Global Digital Health Investments record high According to data, it will reach $57.2 billion in 2021 CB Insights. However, the healthcare industry is a long way from achieving a significant return on investment in the form of sustained reductions in spending or improved outcomes.
An important reason for this may be that low-income patient groups face worse health outcomes than high-income groups, and they are also the most likely to experience barriers to the use of health technologies.This Is Courtney Lyles, Co-Founder Solving Health TechUCSF’s Health Equity Accelerator believes — and she’s determined to change that.
Lyles said there are many reasons why low-income patients don’t have access to medical technology. For example, a startup may only offer services in English or have a misunderstanding of the market opportunity to serve the Medicaid population.In other cases, the company may not know how to contact low-income patients. To help startups in the latter category, Lyles co-founded SOLVE Health Tech in 2019 with UCSF clinician Dr. Urmimala Sarkar.
“We’re near Silicon Valley, so a lot of digital health companies come to us specifically to learn more about the patient population,” Lyles said. “In 2019, we systematized all of these arrangements and projects, thinking it would be more efficient to work in parallel with the company and work to improve momentum.”
Some accelerators take equity stakes in the startups they work with, but Lyles said that would be “very challenging” given that UCSF is a public entity. Instead, SOLVE Health Tech conducts 12-18 month collaborative research projects with companies and focuses on better tailoring health technology to meet the needs of low-income patients. The accelerator is funded by the university and consists of research and clinical staff with different expertise.
The three companies the accelerator has partnered with so far are Apply VR, Survey Health and Doctor of Medicine in Sleep MedicineAll three companies have published at least one research paper in collaboration with SOLVE Health Tech, and the accelerator expects to publish “one or even more than two papers” for each of these companies in the coming months, Lyles said. .
Every company comes to the accelerator with different needs. For example, AppliedVR — a virtual reality platform designed to reduce the amount of opioids needed for patient pain management — approached SOLVE Health Tech after building a strong base of commercially insured patients. The company sought the accelerator’s help because it realized chronic pain was a huge problem in the Medicaid population, and it didn’t test its product for that population.
When the accelerator put the headset on Medicaid-covered UCSF patients, more than 95 percent of the patients had never had access to a VR platform in their lifetime. Getting their feedback on the technology helped AppliedVR fine-tune its platform, and the startup also spoke with clinical leaders at UCSF about how providers view VR as an acceptable treatment service in their chronic pain management arsenal.
The InquisitHealth study looked different. The startup’s peer coaching-as-a-service solution aims to address social determinants of health by matching patients with disease coaches based on shared conditions, age, language, type of medication, demographics and comorbidities. When the company came to SOLVE Health Tech, it had collected a wealth of clinical data about its patients, but wasn’t sure how to use that data to continue developing its platform.
InquisitHealth worked with the accelerator’s researchers to better understand what worked and what could be improved to better reach the Medicaid population, allowing it to quickly understand its data and continue the product redesign process.
In the coming years, Lyles expects the accelerator to conduct research with more startups. She also believes there is room for more stakeholders to participate in the program, such as payers and investors, so they can work together to improve the ability of medtech to reach low-income patients.
SOLVE Health Tech stands for “Overcoming Barriers for Low Income and Vulnerable Patients Every Day with Health Tech”. One might agree that if the accelerator truly lives up to its mission of helping digital health companies better serve low-income patients, it might be forgiven for its awkward name.
Ksenia Zvezdina, Getty Images
