Name: Tembo Health

Legal Name: Tembo Health

Location: New York, New York

Founded: 2018

Founder(s): Anurag Gupta

Website: https://tembo.health/ 

Social Media Following: 19 Followers on LinkedIn 

INDUSTRY – Global Telemedicine Technology Market

Size: $31.8B in 2018 (Source: MarketResearch.com)

Projections: $77.2B by 2022 (CAGR of 19.4%) (Source: MarketResearch.com)

Introduction

Tembo Health is a telemedicine platform serving skilled nursing facilities. The platform delivers patient care for specialties such as psychiatry and cardiology that are otherwise difficult to access, using technology and proprietary workflows. The platform is guided by a team of physicians who leverage modern systems to access patient data more efficiently, and provide more superior care plans. At the same time, by using the platform, nursing homes benefit from improved patient experiences, better quality scores, fewer hospital readmissions, and can enhance revenue opportunities by achieving greater operational efficiency. 

The Product 

Tembo Health partners with clinicians at the chief point of the provision of care, including retirement communities, skilled nursing facilities, primary care doctors, among others. 

The platform’s workflows are patient and clinician-centered, leveraging technology and data to free up clinicians’ time to enable them to focus on the patient during appointments, instead of spending it on computers searching for the patient’s data. Tembo Health communicates directly with the staff and caregivers at retirement centers and nursing facilities to ensure that the elderly residents and patients receive the best possible care in a timely manner. 

Origin and Founding Team 

Dr. Anurag Gupta is the Founder and CEO of Tembo Health. He received his MMSc in clinical informatics from Harvard Medical School, earned his MD and MBA degrees from the University of Michigan. After undergoing training in emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in NYC, he also completed a postdoctoral NIH/NLM research fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Anurag Gupta has also had a brief stint at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with C-level executives from sectors such as pharma and MedTech to help them shape long-term strategic initiatives in the development of healthcare products and solutions. 

The idea for Tembo Health was born out of Dr. Anurag Gupta’s first-hand experience when his grandfather was admitted to a nursing facility for a minor injury. The lack of access to specialists led to his grandfather’s condition deteriorating, which prompted Dr. Gupta to build a platform that facilitates timely access to specialty care for elderly patients. 

Performance and Trends

Tembo Health was selected by the New York-based Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator for its 2019 cohort. 

The post Tembo Health – Facilitating easier access to specialists for elderly care appeared first on Techweek.

So instead of long, painful weeks of waiting to meet your doctor, and miserable hours spent in suspiciously sticky waiting rooms, 98point6 lets you just have a virtual doctor’s visit when you need it, where you want it, how many ever times you choose to use it.

So how does it work?

Founded by entrepreneur Robbie Cape, 98point6 is a mobile phone app that brings together deep technology and board-certified medical professionals to provide reliable, confidential, text-based medical consultations and services to patients.

The app’s AI technology gathers patient history (of patients above the age of 18), updates their charts, performs other administrative tasks, and asks basic questions to collect diagnostic information. Patient profiles are automatically built by the system, avoiding redundancy at the next virtual visit.

The “Automated Assistant” uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), which allows patients to make their complaints in as few or as many words as they feel comfortable. “[Sometimes], we get several words from the patient (‘my head hurts’), and in others we get multiple paragraphs. This helps create a natural dialogue, even in the context of a machine/human interaction,” says Cape to VentureBeat.

Once the initial administrative work and basic questions are resolved, a certified, primary healthcare physician (a full time employee of the company) steps into the process to ask further questions, diagnose the patient, and answer any health-related queries. The certified physicians can also recommend lab work, write prescriptions (automatically sent to your local pharmacy), or recommend that you visit a primary healthcare provider in person for further consultation.

The company says that in beta testing, its system enjoyed a 93% resolution rate, and the whole process takes under 20 minutes from start to finish, including first time user sign up.

Who does it work for?

98point6’s model is likely to address some of the acute problems plaguing the healthcare industry in the US today. The Association of American Medical Colleges found that the US would face a projected shortage of between 40,800 and 104,900 doctors by the year 2030, and the National Association of Community Health Centers reported in 2014 that 62 million Americans have “no or inadequate access to primary care due to the shortage of physicians”.

98point6 increases access to doctors and medical care

An app like 98point6 increases public access to primary physicians and ups the chances of being able to ‘meet’ a doctor at a time when the country faces a dire shortage of them. Further, with the adoption of a technology like this, the time of medical practitioners working outside of tech-based apps could be better served treating only those who really need physical consultations, with a huge number of everyday, easily-curable ailments being screened out through virtual consultations.

98point6 requires no insurance, and allows for an unlimited number of consultations (at $20 a year for the first year, and $120 a year after that for individuals. It also has provisions for employer-sponsored plans) and is also likely to bring down the cost of primary health care for a number of Americans.

The app could improve the quality of primary healthcare itself, by focusing and streamlining the work of medical practitioners. And if widely adopted, it could also increase the overall health of the population: the company’s own research claims that adding a single primary care physician to a population of 10,000 people reduces that group’s mortality rate by 6%.

(Photo credit: 98point6)

Who is 98point6?

Founded in 2015, 98point6’s founder and CEO Robbie Cape was a former founder of family scheduling app Cozi, which he worked on for a full ten years before selling to Time Inc., and before that, he put in 12 years at Microsoft. 98point6’s Chief Product Officer Larry Engel also worked at Microsoft for 20 years before joining Cozi as its Chief Product Officer. Other employees include Starbucks veteran Steven Hurwitz and Cozi’s former VP of Marketing Samantha Bergin, who also spent time as a manager at both Amazon and Starbucks. The company currently boasts 110+ employees, and a 16-person medical advisory board.

Although the service launched in earnest only early this May, 98point6 has received a total funding amount of $86.3M, through four funding rounds. It received $50M from its latest round of Series C funding, led by the Merchant Banking Division of Goldman Sachs. The funding will reportedly be used to enhance its automation capabilities, grow the company’s product and physician teams, and add new features.

Given that the telehealth industry is growing steadily (a 2018 study by Transparency Market Research says that the industry was worth $6B in 2016 and expected to be worth $19.5B by 2025) its not surprising that the app has a number of competitors, like MDLive, HealthTap, DocHalo, Teledoc and HaloDoc.

98point6’s current annual revenue is under $1M, which is well behind its top competitor, MDLive, whose annual revenue is $16.5M, and Healthtap, whose annual revenue of $8.8M. When asked by GeekWire about the company’s competition, 98point6 founder Cape responded rather positively, “We absolutely believe that the market is so interesting, dynamic, and large that there is an opportunity for all of these companies to be successful. There is that much work to do.”

While all of 98point6’s full-time doctors are currently based in Seattle, they’re licensed to practice in all the states in which the app is functional. However, the apps operations vary slightly due to the differences in regulations in various states (a patient in New York, for example, is required to first have a 30 second video call with a physician before receiving text-based medical services). Available on the Apple App Store, Google Play and its website, 98point6.com, it is currently operational in 40 states and Washington DC, and plans to be operational in all 50 states by early 2019.

The post 98point6 Lets You Have Virtual Doctor’s Visits Whenever You Want appeared first on Techweek.