Do you ever leave your doctor’s office with more questions than answers? An Eagle startup has come up with ways to help – using the Internet and video.
Unity Medical Inc. makes two- to three-minute videos that take expert medical advice and deliver it to patients in a way that feels up close and personal. The videos are part of a suite of Internet tools that can deliver information on everything from chronic diseases to wellness.
Right now, the privately held Unity Medical doesn’t have much competition for its use of Internet technology, founder and CEO Michael Boerner said: “We’ve been presenting and sharing this from coast to coast, and to date we haven’t seen anything quite like it.”
“It has the potential to change how doctors practice medicine,” said Dr. Robert Korn, a weight-loss surgeon at St. Luke’s Clinic for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery who is not an investor in Unity Medical.
Doctors can use the company’s toolbox in a variety of ways. One is to videotape themselves introducing patients to pre-recorded, pre-approved medical content, including videos featuring health care experts.
The experts may tell surgical patients what to expect before and after their operations, or diabetic patients how to take care of themselves, or people with heart disease how to eat or exercise.
The content can be tailored to physician practices, hospitals or other health businesses.
The idea is to deliver information to patients in small doses over time.
One of the company’s tools, “Ask an Expert,” starts like many other online symptom checkers. Patients on a company’s Web site click on an outline of a human body and then click on the body parts that are hurting.
At this point, Unity parts ways with more traditional tools, which require patients to wade through more text to get a list of possible ailments. Instead, a kind doctor in a white coat comes onscreen to tell a mother, say, that he is sorry her daughter is suffering from a painful eye condition.
Below him on the screen are pictures of three eyes, each an example of a particular eye condition. “Which eye looks the most like your daughter’s?” the doctor asks.
Mom clicks on the bloodshot eye, a dead-on match for pinkeye, or conjunctivitis. It’s a common childhood infection easily treated at a doctor’s office, the doctor says. The site then provides names of local physicians.
Unity has produced hundreds of hours of video. Some speakers are actors, some are physicians or other experts. Some videos are filmed at the company’s Eagle headquarters, some elsewhere. The company has more than 50 workers, mostly full-time.
Healthwise, a Boise company that feeds health information to sites all over the Internet, including WebMD, isn’t working with Unity but might someday. “I think that Unity has a great, entertaining platform,” said Leslie Kelly Hall, senior vice president of products at Healthwise.
Unity Medical agrees that text helps patients drill deeper into what’s ailing them but believes the best way to grab them is through video. “I’ve seen research showing people prefer video to written content 5 to 1,” said Boerner, a Boise native who founded Mission Media, a nondenominational Christian media production company in Boise.
Unity Medical recently won the audience award for best new service at a recent Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Work on patents is under way.
The initial investment in Unity’s parent company, Unity Media, came from angel investors in Idaho and elsewhere. Unity Media began in April 2006. It focuses on the same technologies as Unity Medical, but is tailored to help large companies with tasks like training workers and communicating with customers.
Unity Medical was born in April with startup funding from its parent. Unity Medical is working to raise an additional $10 million, Boerner said.
The company earns its living by licensing its technologies and its medical content. “We already have substantial revenues,” he said, though he would not say how much. Buyers pay from thousands to millions of dollars, depending on the size of the sale.
Unity Medical has a partnership with St. Luke’s Health System, one of the biggest private employers in Idaho.
“They have some very innovative tools that will really serve the patient better in terms of how they interact with their doctor and their health care provider,” spokesman Ken Dey said.
The software solves some doctors’ dilemmas: They are often too busy to answer patients’ questions, and even when they do, patients who receive upsetting news often don’t remember it later and may have trouble conveying the gist to family members.
An example of Unity Medical’s technology is on the St. Luke’s Web site. An online assessment tool guides would-be patients through the process of finding out if they qualify for weight-loss surgery, which generally is restricted to the morbidly obese – people who are 100 pounds or more above their ideal body weight. Patients plug in their weight and height, then watch as a former news anchor with a script tells them whether they qualify. Viewers also can see patient stories, details of weight-loss surgeries and other bariatric topics.
Patients can share their own questions or comments or send messages or comments to their doctors, Boerner said. If they have the surgery, hours of additional video can be parceled out as patients first undergo surgery and then learn about how to maintain weight loss afterward. Releasing the videos gradually avoids overwhelming patients with too much information too quickly.
The company is working on ways to get the same messages delivered via iPhones and BlackBerrys.
“The real key is you don’t have to remember to come and get it (the video),” Boerner aid. “It comes to you.”
Doctors can arrange to be notified when their patients see the information or take a quiz on it. The completed quiz can be automatically routed to patients’ records.
Korn looks forward to taking fuller advantage of Unity’s programs. Educated patients are happier patients because they can work with their doctors to obtain the best results possible, he said.
“Once they grasp that stuff, they are in the groove,” Korn said.
December 28th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
:O So mUch Info :O