Core Care Medical launches app to help doctors, patients
Nils Bouwmeester and Stan McDaniel knew they had an idea with great potential: a simple way for Medicare patients to get the annual wellness visit recommended by the Affordable Care Act. By using iPads and a unique application that transmits on a secure Internet connection, Core Care Wellness was designed to improve patient care while making the process more efficient and cost-effective for health care providers.
Bouwmeester, who has a background in business development, sales and marketing, and McDaniel, a CPA and CFO of Carolina Medical Affiliates in Spartanburg, brought in a third principal, Scott Montgomery, who has been involved in funding and advisement for a variety of startups.
After fine-tuning the product for about a year, they set up their first clients on July 8 and have a team in place to begin Upstate sales July 15.
How did this idea originate?
Stan: I work in a multi-specialty practice, and Nils had helped us set up a clinical lab and other projects. I talked to him about a struggle we had in our office trying to conduct Medicare wellness visits. This is the third year they’ve been offered, but only 4 percent of Medicare patients have had them. The struggle is for the physician to do the questionnaire and the health risk assessment with the patient – it’s time-consuming. Also, patient education was missing.
Nils: Stan and I saw we could solve this issue. The traditional way, on paper, was too time-consuming, and for elderly patients, it’s not too fun to do 17 different sections by hand. So how can we make this really easy? There’s great technology available … (tablets) make it easy for patients to do the visit and easy for providers to review it, so it’s pleasing both sides.
Scott, how did you become involved?
Scott: Nils and I had talked about ideas – he has a million ideas. This was by far the best idea he ever brought me, his and Stan’s idea. Over several months, we settled on this solution. We did a lot of research and formalized the company in January of this year.
What were your next steps?
Scott: We hired a software company, Sparc, in Charleston. They helped us develop our survey.
Stan: We had to go to an application software developer that had experience in not only designing an app that is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, but storage of the information that is also HIPAA compliant.
Scott: There is no information on the tablet itself. If it is stolen or lost, there is no patient information because it’s all stored in Amazon’s Cloud.
What is included with your product?
Stan: We have a small licensing fee that includes the software, tablet and support, and then a small processing fee for visits conducted on our system, processing and archiving. We also have banners and brochures for the doctor’s offices, and a website, mywellnessvisit.com. It educates the patient so they know what to bring and what to expect. Folks don’t know to seek this benefit so we are trying to raise awareness.
How much time will the product save for doctors?
Nils: If doctors were doing these – and not many were doing them, simply because they didn’t have the time or manpower – you were spending 35-45 minutes on each one. With this, the provider time is approximately 10 minutes.
How is quality of care affected?
Nils: Core Care Wellness points out the highlights, and the physician can review every single answer or just the critical parts, if they filter the report. The patient gets a report as well, an assessment of their health situation and a personal prevention plan. We hope it helps patients lead healthier lives. For example, $28 billion is spent by Medicaid on broken hips each year, and that’s a cost to society. The survey can show if you are at high risk for falling, and the doctor can discuss this with you.
What was the biggest challenge in getting the business off the ground?
Stan: I learned how involved software development is and the challenges we presented to our developer. We had them build the foundation and the application at the same time, which was challenging. And in software, if you fix one bug, it might create another one.
Scott: I would agree. Raising capital wasn’t hard, finding employees wasn’t hard, the sales and marketing wasn’t hard. It was really developing the product.
What are your plans for the future?
Scott: This product can also do other types of surveys, so we can develop additional products like screens for drug study participation, patient satisfaction surveys and others.
We should have 10 employees by the end of the month. Our goal was to sell 20 tablets in July and we are on track to do that halfway through the month. We have interest in Miami, Mississippi, Minnesota and Texas.
Nils: We are proud we can do this in the Upstate. We have an entrepreneurial community, a high-end medical community, state-of-the art facilities, highly educated doctors. It’s very exciting to be launching this in our own backyard, but our market will be nationwide. Our primary focus on the short run is to capture our own state and then expand out.
