Homeward Healthcare started this year testing its healthcare technology at Hurley Medical Center in Flint. It's ending this year with a successful pilot program and a few paying customers in its pocket, not to mention ambitions to take its business model national next year.
The 2.5-year-old startup has developed a mobile platform that enables clearer communication between hospital staff and patients. It provides a questionnaire to patients to illicit more frank information about their health free from social pressures to say certain things to impress doctors or other medical staff. The idea is to enable medical professionals to deliver better care.
"We use an interactive medical platform to provide risk stratification to help prevent patient re-admissions," says Joe Gough, president & CEO of
Homeward Healthcare.
Homeward Healthcare's pilot program dealt primarily with cardiac patients. Kettering University is about to release a white paper on the results of the program that shows a 47 percent reduction in readmission of patients dealing with congestive heart failure and a 33.4 percent reduction in readmission in patients in general cardiac care.
"That translates to 69 fewer readmissions out of 1,000 patients," Gough says.
Homeward Healthcare has been able to translate that work into three paying customers, including Hurley Medical Center,
Mammoth Hospital in California, and
Evolution Hospital in Las Vegas. Homeward Healthcare also has a handful of other hospitals lined up to become customers in the first quarter of 2016. The health systems they are attached to could mean that Homeward Healthcare has customer ceiling of up 600 hospitals.
Homeward Healthcare plans to go national with its platform next year. Besides its office in Ann Arbor, it also has offices in Toledo and San Francisco. It employs 18 people, including 11 hires over the last year. Gough expects those numbers to rise as his team works to raise more seed capital. It closed on a $1.5 million Series A a year ago and is currently raising a $1 million bridge round with an eye on closing a Series B by the end of next year.
"We opened it (the bridge round) last week," Gough says. "We already have $250,000 in it."
Source: Joe Gough, president & CEO of Homeward Healthcare
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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