Hospital communication goes mobile

MOBILE DEVICE: Care Thread has a secure way for surgeons and nurses to coordinate patient care on their phones and through social media, instead of outdated pagers, says President Nick Adams, above left. Also pictured is Chief Technology Officer Andrew Shearer. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
MOBILE DEVICE: Care Thread has a secure way for surgeons and nurses to coordinate patient care on their phones and through social media, instead of outdated pagers, says President Nick Adams, above left. Also pictured is Chief Technology Officer Andrew Shearer. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

It’s 2014 and in hospitals across the country, doctors are still using pagers.While the rest of the world has moved on to mobile phones with messaging apps and data sharing through social media, many hospitals still require on-call employees to walk around with technology from the 1990s.
It’s not as if health care providers have less of a need to send, receive and access information than other professions. In fact, the collaborative, 24-hour, data-hungry nature of medicine requires greater mobile communication than most professions.
So why can’t surgeons and nurses coordinate patient care on their phones?
The issue, of course, is security, says Nick Adams, president of Care Thread, a Providence company trying to change how the medical profession communicates.
“If we could just use Facebook to share patient records, that would be great, but hospitals have to protect patient privacy and comply with the [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act],” Adams said. “We are a secure social network, connecting the care team to each other, so they can communicate and bring the patient into the conversation.” Founded by three friends from Wisconsin, Care Thread has been working to bring their mobile health-records app to the health care industry for three years, including time at Providence’s Betaspring startup accelerator in 2012.
It hasn’t been easy finding a niche between the giants in the health care and mobile-app sectors. Over the last three years, one of the company’s three co-founders left to explore other ventures, as has a head of marketing.
But this year, Care Thread has signed two contracts with major health providers and is close to crossing the threshold into positive cash flow, Adams said.
Care Thread’s first deal was with Eastern Connecticut Health Network, which includes two hospitals and 16 other outpatient facilities.
Then this spring, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston purchased the Care Thread system, which launched last month on a contract set to run through August 2015.
Adams said the company is also close to a deal with an accountable-care organization for its first contract in Rhode Island and hopes to be able to announce it this summer.
Care Thread has also teamed with Beacon Partners Inc., a health care management firm in Weymouth, Mass., that will sell and implement the Care Thread system nationally. Brigham and Women’s is paying for the system under a grant to study new health IT systems designed to lower costs by improving the efficiency of care.
Using traditional technology like pagers, Adams said nurses in most hospitals typically spend about 20 percent of their time coordinating and scheduling care with doctors and colleagues, about the same percentage of their day spent in direct contact with patients.
And unlike traditional communications systems centered around employees, Care Thread is centered around each patient and allows information sharing and communication of care inside and outside the hospital walls.
So when someone walks into a hospital emergency room, Care Thread can send an instant notification to that patient’s primary care physician.
In some cases, information from the primary care physician could prevent a hospital admission or, if an admission is unavoidable, the hospital staff can benefit from the much deeper knowledge of the patient’s medical history from the primary-care physician.
And along with notifying doctors when a patient is admitted, the system can notify them when the patient is discharged to initiate follow-up monitoring to prevent a re-admission.
“Pagers are reliable, but they are not secure, not integrated into clinical systems and have nothing to do with patients,” Adams said. “Our technology is very patient-centered, and we do that by integrating into electronic medical records.” The seeds of the Care Thread concept were hatched at Brown University, where co-founders Scott Guelich and Andrew Shearer first decided they wanted to pursue a health care information technology startup. Guelich has since moved out of day-to-day operations, but maintains a stake in the company.
Adams said the competition from incumbent medical records giants is fierce, but he believes Care Thread’s patient-centered mobile approach will bring new value to hospitals.
“There is competition everywhere in the marketplace from much larger companies,” Adams said. “We survey the landscape, but also focus on what we do and the value we bring.” •

COMPANY PROFILE
Care Thread Inc.
OWNERS: Majority-owned by co-founders
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Mobile health care software
LOCATION: 127 Dorrance St., Providence
EMPLOYEES: Two
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 2011
ANNUAL SALES: NA

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