Clearstep

CEO and Co-Founder Adeel Malik’s Natural Language Processing-based chatbot allows Clearstep Virtual Triage to create a future where pre-hospital journeys are supplemented with clear, concise, and clinically-relevant triage notes—utilizing technology to facilitate more efficient use of clinician time. Using an AI-based chatbot, patients may view treatment options, compare prices, and book care online for their ailments. Their case study using COVID-19 symptom screening was deployed at a large multi-hospital health system with over 25,000 employees, with virtual triage diverting over 1,000 calls over a 2 month period of time to the self-service resource, saving an estimated 25 hours of triage time. Partnered with CVS Health and HCA Healthcare, their team is well on their way to improving communication between patient and physician for timely patient care.

Monovo

Monovo was founded by Jonathan Muńoz and Robert Johnson, DNP, to address home monitoring needs for specific patient populations. Their remote patient monitoring tools continuously check patient oxygen, blood pressure, and cardiac rhythm and pair this data with artificial intelligence to predict and prevent untoward events. For example, their tools can be used for continuous blood pressure monitoring for pre-eclampsia patients, rhythm monitoring for cardiac patients, and oxygen saturation for COVID-19 patients. Monovo also includes a platform that can be used by patients and physicians to track symptoms, address changing care needs, and facilitate billing. They have pilots with both primary and specialty care offices and insurance carriers and they are interested in working with emergency department-directed hospital at home programs.

And the Winner Is…

David Mui and Akshat Patel’s company EM Guide brought together telemedicine and EMS teletriage to focus on directing care to appropriate locations and creating financial incentives to change current protocols. Currently, 40 percent of the 37 million estimated 9-1-1 calls EMS responds to each year are determined to be low-acuity or non-emergent. EM Guide empowers first responders to redefine the patient journey. The EM Guide platform allows EMS to provide point-of-care telemedicine and teletriage services, diverting non-acute calls from the ED and offering instant financial incentive for each diversion achieved by EMS agencies to nudge and change EMS behavior, with a conservatively estimated $2.46B potential savings for insurers diverting low acuity issues away from the ED.

The judges were impressed with the EM Guide group’s clear vision and unique idea—awarding them the top prize. EM Guide’s ability to save unnecessary medical bills and reserve hospital beds in overcrowded hospitals would have the most impact on the companies that pitched their ideas.