Submission

med reconciliation + incentives & blockchain

Enhancing patient UX, improving population health and physician/clinician work quality to reduce healthcare costs

Health

The focus of this project is simple, maintain a foundation that generates positive outcomes based on patient behavior change; we will achieve this aim by helping users manage their medication inventory using the Tympo app.

The Tympo app allows patients to create an account/profile, upload their medication information (photos and simple details such as medication name, dosage and frequency) and share that information with physicians/clinicians; healthcare navigators will assist patients with using the application. The system rewards patients with points that are generated at time of activity; these patients can redeem points for rewards such as real-time co-pay reimbursement, free or discounted fares with local ride sharing companies and more to come. The goal is to continuously engage the patient/user to generate more data that provide insights on how to better cater curated and relevant information.

The short term goal of the project is to affect patient behavior towards engagement and rewarding them based on continuous updates and management and sharing of their medication data inputs.

The long term goal is to use blockchain as a foundation of a shared ledger and other mobile client centered applications. These would help manage the ledger of transactions and begin to reduce healthcare costs relative to a more cohesive, integrated and frictionless system that eases the burden on physicians and clinicians with sharing a comprehensive list of patient medication data across healthcare settings in a secure and most cases anonymous method where necessary.

The big picture or why we have chosen to take this path is clear; Healthcare costs are increasing year over year; presently on average Americans pay approximately $10,345 per person for healthcare service delivery.

Some stats:
Total health expenditure hit $3.35 trillion in 2016
Growth of healthcare spend is projected to average 5.8% from 2015 to 2025
Health care spending is wildly uneven; 5% of the population – the most frail of ill - accounts for nearly 50% of spending in a given year

The ulaHealth typmo app will explore ways to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically understand a user's intent or context and provide the right information at the right time. Geo-location is another consideration for this app so that healthcare administrators have a newer view into the social determinants of health that potentially either make a negative or positive impact on a patients behavior of condition(s).

Blockchain technology will be used to manage the distributed shared ledger of reward points that can be redeemed for specific compensation to the patient based on their engagement; this technology can also be leveraged to more securely manage the sharing of information in an anonymous manner; it puts the patient in control of what information they wish to share and with whom.

Lastly, our app will seek to leverage low-latency, high bandwidth gigabit internet technology where available. There are limitations with leveraging this app given the patient population that we are targeting. We are targeting the 5% patient population which represents the most ill, frail and most needy, which also represent the approximately 50% total healthcare spend on an annual basis. This patient population may not always have access to 5G mobile phones but can leverage this network where applicable. We will develop our app with a long term focus to leverage this high speed next generation (low-latency, high-bandwidth) gigabit internet technology where feasible and appropriate.

Hector Torres, CEO + Co-Founder
Hector Torres has been the chief orchestrator for the company and projects, collaborating and bringing together diverse communities is his passion as is being a healthcare innovator and disruptor.

He created the first Blockchain + Healthcare Innovation Summit that brought together IBM, UT Dell Medical School, Clinical Pathology Labs, Austin Regional Clinic, Law Office of Husch Blackwell & McGinnis Lochridge to discuss the opportunities in healthcare and how we might leverage emerging technologies such as blockchain. The event was hosted at GoogleFiber October of 2016 "ulaHealth Blockchain + Healthcare Summit" http://summit.ulahealth.me/

While serving as the Chief Technology Officer of an Austin based Latino health non-profit, he created and pioneered the first minority focused and patient centric healthcare hack-a-thon named, cultivateHealthATX that IBM hosted October of 2015 which brought together UT Dell Medical School, Clinical Pathology Labs, City of Austin, St David’s RowdMap and others to assist teams with their innovation and development to tackle some of healthcare’s most pressing needs. Click here to see some event photos: https://www.instagram.com/cultivatehealthatx/ or click see the web version: http://ulahealth.me/cultivateHealthATX/

Dan Hedges, Co-Founder
Full stack developer: Dan loves writing, testing, debugging and improving software, and is always looking for challenges, especially in the world of big data. He has worked in the kernel and user space. Dan excelled at eliminating performance bottlenecks and refactoring. Specialties: Refactoring, performance profiling and optimization, project management, linux, programming languages, competitive programming.

Salvador Valdez, COO

Dr Ray Atilano, Chief Medical Officer
Dr. Ray Atilano played an integral role with orchestrating the ulaHealth Blockchain + Healthcare Innovation Summit and served as a moderator for the Austin Regional Clinic information question and answer session. Prior to his ulaHealth roles, the NeuroTexas Institute Research Foundation named Ray Atilano, Ph.D., as its executive director, in March of 2015.

The focus for our app is specifically aimed at the uninsured, under-insured, under-served, indigent, most needy population essentially. We are working to curb the skyrocketing healthcare costs for everyone's benefit. We have a goal of ensuring that the app is culturally and linguistically competent and that it targets at a minimum a fifth grade literacy level to ensure we are being as inclusive as possible. The more we can do by means of simplifying the ease of use of the app the more we can ensure increase user adoption and thus increasing accessibility. We will begin with a bilingual app, English and Spanish and include additional languages as the application evolves based on user feedback.

Additionally, we will seek to employ community healthcare navigators to guide users on how to best utilize the app for their [the patients] specific needs

If our team wins we will use the prize money to:
- employ one or more part time/full time community health navigators to serve as a distribution channel of our app such that they train patients on how to use the app and they serve as a feedback loop to further enhance and improve the application.
- further refine the application user experience UX and user interface UI
- iOS and Android development
- blockchain development
- HIPAA and related security costs to ensure protection of sensitive data
- a small percentage, approximately 5%-7% will be used towards administrative and project management costs

Medication Reconciliation Rewards Pilot CoA v2.0.pptx