MemoryWell Inc.

MemoryWell is a digital platform for life storytelling that uses narratives, and social determinants of health (SDoH) data we collect, to improve healthcare outcomes. Our automated process replaces intake questionnaires with brief stories that epitomize person-centered care. At scale, we’ll harness AI to create the world’s first predictive SDoH system.

Jay Newton-Small, CEO and Founder

MemoryWell grew out of my experience caregiving for my father, who had Alzheimer's. When I moved him into a senior community, I was asked to fill out a questionnaire about his life. This made no sense: who would remember pages of hand-written data for 100+ residents in that community? Instead, as a longtime TIME Magazine correspondent, I wrote his story and it transformed his care. Two of his caregivers were Ethiopian and they'd had no idea he'd served in Ethiopia early in his United Nations career. They became his champions. Since then, we’ve used our life storytelling platform to promote person-centered care and capture hard-to-get data called social determinants of health (SDoH).

Without patient-specific SDoH, providers are missing critical information leading to unintended health outcomes, increased costs, and patient-provider detachment. Currently, most SDoH initiatives are solutions-driven—farmer’s markets, free car rides—with little-to-no sense of need. Our stories easily identify the root cause of major SDoH issues like housing, transportation and food insecurities.

Our addressable market is a combination of hospice/palliative care, long-term care risk retention groups (LTC RRGs), doctor groups, hospitals, assisted living, skilled nursing, and Medicare Advantage populations representing more than 65 million people in the US alone.

Our entry into the market was working with seniors in memory care, like my dad: people who could no longer speak for themselves. Our life stories gave them a way to be seen, known, and heard by their care staff. We have since expanded and are currently approaching the senior market through long-term care RRGs, hospice and palliative care, primary care at home, Medicare Advantage plans and doctor’s groups. 

While down the road, we believe our narratives, and data, can help every patient regardless of age, our target market remains seniors, the most vulnerable, and expensive, in the system. Not only is there often a massive disconnect between them and their frontline caregivers, but there is relatively scant digital data on this population, meaning the available scraped data about them is scarce. MemoryWell can bring a better quality of life to seniors entering care by connecting them to their caregivers in an empathetic way while improving and even predicting potential adverse outcomes.

If Covid has shown anything, it has exposed how impersonal our healthcare system can be. The trust between patients and providers was already broken pre-pandemic—especially amongst minorities—and it has only gotten worse in the era of telehealth; now the patient is as physically distant from their healthcare providers as they were emotionally pre-pandemic. We think of what we’re doing as putting the heart into the tin man of care. Our stories build trust and empathy between patients and providers. They provide ice breakers, a distraction from emergent pain, or simply a way to make someone feel known and seen. And by translating those stories into a language that computers and AI can understand, it brings humanity into the health data equation.

One of our first stories was about a dementia patient in Iowa City who’d been a lifelong accountant. At mealtime, his community rang a chow bell and he would accost people—fellow residents, staff. This went on for months and the community was on the cusp of throwing him out. Then we wrote his story. Turns out he’d also been a lifelong volunteer firefighter and the chow bell was similar to the alarm in the firehouse. He’d been trying to evacuate people, save their lives. We want to be a voice for every patient to be seen and understood and appreciated for who they are, not for their diagnosed illnesses. This is what our stories do. On a systemic level, the entire US healthcare system is going bankrupt as a system that responds to healthcare crises. What if you could see that crisis coming and delay, or avoid, it completely? That system would be infinitely more efficient and patients better off. That’s the impact we envision with our data: nothing short of systemic, seismic change.

Raising venture capital puts us on a clock and we have one year to scale fairly rapidly ahead of a Series A, a goal we have every intention of surpassing. Our most immediate goal is to scale into thousands of stories this year. Given the pilots we have, we believe we can reach that goal. That gets us through the scale threshold to develop our first AI data analytics products. With those pilots converting to contracts, we’ll be ready to scale through two or three smaller healthcare markets—each with approximately 1-2 million patients. A Series A will allow us to expand into large markets like Medicare Advantage,  fee-for-service plans and hospitals. Our fully automated platform is built to handle this scale and we envision getting to millions of stories. 

Over the next 3 years, we are building towards automating the intake and processing of complex SDoH and other health-related data as it relates to NLP (higher complexity) and sorting/pattern-recognition/ML (lower complexity) for the stories and insights we collect. We are also developing data enrichment functionality to help our clients pair their datasets with ours to gain more valuable insights.

We measure our impact in:

• The number of stories told 

• The usage of those stories on our platform (story views and timelines accessed and used) 

• The amount of data we collect and the impact of that data (ie: did we get to the root cause of an issue and was there an actionable solution)

As journalists we were at first leary of selling our data, after all, social media arguably destroyed our profession that way. But we came around to the idea of working with one of our investors and advisory board members, Dr. Marty Makary, a renowned surgeon and author at Johns Hopkins. He lent us his data team for the better part of a year and working with them and consulting bioethicists, we grew comfortable with the idea that our data could be used for good. But we are very careful with how we sell the data. At first, the individualized sets will only be sold back to those patient’s providers, with the patient’s blessing. At scale, our AI analytics can be anonymized. And we have no intention of commercializing the data. We aspire for our data to do only good for patients, never bad.

Covid has started a tsunami of culture change. This year, Med students at Massachusetts General Hospital wrote down patient life stories along with medical histories to help doctors get to know patients from behind masks. And we all saw images of nursing homes conducting window or iPad visits when family couldn’t visit. And, still, people died without anyone around them knowing anything about them. More needs to be done. We’re working with innovators and front runners but to truly change the culture of medicine, we have to cross the chasm and become a widely accepted practice, and that is going to take a lot of work: research on the impact of our stories and data, funding to build awareness and scale, and help to become reimbursable by Medicare and Medicaid and then widely available to any patient.

• USAgainst Alzheimers
• Hilarity for Charity
• The Coalition to Transform Advanced Care
• UCSF (research partner)
• Aging Life Care Association
• Not Impossible Labs
• MIT Solve
• Techstars
• MassChallenge Boston
• Halcyon Incubator

Culture change, or person-centered care, is a movement that began decades ago in the U.S., and despite 30% of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements being weighted to value-based care, it took an epidemic for people to begin to take this seriously. We will need help from powerful voices in the healthcare community like the Gates Foundation, Optum, The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation and Aviva to help support and amplify that message. This genie won’t go back into his bottle, but he will need to be directed and focused in order to be effective and that will take a village, a very powerful village, to cement person-centered care as a cornerstone of healthcare moving forward.

Optum: We’re already partnering with Prospero, an Optum spin-off. We know that UnitedHealth’s board last year committed $400 million to addressing SDoH, but we also know that they struggle to find SDoH data, especially root causes of issues. If we can prove ourselves with Prospero, we’d love to expand across the Optum/UHC universe and make them a leader in addressing SDoH issues.

Aviva: We’re already lined up to pilot with the UK’s Centre on Aging Innovation and we believe Aviva would be a powerful partner for us in the UK as we aim to expand across the NHS.
Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, Doctor Evidence: What we’re doing with AI is cutting edge and has many layers, not just our stories. We also record every interview we do and we believe voice analysis can go a long way to discerning intentions and our timelines provide another dynamic source of unstructured data. We’d love to work with these members on refining our AI algorithms and thinking through other powerful uses of our data sets like research.