Aidin, a startup that helps people find better continuing care after they leave the hospital, is announcing today that it has raised $600K from General Catalyst, HLM, Red Swan and a band of angels and physicians from the healthcare space. The startup, a member of the NYC healthtech accelerator Blueprint Health, will use the funding to accelerate its growth and keep rampin’ up that team. Everyone needs more developers these days.
But what does this healthtech company do? Well, you shouldn’t want to go there anyway, but hospitals need patients to find better care providers after they leave the hospital. Because they keep coming back. In the U.S., one in four Medicare patients are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, and readmissions have a $17.4 billion price tag for hospitals.
This is especially true for “post-acute care,” or the care you receive after leaving the hospital to recover from an acute illness, injury or from surgery. Traditionally, “post-acute care” has meant care for elderly patients after they leave the hospital, but that’s changing. There are 25K post-acute care providers in the U.S. that deal with all ages, according to Aidin co-founder Russ Graney, which include nursing homes, health agencies, and rehab centers. And there’s a huge variability in care at all of them.
To get better outcomes and avoid going back to the hospital, patients need better information, but hospitals can’t tell their patients which care facilities to choose — no objective ratings or reviews of the providers to help them find a good one.
So, Aidin helps patients (or their families) make the right choice post-hospital by providing them with up-to-date ratings and reviews of the available providers in their area, as well as giving them data around the outcomes of each providers’ patients. 50 percent have gone right back to the hospital? Well, probably want to avoid that one.
The information they provide, Graney tells us, is customized to their specific conditions and needs, so that, say, a patient needing follow-up wound care will see ratings for providers that have really nailed wound care — not postnatal care. This includes ratings and reviews from patients who’ve received that specific treatment from that specific provider. In a sense, they’re trying to create the Yelp for continuing care — but which makes hospital staffs’ lives easier, too.
Through Aidin, hospital staff can easily create referrals, share provider ratings with their patients, enter the patient’s choice in the system, as well as take advantage of eMessaging and emailing. The idea is by integrating this into hospitals’ existing infrastructure they can help them save hospitals money on readmissions, documentation, etc. And for patients, it’s a much more effective way to be matched with the right care provider.
As to where the startup plans to make money? They haven’t decided concretely on a business model yet, but potential revenue streams could come from hospital subscriptions, lead-gen/transaction fees for providers, etc. Though it’s somewhat of a niche market, there is some competition from electronic referral systems like ECIN and Curaspan, but with a fresh Web 2.0 interface and some ease of use, Aidin thinks it can do it better.
Aidin here, product demo here.