As the burden of pensions increases, everyone is increasingly afraid that pensions will be overdrawn. However, overseas, data show that the number of emergency department visits in the United States is 136.3 million people each year, and the number of people admitted to the hospital through emergency departments each year is 16.2 million. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid states that two-thirds of emergency department visits are unnecessary (wasting approximately $4 billion), and 10 percent of emergency room visits come from nursing homes.
In the United States, the average waiting time for a medical ambulance is about 15 minutes (the waiting time may be longer under special circumstances), and the waiting time from getting in the ambulance to the emergency room is about 40 minutes. During the 65 minutes that patients wait for emergency treatment, they often miss the best opportunity for treatment.
In order to solve the pain points of the industry, Call9 has launched a telemedicine service to help patients get treatment from professional doctors in a short time, while also saving a lot of manpower, material and financial resources. How does Call9 do this, saving 78% of the time and 94.4% of costs for the healthcare system while allowing patients to stay more comfortably in their nursing home beds? The founders of
Walk Out of the Emergency Room
Call9 are the brainchild of two doctors: Celina Tenev, a postdoctoral researcher in radiology at Stanford University, and Timothy Peck, formerly a professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. The two met while working part-time for a startup (now defunct), and together they discussed the problems they discovered while working in emergency rooms—treating many non-essential patients, ten percent of whom came from nursing homes.
In order to gain a deeper understanding, Dr. Peck spent three months working and living with nursing staff and the elderly in nursing homes, and found three reasons for this phenomenon:
1. The ratio of direct nursing staff to patients is 1:5;
2. Nursing home staff do not have diagnostic capabilities;
3. Doctors and other senior medical clinicians do not provide round-the-clock services.
In a nursing home, if someone is sick, they are cared for by a nurse. There are limited diagnostic equipment available and a lack of doctors trained in emergency treatment, so in the event of an emergency, the patient has to be sent to the emergency room.
They started thinking seriously about how to solve this problem. With the help of Stanford University computer science graduate Xiao Songmu (technical co-founder), an application was made to help patients in need of emergency medical treatment so that they can receive treatment as quickly as possible.
About Call9
Patients are receiving Call9 treatment (Picture source: YOUTOBE video, compiled by Artery Network reporter)
Call9 is an alternative to 911 (American emergency telephone number) in nursing homes. When an emergency occurs for a patient in a nursing home, the nursing staff will activate Call9, and then the specialist nurse equipped by Call9 in the nursing home will quickly come to the patient's bedside and connect to the emergency doctor through Call9's HIPAA (US security regulations for protecting the privacy of medical information data) security technology platform, so that the emergency doctor can quickly judge the condition and propose a treatment plan. Call9 provides technical support for doctors to monitor the patient's vital signs and decide whether treatment should be performed by a specialist nurse (under the guidance of the doctor) or further sent to the hospital for treatment.
Call9 is equipped with three to eight specialist nurses in each embedded nursing home. They work shifts according to the time, ensuring that they can quickly reach the patient's bedside 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and care for the patient through Call9's technology and doctor's guidance. Surveys show that 80% of patients treated by Call9 are able to receive treatment directly in nursing home care beds, avoiding unnecessary, expensive and emergency room trips that often delay the best time to treat their condition. The development history of
Call9
Call9 was founded in 2015 as a platform to provide telemedicine to patients in emergencies. As of September 2017, the company had raised three rounds of funding in just two years, totaling more than $34 million.
Call9 investment and financing situation (data source: Crunchbase)
data shows that Tenev and Peck joined the incubator Y Combinator in June 2015.According to Tenev, Call9 treated their first patient on July 15, and in a three-month pilot of about 264 patients, Call9 successfully prevented 55% of patients from going to the emergency room. As of Series A financing, Call9 has been launched in three nursing homes in New York and claims to have saved three lives.
Call9’s Series A financing was led by Index Ventures. Its co-founder Neil Rimer subsequently joined Call9’s board of directors to jointly promote the implementation of Call9 in more nursing homes.
Call9’s Series B round was in September 2017. This time Call9 raised $24 million. The company intends to use the funds to expand a new roadmap, develop new technology platforms, and develop go-to-market strategies for new locations.
Call9’s business model
Currently, Call9 has about two to three hundred employees. After three years of development, it has gradually formed its own business model.
For every patient, Call9 is committed to using empathy. The focus is on making the patient as comfortable as possible during a medical emergency and ensuring multi-party coordination of care centered on the patient's wishes. Call9 has its own user experience designer, who can not only ensure patient comfort in this aspect, but palliative care is also a key training content of Call9, helping patients relieve symptoms, reduce pain, and improve quality of life.
In recent years, due to high admission rates in nursing homes, the government has penalized nursing homes that repeatedly sent patients to the hospital within a 30-day period. Some government officials believe repeated admissions are not only costly but also a sign that the facility is not properly caring for its patients. Nursing homes ordering Call9 equipment is also a measure to reduce penalties. At the same time, the drugs, diagnosis, treatment, and care provided by Call9 to patients are reimbursed by the insurance company that has signed an agreement with Call9.
One of the cores of Call9 is the specialist nurses at Call9, that is, on-site first responders. They are mainly trained medical staff. Some are emergency doctors, and others are physician assistants and medical students. They are all capable of handling emergencies. In addition, Call9's medical director Kevin Biese, who studies geriatric emergency medicine, provides twice-monthly geriatric continuing education for specialist nurses. Another aspect of
's core capabilities are technology-driven devices that allow doctors to click on the Call9 app to access a detailed dashboard of electronic medical records, patient workflow, remote sensing monitoring and diagnostic results. Doctors can access multiple cameras at the same time when talking to patients through a tablet. In the upper left corner is telemetry. Through the dashboard, the patient's electrocardiogram, pulse rate and heart rate can be monitored in real time to understand the patient's vital signs.
(Picture source: CNBC website, compiled by Arterial Network reporter)
Call9 has modified the medical car in the nursing home according to actual needs, and equipped it with top-notch equipment, such as a portable electrocardiogram, pulse tester and ultrasonic examination equipment for detecting abnormal heart rhythms, to facilitate remote consultation.
(Source: Call9 official website compiled by Artery Network reporters)
In the American medical system, the emergency room is one of the most expensive medical expenditures. For minor medical problems, the average emergency room charge at Missouri hospitals is as high as $372, with some hospitals charging as much as $1,300, according to the Missouri Hospital Association.
With an iPhone and supporting equipment, Call9 can save the health care system and taxpayers more than $40 million, while also keeping patients away from the hospital and conserving medical resources.
Similar foreign companies
Since Call9 is involved in the field of elderly care, this article selects companies including elderly care for analysis.
(Source: compiled by crunchbase reporter)
Cera
Cera was founded in November 2016. It is a home care platform based on the Internet and artificial intelligence to help the elderly receive care and support in the community. Its services include elderly care, palliative care, dementia care, etc.Co-founded by Dr. Ben Maruthappu and Marek Sacha, the company is able to respond to patient needs within an hour and provide same-day care 96% of the time through Cera's automated matching and scheduling system. Cera has lower overhead costs compared to traditional nursing companies, and the company pays caregivers 50% more than the industry average while still providing affordable rates to clients.
Kindly Care
Kindly Care was founded in 2014 and is the leading elderly care platform organization in the United States. It finds suitable caregivers for the elderly in need of care and cooperates with their families to manage the caregivers. Use Kindly Care's mobile app to manage caregivers, check in, and process payments.
Caring.com
Caring.com Founded in 2007, Caring.com is an online network platform that provides information and support to customers, dedicated to helping customers save time and money, and reduce loneliness and stress when facing the many challenges of care. Caring.com provides personal, one-on-one guidance, home care, health and wellness articles, and convenient tools for seniors. As mentioned in the
review, the difference between Call9 and the above-mentioned companies is obvious. Call9 is an institution that provides emergency care in nursing homes. Its advantage is that it provides emergency medical care for emergencies. It can also provide palliative care at the bedside of patients. It can be said that it is a product that fills a gap in the market. Call9's entry point happens to be a pain point in elderly care - the lack of emergency response capabilities. As the U.S. government improves the emergency medical system, the market for Call9 will become a blue ocean.
Similar companies in domestic elderly care
In the field of elderly care, our country can be said to have made initial progress, but it is almost blank in terms of emergency care. According to a previous report by Arterial Network (WeChat ID: vcbeat), with the aging of the population, domestic elderly care platforms have also achieved certain development. This article selects several typical elderly care platforms for analysis.
Qingsong Health Care
Qingsong Rehabilitation and Nursing Group Qingsong Health Care Group was founded in 2004, pioneering home functional rehabilitation care in my country. Over the past ten years, it has developed into an elderly health industry chain integrating Qingsong Care Network, Qingsong Health +, Qingsong Academy, and Qingsong Preferred. It provides professional and standardized long-term care and rehabilitation nursing services to the elderly, disabled people, and people in recovery period after illness and surgery who live at home and in the community. Customers contact Qingsong Health Care through an online application. Qingsong Health Care will then come to assess the physical condition and then formulate a plan. Finally, Qingsong Health Care will provide on-site services.
Xiaobaijiahu
Xiaobaijiahu was founded in 2015. It is a professional elderly care operation company originated from the United States and based in Ningbo, relying on the Internet technology platform. It mainly provides home care and professional hospital accompanying services for the elderly, as well as professional nursing training business. Xiaobai Home Care uses the Internet as a carrier, integrates online and offline, and has established a complete Internet-based transaction process and management concept that leads the industry. It has formed a set of core service processes including server-side classification management, intelligent demand matching, online nursing logs, and pathological data collection. It uses Internet thinking to improve the current demand pain points of asymmetric information between supply and demand for professional home care, non-standard services, difficult evaluation of effects, and opaque prices.
Qingmeng Senior Care
Qingmeng Senior Care was founded in 2014. It is a company with the purpose of "model innovation, cross-border integration, professional services, and win-win cooperation" and integrates senior care and health talent education, senior care and health services, senior care and health high-tech research and development, and senior care and health O2O.
Qingmeng's care system has realized full-service standard IT. The elderly portrait system accurately depicts the elderly through more than 1,000 indicators, provides personalized care plans for the elderly and updates them monthly; caregivers receive care tasks through the APP to perform services for the elderly; the above data generates care logs and sends them to the elderly's children every day, making them feel at ease.At the same time, the elderly's physical index data is tracked every day, and the index changes are displayed in the form of charts every month to visualize the effects of care and intuitively understand the improvement of physical functions.
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