About our project
The problem we solve: Millions of patients in the home health setting have to administer infusions to themselves and operate complicated equipment but do not have a nurse present yet. Their pump could be alarming, or they could see blood on their dressing. Currently the home health industry only offers patients call centers and phone based processes to receive help. It can take hours for a patient to receive a call back, by which time they are so anxious and many resort to unnecessary trips to the emergency room.
About our solution:
Call Bell is a HIPAA compliant mobile platform that gives patients and caregivers the confidence they need to complete their home health procedures. It streamlines the caregiver response eliminating the need for call centers. By providing immediate answers to common questions, Call Bell dramatically improves the patient experience, decreases anxiety and reduces likelihood that they’re going to run off to the ER unnecessarily.
Progress to
date:We have our product build in iOS, android and a web version. A large home health instution, Bioscrip, is currently in pilot with us along with a small independt home health compnay, Alliance Homecare. We were the winner's of the Digital Health Breakthrough Network so with the help of the city of New York an additonal pilot is being designed and launched. Dozens of patients have expressed how helpful it would be to have a tool like Call Bell at their disposal instead of current processes. We are also in the sales cycle with CVS and Walgreens who both operate large home infuison copanies and they along with other C suite home infusion executives have all expressed interest in the significant cost savings our solution provides.
About Our Team
Creator: Melissa Kozak
Bio: Melissa is a Registered Nurse turned entrepreneur based in NYC, who is expertly skilled in emergency medicine and home healthcare. Melissa absolutely loves being a nurse and after 9 years of beside nursing she realized that she could reach more patients through creating a large scale solution. She identified a major pain point in the home health industry and created Call Bell to increase patient care and decrease provider costs.
Title: CEO
Advanced Degree(s): RN
About Team Members
Shahid Shah
CTO, Chairman of the Board, Computer Science
Biography: Shahid N. Shah is an internationally recognized and influential healthcare IT thought leader who is known as “The Healthcare IT Guy” across the Internet. He is a technology strategy consultant to many federal agencies and winner of Federal Computer Week’s coveted “Fed 100″ award given to IT experts that have made a big impact in the government. Shahid has architected and built multiple clinical solutions over his almost 21 year career. He helped design and deploy the American Red Cross’s electro
Title: CTO, Chairman of the Board
Advanced Degree(s): Computer Science
Twitter:
@ShahidNShah
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahidshah/
About Our Company
How We Help Patients
Millions of patients in the home health setting have to administer infusions to themselves and operate complicated equipment but do not have a nurse present yet. Their pump could be alarming, or they could see blood on their dressing. Currently the home health industry only offers patients call centers and phone based processes to receive help. It can take hours for a patient to receive a call back, by which time they are so anxious and many resort to unnecessary trips to the emergency room. Call Bell is a HIPAA compliant mobile platform that gives patients and caregivers the confidence they need to complete their home health procedures. It streamlines the caregiver response eliminating the need for call centers. By providing immediate answers to common questions, Call Bell dramatically improves the patient experience, decreases anxiety and reduces likelihood that they’re going to run off to the ER unnecessarily.
How We Help Physicians
Home infusion providers are desperate to eke out more margin. Their overhead for supporting patients is increasing while patient satisfaction is on the decline. Providers are in need of a workflow management solution that decreases costs, streamlines workflows, makes their job simpler and improves patient care.
How We Help Hospitals
Hospitals are penalized everytime a patient who was discharged gets readmited. Our solution provides better patient engagement, education and support so patients are much less likely to be readmitted to the hospital.
How We Help Partners
Partners have the opportunity to try out a next generation solution to improve patient care and reduced costs. They get bragging rights for embracing innovation and will be supplied with a white paper on the data we collect during the pilot.
Challenge Mission
Key Milestones Achieved and Planned
We intent to achive 10% market penetration with three years with gross margins of 60%. This will prodcue $45M in revenue in 2020 and will allow us to expand our customer base to include non infusion homehealth companies such as wound care and diabetic management.
Our Competitive Advantages
Our business model is subscription-based Enterprise SaaS. We are charging $49 per pateint per month for access to our platform. At those prices we will have healthy 60+% margins.
Barriers to Entry
Our biggest competition by far is the Status Quo; getting the industry to change from using answering services, call centers and their current workflows. There is also the possibility that larger companies such as CVS and Walgreens try to build their own version of Call Bell rather than buy it from us.
Traction, Funding and Partners
Innovation Details
Intellectual Property Summary
We have a provisional patent on our unique way of providing patient support to home healthcare patients.
Patent Link
http://www.citushealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/56551_Appln.pdf
Clinical Information
We have a pilot protocol written and are in the middle of launching our first IRB pilot but do not have results to share yet. Additonaly the Digital Health Breakthrough Network will have results to share over the next few weeks.
Regulatory Status
FDA approval is not required for our solution, however, we are considering applying for it as we see it as a barrier to entry.
How we will use the funds raised
We need to grow our team, specifically two full time sales people to build out our sales pipeline over the next 18 months. We also need to build more capabilities based on our customer's requirments, specifically integrating with home health provider's EHRs.
Thank You
I have been a home infusion nurse for the last 7 years. I have heard countless stories from my patients about how frustrated and scared they were when they weren't getting a call back from the on call nurse. Many of you have probably experienced this yourself, with an aging parent or even a child. There is a better way and as someone who has answered those "emergency" calls in the middle of the night for years, I built this solution from my direct experience with providing patient care. We are looking for votes, likes, introductions, pilot partners and advice. Please help us help the home bound patients. Many thanks, Nurse Melissa Kozak.
