On June 7, Agathos joined 20 other digital health companies, more than 500 attendees, and around 200 viewers on live stream to showcase Agathos' physician engagement platform to hospital leaders, physicians, investors, and the media at the Texas Medical Center (TMC) in Houston, Texas.
TMCx is a health IT accelerator hosted by Houston’s Texas Medical Center (TMC), the world’s largest medical complex. TMC is a member-based organization that includes leading health systems, such as CHI St. Luke’s Health, Memorial Hermann, Houston Methodist, Texas Children’s Hospital, and MD Anderson. TMCx’s program is a great entry point into the Houston’s vibrant healthcare ecosystem.
In his pitch, Andrew Trees, Co-Founder and CEO announced a new partnership with CHI St. Luke’s Health, The Woodlands Hospital.
The Agathos Pitch: Reducing Clinical Variation through Physician Engagement
“Too often hospital physicians are imprecisely evaluated on outcomes-level metrics and receive little—if any—feedback on their action-level practice patterns and decisions. The result is an inefficient delivery of coaching and inefficient delivery of care.”
Andrew Trees, CEO and Co-Founder pitching Agathos at TMCx Demo Day
Can we get a raise of hands for everyone super passionate about health analytics? Alright, then let’s talk basketball, imagine Mike D’Antoni telling Harden, “Make more baskets!"
Or imagine a school administrator telling a struggling teacher, “Get those test scores up!”
Now, imagine a hospitalist being told, “Reduce your patients’ length of stay!” This isn’t feedback. Good feedback is immediate, specific, and actionable but for many reasons, this is very difficult in hospital medicine.
Too often hospital physicians are imprecisely evaluated on outcomes-level metrics and receive little—if any—feedback on their action-level practice patterns and decisions. The result is an inefficient delivery of coaching and inefficient delivery of care.
Reducing unwarranted variation in care is a shared goal for physicians and administrators yet it's grueling work, and physicians still at best feel missed by current solutions. Health data is notoriously cumbersome, and inpatient medicine has a particular challenge of attribution.
Agathos tackles these problems head-on. Our ultimate goal is better outcomes: reduced length of stay, lower total cost of care, reduced readmissions.
However, outcomes are primarily driven by factors beyond the physician’s control. Agathos has automated and scaled the work it takes to isolate these factors and identify useful insights.
A hospitalist gets a notification on their smart device. Feedback on repeat daily lab orders, which is algorithmically filtered as relevant to them.
Using peer comparison and case examples, hospitalists arrive at their own conclusions about what – if anything – to do or how they might approach their next shifts differently.
This represents dozens of insights they could receive, on actions such as labs, imaging orders, consults, and when and where to discharge a patient.
Agathos also delivers outcomes metrics refreshed nightly, individualized through our attribution approach that accounts for each physician’s influence.
Meanwhile, team leaders receive the same transparency into individual users’ insights. Agathos’ value proposition to hospitals and hospital physicians is better-individualized metrics, actionable feedback specific to individual practice patterns, and higher-quality, lower-cost care driven by physician-led behavior change.
At our first customer, MDP, on average 59% of physician users engaged with each insight. We have already seen a 28% relative increase in early morning discharges, 15% lower length of stay in the past year, saving over five thousand bed days and hundreds of averted unnecessary lab orders… and counting. MDP’s work with Agathos was selected in the Top 15 innovations at Hospital Medicine 2018.
Our team is expert in data integration, health analytics, and behavioral economics, including several colleagues from EPIC and Dr. Michael van Duren, who led pioneering variation reduction work at Sutter Health and we are pleased to welcome TMC Innovation into our team of digital health partners.
Feedback is always challenging in complex disciplines, whether in sports or hospital medicine... leaders often ask, “We have a great team, and I know we can perform better… but how?”
Agathos can demo with real data in weeks, and prove behavior change and ROI in months.
CHI St. Luke’s Health, The Woodlands Partners with Agathos
Agathos is pleased to announce we are going live with CHI St. Luke’s Health, The Woodlands, in July and we have almost two dozen mid-stage opportunities spanning academic and community systems across the country. After landing the EPIC hospitalist market, Agathos will expand across provider type, service line, and other EHR systems.
Agathos and TMCx
We were fortunate enough to participate in the TMCx program and look forward to further collaboration with the TMCx team.
The Agathos Pitch at TMCx Demo Day
About Author
