Ulivity

Medical office waiting rooms create risks for COVID19 transmission and create concern that deter patients from seeking care.  Medical facilities are high-risk for transmitting the virus. Patients are increasingly reluctant to visit their clinicians. The consequences are two-fold: serious medical conditions are going unaddressed and clinics are suffering financially and some may not survive our financial crisis. 

The COVID19 pandemic is both virology and psychology, and our work addresses both aspects now and in the future.  This is a mobile platform that checks-in patients from a distance, so they only enter a clinic when their exam room is ready.  This technology maximizes social distancing, limits unnecessary interactions between patients and staff to reduce transmission. The technology restores patient confidence to seek medical care such that non-COVID19 medical conditions can be treated timely and medical practices can begin to receive financial relief doing what they do best: caring for patients. 

Patient care, regardless of condition, begins in the waiting room. However with so many people congregated into a confined space seeking medical attention, waiting rooms are a hot spot for viral spread. With the onset of COVID-19, people are growing increasingly uncomfortable being around others in that setting and clinics are seeing up to 50% of their appointments being canceled. This causes financial strain and employee layoffs for these clinics. Outpatient clinics in the U.S. may see up to a $64 billion loss with these cancellations. Patients that do not come in to seek care also may face adverse medical conditions if not treated immediately. Even after the pandemic, many of these clinics may not financially recover and patients to remain wary of coming to an environment where they may be vulnerable. We may see many clinics being forced to lay off workers or close and many patients having medical issues made worse due to not seeking care sooner. 

Ulivity is a web based platform that maximizes social distancing when a patient checks into a clinic. It allows the patient to provide information as they normally would to a receptionist in the waiting room before coming to the clinic and also allows them to wait where they would like before being seen by a medical professional. It bypasses the need to interact and wait in the presence of others and optimizes the wait time in between check in and care. Unlike other technologies, our platform is web-based, requires no integrations so can be rapidly deployed and scaled.  In one week alone, nearly 140,000 providers signed up for Doxy.me—a telemedicine platform, that follows a similar non-integrated, web-based platform—showing the immense demand and action providers will take to reach patients using simple solutions.  Our technology provides a digital waiting room bringing benefits of social distancing while providing access to in-person medical care.

Our technology is intended predominantly for outpatient medicine in suburban and rural populations where most people can drive to their clinic appoints in the United States.  Specifically, our initial pilot population are in rural areas that often have less readily available healthcare in the US. Building from there, we intend to partner with the Veterans Health Administration’s Clinic Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOX’s) to use our technology to serve their over 800 outpatient clinics in the US.  VA patients that frequent these clinics are often have high-risk comorbidities for COVID19 in addition to other acute and chronic medical conditions. We intend to use our technology to optimize social distancing to help reduce the spread of COVID19 and restore patient confidence in the safety of seeking medical care for other conditions.

This project is a direct response to the challenge of "Health Security and Pandemics". It is a solution that is needed now, in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic to prevent viral spread and promote social distancing without compromising everyday medical needs as well as the livelihoods of medical employees. It is a solution needed even after the pandemic because the fear and possibility of spread of viruses and other sicknesses like the flu will remain. Whether or not there is a pandemic, reducing contact with potentially contagious people in a vulnerable area like the waiting room could save lives. 

Though there are similar technologies that notify a patient regarding their appointments, there are no widely used technologies that allow a patient to virtually check-in and stage at a distance until their appointment is ready.  Our main advantage is the ease of use of our technology where it purposefully does not require an integration into existing software so it can be rapidly deployed and adopted.  Nor does the platform require that an app be downloaded so it easy for patients to use as well.

Using the popular telehealth platform Doxy.me as an example, we intend to follow a similar example. We see our platform as an added tool for medical practices that purposefully does not require expensive or labor-intensive integrations.  As evidence that this approach is needed and effective, Doxy.me added nearly 140,000 providers in the last week of March alone. 

Though helpful, telemedicine itself has several limitations as it only provides a limited physical examination and cannot allow providers to perform necessary procedures that are commonly done in clinic.  Moreover, many providers recognize that it is more difficult to establish normal bonds with patients and family via telehealth, which threatens the doctor-patient relationship.  We believe there will be a demand for our product that bridges the benefits of a virtual encounter—namely social distancing—with the benefits of seeing a patient in person.

We are using software technology to develop an SMS system for patients to remotely check in. There is no need to download any apps on the patient side. On the clinic side we are creating an easily system that can exist with current applications. 

To date we have completed a manual/non-digital pilot in outpatient clinics with significant results. Patients repeatedly reported that they felt safer and more likely to come to clinic when they are able to wait in their cars rather than a waiting room. This manual process was labor intensive, which is why our digital endeavor was initiated. 

As evidence of our impact, our concept was awarded winner in the category of “New Ways to Practice Medicine in a COV19 World” at MIT’s Hacking COVID19 challenge. Feedback we received from mentors and judges included, “[I] was super impressed with your concept and pitch. [It was the] best I’ve seen from the whole weekend,” and “Your team was easily the top of the rankings for our track.”

We believe the post-COVID19 world will be significantly different than it was even 6 weeks ago. We believe our technology can serves as a paradigm shift in the pre-appointment experience for patients. If we are successful, we will ensure that patients are able to see their providers--as they have been--without having to experience the negative consequences of a waiting room. We expect to see fewer nosocomial infections, higher satisfaction ratings for patients, and financially viable clinical practices.

Beyond that, we believe our technology will also serve as a "hook" for additional down-stream applications. For instance, our ability to transmit insurance information can allow us to inform patients in real-time the cost of aspects of their outpatient care, such as cost of procedures relative to their deductible. We also see value of providing a virtual waiting room with virtual content, such as patient information about disease prevention and/or therapeutics, that a patient can access from their device while they wait for their appointment. In fact, we believe providers can direct content important to their visit while patients wait, such as information about the "ABCDE's of Melanoma" for patients presenting for a skin exam. A digital waiting room is just the start.

We have been contacted by outside entities such as the VHA Innovation Ecosystem to collaborate and pilot our technology at their CBOX clinics. We were also accepted to Advancing Innovation in Dermatology’s COVID19 incubator for rapid development and deployment. Additionally, organizations such as Medovate and other physician led groups have expressed interest in piloting and adopting our platform. 

We are hoping to sell this technology to a larger entity to help deploy and integrate this feature in already widely used platforms after we have fully fleshed out the technicals and have proved the effectiveness. 

We are applying for funding and/or resources to help develop and deploy our solution. We are in the early stages of technical development and have been recruiting technical experts after the MIT COVID19 Challenge where we formed the solution. We are now mainly seeking funding to launch a MVP.

We would like to partner with potential adopters of this technology - clinics, telehealth platforms, etc.