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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.

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Just click on the “Project 60 Video Journey” button in the center of the front page and you will hear straight from Governor Otter, Department of Commerce Director Don Dietrich and Idaho business leaders about the advantages of becoming a Project 60 Partner.
The videos introduce the
Project 60 concept, then walk you step by step through the three-tiered plan for strengthening both rural and urban communities, creating quality jobs that lead to careers, recruiting new companies to Idaho, and selling Idaho’s trade and investment opportunities to the world.
The videos also include Idaho business leaders who are Project 60 partners explaining why Idaho is such a great place to do business, and how their companies are teaming up with the state to help grow Idaho’s economy.
The video journey encourages business and industry leaders to share networking opportunities with their vendors and customers in other states, and invites them to become a partner for Idaho’s future.
“Project 60 belongs to all of us and we all need to be champions of this effort,” Governor Otter said. “Our partners at Unity Media Group in Eagle worked with us to create this short journey, or jLog™, because they know that growing Idaho’s economy is good for all of us. It’s our way of helping everyone participate in this process.”

“This is a very savvy technology audience, and they really liked Unity’s combination of video, decision support and education tools for health care consumers,” stated Health 2.0 co-founder Matthew Holt.

Building on technology developed for Unity Media Group’s iQuestions Web destination, products like the Wonder Bar, Journey Log, Ask an Expert and Smart Assessment Tool allow providers and patients to access information ranging from medical diagnoses, to guidance on procedures, to mental and physical health counseling.
Unity Medical was selected for its award from among 12 finalists, and judged by audience members representing over 400 technology and health care organizations.
“We’re delighted that the medical industry at Health 2.0 recognized the ability of our technologies to increase patient engagement and reduce the overall burden and costs on the health care system,” stated Unity Medical founder and CEO Michael Boerner.

Eagle technology start-up Unity Medical Inc., announced that the company won the audience award as the best new service at the Launch! competition at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Unity Medical unveiled its suite of media technologies that offer video interaction for health-care professionals. The Launch! audience award was given to the best technology presentation from 12 finalists and judged by audience representatives of more than 400 technology and health-care organizations at the conference.

Compiled by Pat Carson.

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The high-speed digital world has gone by a lot of names: the Information Age, the Digital Age, the Computer Age, the Connected Age. But Michael Boerner, founder and CEO?of Unity Medical, said his company has yet another term for it: “the New Normal.”

“Four years ago there was no such thing as video iPods, YouTube or television programs on the Internet. Since then, we have gone through a mass consumer behavioral shift,” he said. “The new normal way consumers prefer to learn is short-form video and social networking, and that is precisely how our tools have been designed to engage.”

According to Unity Medical COO Ken Holsinger, adapting to the New Normal has been especially difficult in the area of health care, where hospitals and providers are working to expand access just as physicians are struggling with regulatory issues and a sour economy.

Spun off earlier this year from Unity Media which Boerner also serves as founder and CEO, Eagle-based Unity Medical is working to push health care’s transition into the 21st century with a suite of software tools that take advantage of high-definition video, user interactivity and the power of the Web.

“We’re at a unique time where the holy grail of most industries is: ‘How can I make something more scalable, with a better user experience for less money and yet still differentiate my products?’” Holsinger said. “[The goal] for us is to be able to bring in a scalable tool that can do the education that the doctors don’t have time to do but with the face and personality of the doctor involved, and make that available when the patient is most focused.”

Fresh from an award-winning appearance at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco late last month, Holsinger said Unity Medical is pioneering a niche on the “bleeding edge” of what’s possible in health care delivery.

One way Unity Medical is pushing the envelope is with the Journey Log, or jLog.

Essentially a package of instructional videos centered on a specific subject, the jLog allows users to access step-by-step advice or information on a range of medical topics, from whether flu symptoms require hospital attention, to what to expect before, during and after surgery.

Holsinger said the video component enhances users’ experience, giving them remote access to physicians’ specialized knowledge complete with a friendly face, but it also frees up doctors and nurses to concentrate on more critical needs.

“We bring our production and film backgrounds to the table to almost act in a consultative manner to come in and help define processes and tell a story about what’s happening in a service line,” he said. “We want to be able to connect the patient to the doctors in ways they normally aren’t able to be connected.”

The jLog application is currently being tested by Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System, where COO Chris Roth said the technology “provides new ways to enhance the health care experience of our patients, their families, staff and physicians.”

Other products developed by Unity Medical include the Smart Assessment Tool, Ask an Expert and the Wonder Bar, all of which take advantage of the company’s catalog of “safe and trusted” content and blend it with interactive Web capabilities.

“We’ve taken the best of social networking and embedded it into our software and allowed for one-to-one commentary, one-to-a-group commentary or full-on public commentary,” Holsinger said. “Anywhere where you have a high level of expertise that needs to be transferred to someone in a very user friendly, scalable way, our tools make sense.”

Part of what’s driven Unity Medical’s development has been a trend away from destination Web sites and toward tailored, user-centric platforms, Holsinger said. Simply put, people don’t have the time anymore to sift through pages of data to find what they want – the new technologies demand instant access to relevant information.

“The destination Web site days have been difficult. You have to spend a tremendous amount of money advertising it, and when you go to a destination site it’s like going into a giant shopping mall but you’re looking for a pair of size 10 patent leather dress shoes,” he said. “I have to go through all of the candy, all of the women’s clothing and all the other stuff to get to the store that sells the right shoes. Or with the jLog somebody can send me the link to just those shoes and just fit me.

“If the destination Web site is the shopping mall then the jLog is the personal shopper.”

Looking forward, Holsinger envisions tools like the jLog becoming mainstream methods for knowledge delivery. Based on the high level of interest shown in Unity Medical’s offerings at the Health 2.0 Conference, where the company won the audience award for best new service, Holsinger is confident there’s plenty more room to innovate.

“We’re still a startup, we’re in the development mode and the partners we’re looking for are really unique. The contracts have to be large and they have to be willing to literally sign on and make a personnel investment into this,” he said. “The tools are easy, the hard part is compliance – getting people to stop using old methods that are expensive and ineffective and start using new methods.”
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