a suite of innovative patient engagement and automation technologies developed by UPMC Enterprises and the UPMC Pharmacy Network.

– The acquisition adds AI-driven virtual assistant technology and a robust patient management system to its affordability offerings, expanding support for more than 200 million patients on their journey to fill and refill their medications.

– Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. In addition, UPMC has invested in Arrive Health as a part of this transaction.

UPMC Enterprises Pharmacy Technology Background

UPMC Enterprises and UPMC pharmacy experts have developed and deployed technology to support medication adherence. The AI virtual assistant and integrated workflow tools allow care teams to prioritize patients who are at risk of skipping their medications and drive continuous engagement through automated conversation flows. With these tools, UPMC has demonstrated meaningful results, including a 200% improvement in refill-rate, a 32% reduction in 7-day readmissions, and the elimination of thousands of pharmacy calls per month.

UPMC Pharmacy Integration Benefits for Arrive Health

Arrive Health has built the industry’s leading cost and coverage network, delivering patient-specific data from over 200 million insured members into the prescribing workflows of over 300,000 providers. With the integration of the UPMC pharmacy technology, Arrive Health will further support pharmacy teams and the patients they serve by combining automated patient access resources with the power of consumer-facing real-time benefit checks.

What You Should Know:

– CIMSS has acquired RxCompli, a medication adherence provider of a personalized caregiver sensor/app that alerts patients to take their medications as prescribed.

– The acquisition offers a new technology platform to physicians that ensures their patients take the right medication at the right time. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Non-Adherence of Medication is a Growing Problem in the USA

50% of patients do not take medications as prescribed, resulting in $100 billion of unnecessary spending and 125,000 lives lost each year, according to Duke Health. Therefore, this acquisition will help prolong lives and lower costs for the patient.

How RxCOMPLi Works

Patients take the right medication and at the right time with the help of our sensors, SMART app, and reporting. RxCompli sensors stick on all kinds of containers (Pill Bottle, Pill Box, Inhaler, Injectables). The sensor sends out smart reminders using a combination of LED and buzzer and automatically records medication intakes. It flags overuse and underuse of medications and keeps a tab on medication adherence and alerts for timely refills. Once programmed, the sensor works independently of smartphones with a battery life of nine months.

“With the acquisition of RxCompli, we can offer easily deployable technology to physicians, like the app and cloud integration, so they can be sure that their patients are taking the right medication at the right time,” says Dr. Paramjit “Romi” Chopra, MD and CEO of CIMSS. “Each physician and physician group we work with is at the center of our universe, and we believe in supporting them from beginning to end. By acquiring RxCompli, we can provide them with more support than ever before.”

Currently, some 22 states have enacted prescription drug transparency laws that require entities across the drug supply chain to report pricing information to state officials. Designed to shed light on the true cost of drugs and to ensure that consumers and insurers aren’t being gouged, drug pricing transparency laws seek to level the playing field by delivering greater visibility into drug costs. And given the fact that prescription drug prices continue to increase, the topic of drug price management is likely to continue to capture the attention of the media and policymakers at the state level, given the current lack of overriding federal regulation.

For example, the AARP Rx Price Watch Report for 2021 revealed that retail prices for brand-name prescription drugs are consistently increasing at a faster pace than that general inflation. These cost increases have a negative effect on patients and overall drug compliance because people tend to avoid taking medications as prescribed when the cost gets too high. This trend is also confirmed by a 2021 GoodRx survey around medication adherence and drug cost, which shows that 18.7% of adults have delayed refilling a prescription after running out, and 16.4% of people ration medication to extend their prescriptions.

What’s Next for Drug Pricing

As drug prices become a broader concern, it becomes even more likely that there will be additional legislative and regulatory activity around drug pricing in the coming months and years. In the absence of comprehensive federal legislation, many states are taking on drug pricing management themselves, and within the next few years, up to 30 states are expected to adopt price transparency regulations. With this, we can expect that each state will have its own set of unique reporting requirements around pricing transparency.

These coming requirements for greater transparency and visibility into drug pricing will help legislators, regulators and the public better understand price increases and help control costs. Price transparency mandates typically require companies to generate reports based on “triggering events,” which include wholesale acquisition cost (WAC) increases and other events that include the release of annual price lists and pricing for new drugs, as well as the rollout of newly acquired products, as well as new drug applications.

However, the requirements for reporting and documentation can vary significantly from state to state, including formats and timing. Different periods of time around reporting on WAC price increases can vary from 30 to 60 days, or reports may be required on a quarterly basis.

Managing these requirements across a large and potentially growing number of states is, of course, challenging for pharmaceutical manufacturing companies. For each state, these firms must generate and deliver mandated reports, correctly formatted and on the correct timetable. Reporting volumes can vary significantly based on drug types and the nature of a given firm’s price increases, and some states may demand different calculations and/or documentation from companies. Accurate reporting also turns on cross-departmental collaboration that can include marketing, research and development, IT, and finance stakeholders from across the organization.

Multiplying these requirements across various states and the numerous drugs in the market illuminates the obvious complexity and show how difficult staying in compliance can be. Even worse for drug manufacturers, there can be substantial financial penalties for non-compliance, with potential fines running into the millions of dollars in some large states. 

What Can Pharmaceutical Companies Do to Stay Compliant?

This increasing pressure means that pharma companies must respond to and meet reporting requirements with solutions that go far beyond labor-intensive, manual processes such as using spreadsheets and maintaining multiple different report templates.

Some companies have addressed this pain point by employing outside experts, in the form of consultants and law firms, to manage compliance efforts. While this can be an effective short-term solution, these consulting organizations typically are not domain experts with core competencies in the drug and pharma space. Additionally, these services can have a substantial price tag for pharma manufacturers, adding further to the financial burdens of compliance. This approach also typically fails to integrate technology to handle the most labor-intensive aspects of compliance, like maintaining document repositories or leveraging automation for tasks like workflow-based approvals.

State Price Transparency Software Solutions

As a result, pharma manufacturers are looking to software vendors to fill the void. Today’s state price transparency management (SPTM) tools can help ease the reporting burden and effectively operationalize these mandates. Modern, cloud-based solutions can be configured to maintain repositories of state-specific reports, filing formats, and critical dates and deadlines. Legislation repositories can also store rules changes and allow for updates as rule changes occur. 

Pharma companies can also rely on automation capabilities within SPTM software to route tasks and approvals across an organization, bringing departments together for collaboration when and where needed. Automation also enables on-demand report generation based on triggering events, which helps user organizations ensure that filings are timely. Governance capabilities within these systems are designed to track and record reporting activity to provide a clear audit trail for regulators should that documentation be needed. What’s more, analytics capabilities within these systems allow for the exploration of what-if scenarios relating to downstream pricing impacts, so companies can plan for future events.

The challenges associated with state-based price transparency rules will continue to be a moving target for pharmaceutical and biotech companies for many years to come. As a result, companies should look to develop agile strategies around responding to these mandates and embrace technology and services – and collaboration between business and IT – as the foundation of their approach. Doing so will enable companies to proactively respond to changes in specific laws on a state-by-state basis, avoid penalties, and maximize revenues. Given the scope and scale of the challenge, there is really no other way for companies to deal with today’s state mandates and plan for the future.

About Kyle Forcier
Kyle Forcier is a senior director of Life Sciences Product Marketing for Model N. For more than 15 years, Forcier has focused his time in the life sciences space helping manufacturers increase their revenue, maintain compliance, and bring innovative ideas to the marketplace. He currently helps shape Model N’s strategic direction focusing on bringing complex, valuable solutions to the market to solve longstanding operational challenges within the medtech industry.

What You Should Know:

– Cureatr and Unite Us are teaming up to launch a comprehensive health equity program to support patients experiencing transitions of care. The partnership with Unite Us has empowered Cureatr to more holistically care for patients and evolve the role of Cureatr’s certified community health workers (CHWs).

– In addition to providing services that address medication access issues, the new health equity program allows CHWs to screen patients for social determinants of health (SDoH) insecurities related to food, transportation, housing, and health literacy and connect them to community resources in their area. The Unite Us closed-loop referral system streamlines service delivery across multiple regions to effectively address social needs and improve lives.

Pilot Health Equity Program & Outcomes

Cureatr initially launched its pilot health equity program with Unite Us in two state networks (Unite New York and Unite Missouri) after an introduction from a Missouri-based nonprofit attending a community information meeting. In Missouri, the network is built in partnership with CyncHealth, Freeman Health, Mercy, the United Way of Greater St. Louis, and United Healthcare, and in New York, the network is built in partnership with Healthy Alliance, AHI, and the Institute for Veterans and Military Families. Partners in both states are connected through Unite Us’ shared technology platform, enabling them to send and receive secure, electronic referrals, address people’s social needs, and improve community health.

After just one month of operation, the program successfully “closed the loop” for 83 percent of patients. The estimated value of each closed loop was about $1,000 of social assistance per patient. The impressive, life-changing results have motivated Cureatr to bring this transformative program to all patients the company serves in New York, Missouri, Ohio, Arizona, and North Carolina.

As part of its broader medication management services, Cureatr pharmacists are adept at helping patients better access medications and improve medication adherence. But patients’ social drivers, such as food and housing insecurities or lack of transportation to get to medical appointments, add complexities that complicate delivering medication management services.

What You Should Know:

– Aspen RxHealth recently announced the launch of Alliance by Aspen RxHealth, a clinical pharmacy services model serving payers across the nation. 

– For the first time, the new model will allow health plans’ in-house pharmacy teams to utilize Aspen RxHealth’s proprietary platform and support services to complete pharmacy consultations for their member or patient populations—eliminating the need for a sizable investment to create a homegrown technology platform, the operational infrastructure to support it, and reducing operational risk and burden placed on payers.

Increasing Consumer Access to Pharmacy Services

Aspen RxHealth provides clinical pharmacy services to health plans, strategic partners, provider groups, and life sciences organizations via a mobile-based technology platform that intelligently matches pharmacists with patients to enrich the patient-pharmacist experience, drive medication adherence, and overall health outcomes.

This new care delivery model is revolutionary in its ability to allow for flexibility and contingency planning. Should a client’s capacity to complete consultations be insufficient, Aspen RxHealth’s gig-economy community of over 7,000 pharmacists is standing by, able to augment efforts and ensure all members receive the care they need without forsaking their experience or outcomes. By utilizing the mobile application and operational infrastructure, a health plan can deliver clinical consultations in-house, while all pre-consultation and post-consultation work including eligibility determination, telephony platform maintenance, queue management, direct mail capabilities, member documentation and quality-related reporting are entirely managed by Aspen RxHealth.

“We’re already seeing significant market interest in the innovative delivery model. Clients understand the burdens of building a complicated technology stack from the ground up and in some instances prefer to deploy their in-house pharmacy teams to conduct member outreach – and now they can,” said Clayton Walberg, chief commercial officer, Aspen RxHealth. “The peace of mind knowing that you have the largest community of pharmacists at the ready is one of the resounding reasons Alliance by Aspen RxHealth is already taking off. We understand the plight of health plans and are here to act as a true extension of their teams, when they need us.”

“This new offering has the potential to address the prevalence of complex care needs and change the trajectory of healthcare as we know it today,” said David Medvedeff, CEO and co-founder, Aspen RxHealth. “Granting more patients access to pharmacists – our most highly trained and educated medication experts – when needed, can prevent unnecessary complications and save lives.”

Alliance by Aspen RxHealth is the latest in the series of innovations pioneered by the nation’s gig-economy pharmacy platform leader. Aspen RxHealth offers a full suite of clinical pharmacy solutions including comprehensive medication management, medication adherence, transitions of care, member education, condition management and specialty medication management. By offering new ways for pharmacists to utilize their licenses to their fullest potential, Aspen RxHealth is creating an infrastructure that keeps patients healthier, reduces costs and increases satisfaction among clinicians.

What You Should Know:

– MedMinder, a provider of connected pharmacy care for polypharmacy and senior patients, announced it has closed an additional $35 M in funding through a credit facility with SWK Holdings Corporation and additional investment from existing equity partner, Accelmed Partners.

– The additional funding will allow MedMinder to further its mission of enabling patients to age at home by increasing its capacity to meet growing demand, offering its holistic pharmacy services nationally, and building innovative virtual care, clinical, and technological capabilities.

Improving Accessibility and Quality of Home Care

MedMinder is the leading connected pharmacy care solution for seniors and polypharmacy patients. Founded in 2007, MedMinder currently employs over 180 team members and is a recognized ultra-high-growth pharmacy care organization. MedMinder’s touchscreen-enabled, automatic pill dispenser is the first device on the market capable of offering medications from its integrated pharmacy directly to patients in pre-organized daily trays for the entire month.

MedMinder is trusted by thousands of polypharmacy and seniors – and their caregivers – to help manage their care at home. MedMinder’s combination of an innovative, connected pill dispenser; convenient pharmacy care via pre-sorted medication trays; personalized clinical care; and robust analytic capabilities are purposefully designed to meet the unique needs of aging patients. Through extensive relationships with health plans, home health agencies, provider organizations, long-term care facilities and advocacy groups, MedMinder improves medication adherence, reduces adverse health outcomes, lowers the overall cost of care, and extends opportunities for aging at home.

“We are honored to establish a relationship with SWK and expand our relationship with Accelmed. Both partners are industry leaders who will be instrumental in helping us achieve our mission,” said Mike Edwards, Chief Executive Officer of MedMinder. “The demand for our services from patients and payers has never been greater. This additional investment will allow MedMinder to more deeply impact the lives of polypharmacy and senior patients nationally.”

What You Should Know:

– Fullscript, the leading care delivery platform for personalized treatment planning, ongoing wellness support and education, and high-quality supplements released a report about behavioral change in integrative medicine as part of its mission to change how health is prescribed and help people get better. The findings indicated that while behavior or lifestyle change is challenging,

– The findings indicated that while behavior or lifestyle change is challenging, there are clear benefits to adopting new health behaviors and evidence-based strategies that practitioners can use to support their patients.

Understanding Behavioural Change Better to Improve Patient Care

Fullscript is a powerful care delivery platform for integrative medicine practitioners offering access to personalized treatment planning, ongoing wellness education, and healthcare’s best supplements and wellness products. With over a decade of development and use by more than 70,000 healthcare professionals serving over 5 million patients, Fullscript delivers the scale, technology, and expertise to support the growth of integrative medicine and the delivery of high-quality care.

The comprehensive report by Fullscript, which was produced internally by a team of Fullscript medical researchers, writers, and health professionals, and peer-reviewed by the Institute for Natural Medicine, included a literature review and a large patient survey. The purpose was to support integrative practitioners in making treatment recommendations by identifying barriers and strategies that influence change and helping patients adhere to health-promoting behaviors.

The key findings from the report are illustrated as follows:

1 There are clear benefits to adopting multiple health behaviors, but long-term adherence to these behaviors remains a challenge. Integrative medicine is well poised to address these challenges through regular engagement, by increasing motivation, and by incorporating lifestyle-based support.

2. Lifestyle-based behaviors and treatments (e.g., diet, exercise, mindfulness/sleep, etc.) are harder to follow than other behaviors. Barriers influence BC success to different degrees and vary across practitioner types, pointing to the value of cross-modality collaboration.

3. The most common barriers to adherence and BC for patients working with integrative practitioners are cost, time, and motivation. Practitioners may use tools such as motivational interviewing or other measurement tools such as the URICA to determine which barriers are most impactful to a patient or the areas where they may need extra support (e.g., readiness to change, feeling empowered, etc.).

4. The most important strategies to facilitate BC for patients working with integrative practitioners are education and treatment plan simplification; receiving practitioner monitoring and feedback; and setting up goals, plans, and commitments. However, some strategies may be more effective for specific behaviors.

5. Patients working with integrative practitioners tend to indicate their willingness to use technology to support their BC journeys. The use of evidence-based technologies may be a cost-effective means for practitioners to deliver successful BC support.

Why Integrative Medicine Needs Behavioural Change

As integrative medicine has a foundation in lifestyle medicine (in contrast to conventional medicine), it has been proposed that incorporating integrative approaches into conventional care may be beneficial for BC. Approximately 45% of respondents to a survey including 10,201 individuals indicated that engaging with complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) modalities motivated them to start at least one new healthy behavior. Specifically, they reported greater inspiration for exercise (35%), healthier food choices (31%), organic food consumption (17%), smoking reduction or cessation (17%), and reduction or elimination of alcohol intake (9%). Figure 4 provides the breakdown of motivation for new health behaviors based on engagement with select CAM modalities.

“Integrative medicine is well poised to address these challenges through regular engagement, by increasing motivation, and by incorporating lifestyle-based support,” said Dr. Christopher Knee, ND, MSc, medical education and research manager, integrative medical advisory team at Fullscript. “Those lifestyle-based behaviors include nutrition, exercise, mindfulness, and sleep.”

Barriers to Adherence and Behavioural Change in an Integrative Setting

The following list provides specific examples of recurring barriers and facilitators for the uptake and maintenance of healthy behaviors for healthy aging in middle-aged adults:

– Environmental restrictions (e.g., distance, location, safety)

– Financial cost

– Firmly established attitudes and behaviors

– Lack of access (e.g., transport, facilities, resources)

– Lack of knowledge

– Lack of time (e.g., due to life responsibilities)

– Low socioeconomic status (Kelly 2016)

The Role of Technology for Behavioural Change in an Integrative Setting

Whereas traditional BC interventions have been mainly conducted face-to-face, allowing observation of a patient’s physical cues and the benefits of in-person social dynamics, technological interventions may provide other benefits. These benefits include accessibility, cost efficiency, and elimination of barriers that prevent patients from disengaging as a result of the need to be physically present for a consultation or intervention.

In the survey led by Fullscript, it was identified that 27% of the patients had indicated that they would be extremely likely to turn to technological-based tools for BC support, followed by 55% who said that they would be “somewhat likely”, whereas 18% indicated that they would not be likely at all. It was also found that patients might be more willing to use technology to support BC when they are at least preparing to change or when perceiving that change may require significant effort.

Technological Considerations for Practitioners

The report highlights certain considerations for practitioners looking to use technology-based tools for incorporating Behavioral Change in integrated medicine. They are listed as follows:

1. Assessing the Quality of Technology: Practitioners should scope out available platforms through app stores and professional associations. Furthermore, they should create a shortlist within the specific health domain (eg, medication adherence), and evaluate the shortlist using the adapted MARs, whilst also creating criteria to include in the recommendations

2. Features Designed for Patient Engagement: The second consideration when selecting a technological platform is understanding how engaging the platform is. One of the most important predictors of a patient’s willingness to adopt and use technology to support their BC journeys is the extent to which the digital platform can engage the patient in its supportive interventions. The frequency of logins, time spent in the platform, and the amount or type of content/ actions used by the patient in the platform are examples of key objective engagement indicators.

3. Effectiveness of Digital Interventions: While many reviews capture the frequencies of BC strategies found in digital interventions and may report on the success rate of interventions containing specific techniques (vs. no change), they do not often determine the relative efficacy of these techniques across various behaviors. Overall, digital interventions have been shown to improve diet, physical activity, obesity, tobacco, and alcohol use, particularly within six months, but also for up to one year, (Afshin 2016) typically providing small positive effects on change.

What You Should Know:

– Cedars-Sinai Accelerator, today announced its eighth accelerator class of ten new digital health startups.

– From digital health mental health services to wearable devices to manage chronic asthma, these innovative healthcare-focused startups are working to transform health and healthcare delivery as part of the Los Angeles-based accelerator program.

Cedars-Sinai Accelerator Overview

During the three-month term, company representatives collaborate with doctors, researchers and administrators to understand how their products and solutions work in a real-world environment to benefit patients, clinicians and hospitals. Each business accepted into the program will receive a $100,000 investment from Cedars-Sinai. At the conclusion of the three-month program, company leaders will share their progress with an audience of investors, mentors, potential customers and members of the news media at a Demo Day.

“Promising new technologies and advances in the digital space can drive positive change in how healthcare is experienced,” said James Laur, JD, vice president of Intellectual Property and managing director of Cedars-Sinai Technology Ventures, and one of the founders of the accelerator. “As one of the nation’s top-ranked hospitals, Cedars-Sinai recognizes the importance of innovation. Bringing this new class of companies into the accelerator allows us to partner with entrepreneurs who are working on problems that we are trying to solve as a healthcare provider.”

Here is a look at the eight class of Cedars-Sinai Accelerator’s 10 digital health startups:

Acolyte Health-Using voice and face recognition software, Acolyte creates tailored video content, including preventive healthcare, pre- and post-visit education, reminders and more, which is delivered securely to patients on the device of their choice. Patients using the interactive videos can take immediate action, resulting in better outcomes, like reduced readmissions, increased medication adherence and increased patient satisfaction.

Aevice Health-Aevice Health has created an artificial intelligence-powered wearable device that continuously monitors key biomarkers of respiratory diseases like asthma. Chronic diseases like asthma account for 25% of emergency department visits, mainly due to patients’ lack of objective data to help them assess disease progression at home. With the device, the company’s goal is to empower patients to manage their condition, optimizing the affordability of healthcare and hospital resources.

Aidin-Aidin has created a digital healthcare workflow platform that helps to streamline and structure hospital workflows, helping case managers accomplish daily tasks faster and transition patients to trusted care providers. The company aims to help reduce patients’ length of stay, manage staff assignments and address delays in real time.

Candlelit Therapy Inc.-Candlelit Therapy Inc. is a digital mental health provider for underserved new and expectant parents at risk of perinatal mood and anxiety conditions. Candlelit Therapy’s perinatal mental health service is rooted in cultural competency, celebrates Black identity and offers an easy way to access culturally based treatment while helping obstetricians, nurse midwives and birth workers proactively screen and manage life-threatening conditions in a more culturally appropriate and affirming way.

GattaCo-GattaCo’s A-PON Plasma Separator eliminates the need for bulky equipment currently needed for most blood tests. The A-PON is a self-collection device that uses fingerstick blood to produce lab-quality liquid plasma. Plasma is the most widely used sample type in clinical lab testing to detect and monitor medical conditions, diseases or therapy responses.

HealthLeap Inc.-HealthLeap Inc. offers an artificial intelligence-enabled clinical nutrition app, NutriLeap, that helps healthcare professionals prevent and treat malnutrition. The app helps hospital dietitians make precise nutritional calculations and provides recommendations based on the most up-to-date clinical guidelines.

Luminare-Luminare has created a digital platform that aims to accelerate the speed of sepsis detection in order to save lives, reduce alert fatigue, and increase revenue through improved clinical documentation.

Shift-Shift provides learner-focused nurse training through virtual reality, real-time adjustments and insight. The company’s growing library focuses on advancing health equity, nurse onboarding, infection prevention, and mandatory trainings. Female-founded ShifBias aims to reduce the amount of time, money and staff resources needed for nurse training and give nurses the tools to improve patient outcomes.

Siimee-Siimee has created a recruiting platform that directly connects job seekers and employers by creating a one-to-one matching experience, highlighting users’ backgrounds and interests to opportunities, while educating employers with the aim of eliminating early biases that historically occur in the recruiting process.

Syntho-Syntho provides artificial intelligence-based privacy-enhancing technology to generate anonymous synthetic data points. These data points are then used by medical researchers in a variety of research projects.