In our latest interview, we’ve got some answers from Bioscape Digital’s CMO Jon Harmer, who leads product management, marketing, and strategic business development for the company. He has spent the last fifteen years guiding innovative technologies to market in startups and big companies.
Here’s what he had to say about Bioscape and the overall mHealth sector:
How would you pitch Bioscape Digital?
Bioscape Digital provides a patient engagement platform that delivers relevant information into health systems utilizing mobile (tablet) technology. It empowers patients to engage in their health, enables providers to practice medicine more effectively and elevates health systems to the next level in quality of care. We enable providers to alter the entire patient experience and ultimately drive care that leaves a lasting impression.
Our platform places proprietary tablets loaded with health related multimedia content into patient rooms in the Emergency Department as well as in-patient settings and Imaging centers. The service also allows providers to give patients discharge instructions through the platform, to get them to sign-up for patient portal, and to collect patient feedback so that it can be addressed before the patient fills out an HCAHPS form that could negatively affect the hospital’s ratings.
What sets you apart from competitors?
Bioscape’s platform is a PATIENT FIRST, customizable platform delivering relevant and timely information. By focusing exclusively on hospitals, Bioscape has created a one of a kind, intuitive and optimized experience for the patient. Driving the best QUALITY OF CARE.
What’s your business model?
We sell our platform to major hospital groups for a initial setup fee and a recurring monthly fee. The platform is a fully managed service, hospital IT does not need to be involved.
Can you share some numbers? How many users do you have?
We have a current annualized run rate of about 1 million patients a year, and are on pace to be over 4 million by the end of the year.
Where do you see Bioscape Digital going from here?
Our main focus has been the ER so far, but the obvious next steps (which we have already started taking) are to expand the platform further into the inpatient experience, first with surgical patients and then throughout the rest of the hospital.
Where do you see the mHealth industry going?
I think as meaningful use mandates push more and more patients into online health portals, people will want to access that info from their mobile phones and tablets. Over time, I think more patients will adopt technologies like Prime to aggregate that health data in one place. Bioscape will be able to ride the mHealth wave forward as we facilitate that entry point when the patient is most likely to be thinking about these issues: when they are in the ER or the hospital.
How long are we from seeing modern mHealth technologies going mainstream?
We are right on the verge of mHealth being mainstream. In addition to all of the Meaningful Use driven innovations, there are also a ton of wearables out there, as well as Apple’s HealthKit, Samsung’s SAMI and Google Fit. I believe we will continue to see people using tools like this to monitor their health and fitness (which are obviously interrelated) in real time, and using their mobile devices to aggregate that data and push it into their health records. There is also a good bit of momentum behind chronic disease management with mobile devices, which will also push mHealth forward into the mainstream.