MemoryWell Inc.

Our writers are crucial to what we do. Not only do they create brief, easily digested stories for busy frontline caregivers, they provide a crucial human element to our interviews and they input the data to our structured databases. In 2020, there were more than 30,000 newsroom layoffs. We will allocate a portion of Elevate Prize funding towards hiring these writers, providing a steady income source for a struggling workforce. Our data has helped make us attractive to payers and providers, but to be truly equipotent, we must apply to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to become a reimbursable benefit. That way, our stories—and data—can be available to everyone. And that’s an expensive process. So the Elevate Prize money would go to that and to expanding across Medicaid systems, in particular. After all, the only way Medicaid will survive in most states is to transform itself into a predictive and preventative system, something that is impossible without Social Determinant of Health data for every patient. And that is exactly what MemoryWell provides: stories to better connect patients and providers, and translation of that information for computers to understand and, using artificial intelligence, get ahead of adverse events.

MemoryWell grew out of my experience caregiving for my father, who had Alzheimer’s. When I moved him into a community a few years ago, I was asked to fill out a 20-page biographical questionnaire about him. This made no sense to me: who could read and remember 20 pages of handwritten data points for the 100 residents there? Instead, as a longtime TIME Magazine correspondent, I simply wrote down his story and it transformed his care. Two of his caregivers were Ethiopian and they’d had no idea that he’d actually lived in Addis Ababa for four years early on in his career with the United Nations. They became his champions: sitting with him for hours, asking him what it was like to work with Emperor Haile Selassie. And Dad loved it because he remembered Africa still from his early 20’s, even if he didn’t remember last week. I knew then my mission was to start MemoryWell and help every patient be seen as a person and treated with dignity as my father was.

In the years since I left TIME in 2017 to start MemoryWell, we’ve created a single-sided curated digital marketplace that matches the patients sent to us by providers and payers with our national network of nearly 800 freelance writers. The writers not only create easily digestible narratives for busy frontline caregivers that we can push into electronic health records, but they also file key words with those stories—creating structured, minable databases that are an incredibly valuable data set for our clients. With every story we approach more than 72% of what are traditionally considered social determinants of health. With the tens-of-thousands of stories we expect to scale into, we can use AI analytics to create a Nielsen rating system for social determinants of health that would be a game changer in health care. We are MemoryWell and we are putting the person in person-centered care.

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 that triggered him, causing him to be aggressive toward 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 when he heard an alarm, a bell, in the firehouse, it was time to move into action. 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 would be better off. That’s the impact we envision with our data: nothing short of systemic, seismic change.

When I write for TIME, it’s about the richest, most powerful people in the world for an audience of millions. When we write for MemoryWell, we’re writing about the other 99%, in this case seniors, but down the road for everyone. The audience for each story may only be 20-50 people, but the impact on that life is much more profound. We believe that stories are what’s needed across the healthcare continuum. We envision healthcare where a short bio of every patient is on the front page of every electronic health record, so health providers can treat people rather than symptoms. And the data that we pull from our stories can help improve outcomes with researchers and make care more holistic across the board.