About our project
The problem we solve: Most patients come into chronic condition states as novices and they need to acquire expertise as fast as possible. This is true of the patient’s caregivers and family as well. They need to report care plan and treatment adherence on a regular basis. This is the group that currently has the fewest tools needed to manage the complexity, learning and communication.
About our solution:
The solution Christy Health offers extends the goals offered in the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020. Complex patients and their caregivers are highly motivated to learn the ‘boundaries’ of their good health states and to frequently monitor their current condition. These insights can be used to judge health state transitions. Health care providers are a good starting place for the accumulation of health data, however, it is not sufficient. In-home acquired data is an important untapped data source, which when combined with provider generated data, yields a substantially more complete view.
We deploy an unconstrained natural language conversational agent. So long as both ends of the conversation are using sufficiently computable language both sides of the conversation will be able to obtain the information they are after and use it in additional rounds of dialog.
Progress to
date:
- Alpha, Beta and in some cases MVP software
- A website offering MVP software. This is the beginning of the Community (free) Tier offering
- Proof development of FHIR API integration to CMS Blue Button 2, EPIC,and Cerner
- We use a private GitHub for software repository and control, and Slack developer communication
- Conversation agent
- Computation engine
- Grammar parser
- A small testing user group
About Our Team
Creator: Mitch Stonehocker
Location: New Jersey
Education: University of Wisconsin
Bio: Mitch has worked in the financial industry for more than 35 years. He earned a BBA from the University of Wisconsin majoring in finance and economics. Starting as an options market maker in Chicago, he later taught quantitative finance classes at the university level for the trading staff of global banks. Starting in 2000 he had various consulting and management responsibilities for financial industry software vendors Reuters and SunGard (now FIS). Most recently Mitch is using his technology and analytical experience to build Christy Health.
Hospital Affiliation: None
Title: President
Advanced Degree(s): BS Finance and Economics
About Team Members
Anton Antonov
Quant, Ph.D.
Biography: Anton has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from DTU (Denmarks Tekniske Universitet). With knowledge of parallel programming, functional programming, object-oriented programming and design patterns and experience developing and applying various machine learning algorithms (classification, regression, time series, etc.) he has designed, prototyped, and implemented recommendations systems. Anton is leading Christy Health efforts in natural language processing, combinatorial optimization, domain specific language design and interpretation, and conversational agents design and programming.
Title: Quant
Advanced Degree(s): Ph.D.
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anton-antonov-89a8797/
Alan Calvitti
Data Science, Ph.D.
Biography: Alan has a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has been lead data analyst on several Federally funded projects, primarily time-and-motion and usability studies of Electronic Health Records in clinical settings. Additionally, Al has developed algorithms and codes for analysis of clinical and computer workflow; participated as subject matter expert in usability in VHA health IT national initiatives. Most recently Al has analyzed healthcare time series data related to patient account receivables from Epic and other clinical RCM sources. He developed machine learning analysis algorithms and models for econometric forecasting.
Title: Data Science
Advanced Degree(s): Ph.D.
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-calvitti-phd-85764211/
Christine Galan
EVP, BA
Biography: Christine has a long and complex health history. Every day for 30 years she has been on a drug regimen, had some treatment, or encountered some debilitating health episode. This situation has not slowed her down from being productively employed in a small business over all those years, volunteering for her favorite charities, enjoying family and friends, and now, helping to build Christy Health. She earned a Liberal Arts degree from the University of San Diego.
Title: EVP
Advanced Degree(s): BA
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-galan-b65913a/
How We Help Patients
What does it take to bring data, computation, understanding and communication to a single view point? In the healthcare industry it takes a radically simple idea. The patient! The patient’s data conveys information about the patients’ health states over time. So, where is the patient’s data? How can the patient get it, organize it, compute with it, learn from it, and communicate with it?
There is an identifiable patient population that is highly motivated to monitor and understand their health states regularly; many times per day. These people live with volatile health state transitions. They need the tools to complete a rather easy set of tasks that produces deep understanding of health states. Christy Health delivers the ability to show a complete history of health states, suspicion of health state changes and the ability to share this information with care teams.
Patients with chronic conditions have enormous in-home challenges. The challenge we address is in-home data capture, management, computation, and communication. Christy Health offers a consumer software as a service (SaaS) that combines easy to use data capture and communication capabilities with autonomous analytical modules that anyone can use. Data is captured multi-modal in-home and using FHIR APIs to CMS Blue Button 2, SMART FHIR EPIC and Cerner in-hospital.
How We Help Physicians
The Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020 is clearly laying the ground work needed to put patient data in patient hands. For complex patients the communications with provider care teams will change. Many patients and their caregivers will take on more responsiblity - if they have the tools to do so. Christy Health is such a tool.
How We Help Hospitals
The Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020 is clearly laying the ground work needed to put patient data in patient hands. For complex patients the communications with provider care teams will change. Many patients and their caregivers will take on more responsiblity - if they have the tools to do so. Christy Health is such a tool.
Challenge Mission
Key Milestones Achieved and Planned
Our Competitive Advantages
Funding, Partners and Alliances To Date
Innovation Details
Intellectual Property Summary
- Proprietary unconstrained natural language conversational agent
- Proprietary text to grammar parser
- Proprietary computational pipeline constructor
- Proprietary Analytic Engine
- Proprietary APIs (that can be exposes when desired) that wire parts 1 to 4 together and to the world
Clinical Information
No FDA requirement.
Regulatory Status
No FDA requriement.
How we will use the funds raised
There are three roles in need of effort:
1) Web front end
2) Web back end
3) Marketing, sales, and business development
The current website, analytics engine, and test user outreach was created to test the ideas technical viability. the coversation agent and computational grammars capability has been sufficently competed to begin releasing to the public. This release requires a new web interface that extents the existing offering. This work has started but committed resources will excellerate completion. Addtionally, adding a marketing, sales, and business development will start the first push for revenue.
Thank You
I'm frequently asked, why are you doing this? After all, my background is in the financial industry. My answer is - Easy, Christine and I need it. When her kidneys started to fail I had to start learning fast. The problem was, there is so much data from so many sources how could I ever make sense of it? Christy Health is the result and we believe it can help people like us, living with complex health conditions, to learn faster, monitor better, and communicate more confidently.
