About our project
The problem we solve: For patients and caregivers, there are typically a number of different touchpoints that they are expected to juggle throughout their healthcare experience with their provider. This could take the form of a patient portal, patient educational materials, medical device support, or even a medication regimen. All of these touchpoints are managed in different places, in different mediums.
The end result of this balancing act is poorer patient experiences and outcomes due to a lack of consolidation and ease of access. CoHealth is solving this problem by providing a single point of access for the entire healthcare journey: before, during, and after an interaction with a healthcare provider.
We work with provider networks to ensure that their patients have everything they need in a single place to more effectively manage and coordinate their care.
About our solution:
CoHealth is a mobile platform delivered to patients and caregivers by providers. The platform is downloaded on mobile devices, where users can then select their provider, select their recommended care plan(s), and thereupon gain access to a suite of educational content and care management tools that have been vetted and supported by providers for their patients.
Existing patient educational libraries are often fragmented; CoHealth digitizes all existing materials for ease of access for patients while providing patients with useful tools like medication and appointment reminders, tracking/graphing/exporting of key measurements like weight, pain scales, blood pressure, and more.
The platform is "light-weight", easy to launch and scale, and has currently been launched in 30 hospital networks, over 100+ departments, and over 100 primary care environments.
Progress to
date:To date, CoHealth is live in over 30 hospital systems, over 100 departments, and 100+ primary care environments, and we have partnered with global brands like Medtronic and RBC to help with distribution as they grow and scale.
Our product is in market and is actively being distributed to patients today in a variety of care environments. CoHealth is positioned as an ecosystem agnostic system and is serving patients in: emergency, surgery, oncology, cardiology, maternity & women's health, primary care, and other environments.
Our platform has generated preliminary data demonstrating a reduction in length of stay for surgery patients as well as a reduction in paper education printing costs for our provider partners.
About Our Team
Creator: Zack Rothbart
Location: Ontario
Education: Osgoode Hall Law School, Schulich School of B
Bio: Zack Fisch Rothbart is the CEO & Co-Founder of CoHealth. CoHealth is a patient relationship platform gives patients a single point of access for their entire healthcare experience. The platform is currently distributed in over 30 provider networks across North America and has helped tens of thousands of patients manage and coordinate care. As a patient, Zack himself fell through the cracks in the healthcare system after developing a complication that nearly cost him his leg. This experience motivated him to found CoHealth.
Zack studied in the joint JD/MBA program at Osgoode Hall Law School & the Schulich School of Business. He holds a Bachelor's degree in History from the University of Waterloo, is a 2x start-up founder, and graduated from the Next 36, 2016 cohort in which he was selected as one of the top 36 entrepreneurs in Canada of the year.
Title: CEO & Co-Founder
How We Help Patients
CoHealth has conducted thousands of patient and stakeholder interviews. The feedback across the board is resounding: patients and caregivers are expected to juggle a large number of touchpoints throughout their healthcare experience. A touchpoint could be a patient portal with medical record access, patient education information scattered across various mediums, a medication regimen or even information and support for a medical device. All of these touchpoints live in different places and are fragmented and separated from one another throughout the patient experience.
By acting as a single point of entry for patients, CoHealth consolidates this experience, and brings everything together into a single place to help patients more effectively manage their care. Resources come directly from provider networks, and CoHealth is co-branded with provider branding to ensure that patients feel a sense of trust towards the tools and resources they are able to access through the platform.
This consolidation has generated preliminary data showing that CoHealth improves patient experiences as well as patient outcomes; in a recent preliminary evaluation, CoHealth reduced the length of stay for hip/knee replacement patients by multiple days.
How We Help Physicians
This section is applicable to various provider stakeholders, be it independent physicians, hospital networks, or primary care organizations. Please disregard the next question regarding how CoHealth helps hospitals, as a result.
CoHealth supports both hospitals and primary care providers and pulls a number of key-value levers in this regard.
Hospitals:
- Often have fragmented systems and touchpoints with patients that require consolidation and ease of access. CoHealth brings all of these resources and tools together to better support patients.
- Improved outcomes = reduced readmissions penalties, better supported and engaged patients, as well as improved patient experiences translating to improved paitent retention and loyalty
- CoHealth can support networks to ensure patients stay within the networks they trust most so as to reduce patient leakage
- Data reporting to support insight generation into patient populations; faster and cheaper than traditional surveying techniques
Primary Care:
- Fee for Service: Increased patient throughput; questions can be answered on CoHealth before/after a visit for patients/caregivers so more time can be spent supporting more patients in office
- Capitation: better support in communities means healthier patient populations and fewer office visits as a result
Both Hospitals/Primary Care
- Extended brand recognition and support into communities to better support patients at home
How We Help Partners
CoHealth works with a variety of distribution partners in a number of verticals. Our focus is on partnering with firms with large, multinational organizations that operate core businesses that can be complemented by our patient relationship platform. We are actively working with firms like RBC and Medtronic in this pursuit to increase their competitiveness while working alongside their business units to leverage their distribution.
With Medtronic, we are bidding on joint hospital RFPs to fill the gaps where Medtronic as a medical device company wants to work with partners to support their core device business.
With RBC we are offering CoHealth at a discount to their healthcare client banking base to help RBC increase customer loyalty while also helping them draw business away from their competitors.
These are two examples of real partners we are working with today. More partnerships are in progress now to work with other stakeholders that may not be the most visible part of the patient journey, but their footprint and distribution potentials are incredibly meaningful for CoHealth's growth trajectory.
Challenge Mission
Key Milestones Achieved and Planned
In the past 18 months CoHealth has scaled into over 30 health systems, 100+ departments, and 100 primary care environments. We've formed partnerships with global firms like RBC and Medtroinc to help us with distribution as we grow and scale our company. All of this has been accomplished on a shoestring budget - a previous angel raise of $500,000 and a bridge financing of $200,000 CAD.
Over the next 6 months CoHealth will be executing on two key objectives from a business standpoint, namely:
1) Closing of Seed Round: CoHealth will be closing a seed round financing of $2M USD to help the company scale its team and execute on key projects in multiple markets to support growth initiatives. The team will grow from 8 to 19 with the majority of hiring taking place on the business development and engineering teams to support additional sales operations/client support as well as product development moving forward.
2) Go-Live of key projects: CoHealth is currently in the planning phases of launching a number of key strategic projects, such as a reselling partnership with RBC into their healthcare client banking base, joint bids on hospital RFPs with Medtronic, and a distribution partnership with a partner in the Middle East with distribution in 13 countries in the gulf. This additional financing round will support the go-live of these projects, and others that are in our pipeline now.
Our Competitive Advantages
CoHealth distinguishes itself in the market in a number of ways. First and foremost the platform is ecosystem agnostic; CoHealth is serving patient populations in surgery, oncology, cardiology, maternity, primary care, and other environments. The platform provides system-level coverage for health systems to ensure that CoHealth can be used to support the needs of any patient population at any time, negating the need for multiple vendor relationships surrounding patient education and support.
Second, the platform's content library is proprietary. CoHealth retains a worldwide license to educational content shared by our clients with their patients through our platform in single-payer markets. This has translated into the building of a robust suite of education that can be shared with clients in our pipeline in the event they do not have an existing suite of educational materials or would like to compliment the existing educational resources they share with their patient populations.
CoHealth has actively displaced a number of competitors from current client sites given the robustness of our platform.
Barriers to Entry
It is hard to make meaningful change in healthcare. That is why CoHealth has aligned itself early with large strategic distribution partners that have the footprint and capacity to help us scale into multiple markets with their resources and local market expertise. We are not active in every market RBC or Medtronic work in, but they have teams and offices in multiple markets to assist with RFPs/distribution as the case may be. By complementing their core businesses and by adding value to their healthcare clients we can work together towards the goal of mutually increasing competitiveness and increasing our footprint and distribution potential as a result.
Funding, Partners and Alliances To Date
To date, CoHealth has raised two previous rounds of financing, an angel round of $500,000 CAD, and a bridge round financing of $700,000. Investors including individuals and angel networks in and around the Toronto region, as well as institutions like the University of Toronto and the Provincial Government of Ontario through their investment arm, the Ontario Centres of Excellence. It is our intention to raise a seed round of $2M USD to amplify growth efforts to scale our team. This will propel us 18-24 months and set the company up for an additional Series A raise.
Revenue
CoHealth is actively generating revenue, however this is not our priority at this stage in our business. Actively enlarging our footprint of healthcare providers distributing CoHealth, and using that footprint as an opportunity to secure additional distribution partners in multiple markets to help us build a foundation for distribution to help us scale in the future.
Our first reporting year was 2017.
2017: $75,000
2018: $412,000
YTD 2019: $300,000
Innovation Details
Intellectual Property Summary
CoHealth is a software company. The current legal landscape of pursuing software patents is tenuous given recent court decisions in the US/Canada. In summary, software patents are expensive and time-consuming endeavours with little enforceability and as a result we have not pursued patent protection as of today.
CoHealth retains a worldwide license to care provider education content that is digitized on our platform in single-payer markets. We can reuse this content in subsequent client sites to complement existing patient education libraries with trusted resources from existing organizations that have partnered with CoHealth. CoHealth is not a content company; we do not want to hire patient education staff as we feel as though this is a highly unscalable endeavour. Rather, we have outsourced the creation of educational content to our existing client base in single-payer markets and can leverage this to help us grow.
Patent Link
N/A
Clinical Information
CoHealth has generated preliminary data surrounding a reduction in length of stay for surgery patients (hip and knee replacement patients specifically). The data collected was aggregated through an evaluation looking at "pre" CoHealth and "post" CoHealth in a specific patient population in a partnered site.
CoHealth reduced hip replacement patient LoS from 7 days to 1.96 days and knee surgery patients LoS from 3.4 to 2.15 days. While there were a number of quality initiatives implemented at the same time along CoHealth for hip replacement patients, no such additional quality initiatives were implemented for knee replacement patients. The reduction was evidenced through CoHealth being able to reduce or eliminate pre-hab visits to hospital in advance of surgery, as well as providing patients with greater peace of mind and expectation setting post-op to encourage discharge.
While this data was preliminary, it was so meaningful to this particular client site that they have now scaled us from one hospital into six of their locations and are conducting a more thorough examination of the CoHealth platform as a result of this.
Regulatory Status
N/A
How we will use the funds raised
CoHealth is aggressively pursuing growth opportunities in multiple markets, including the United States and the Middle East. These funds would make a meaningful impact on our business development efforts by supporting the costs of onboarding a business development hire in the North-Eastern United States to support our growth efforts in the region. We already have an experienced account executive candidate in our pipeline for this role with over 20 years of sales experience with provider networks and a strong existing network/rolodex to sell into. We feel as though this individual will be able to help us close between $150,000 - $250,000 new business in the first 12 months of being on-boarded full-time with us.
Thank You
CoHealth was started by Zack Fisch Rothbart, our CEO & Co-Founder, after he underwent his own personal patient experience. He developed a preventable complication after breaking his leg in a freak sporting accident that progressed to the point his leg was nearly amputated. That experience ignited a passion for healthcare and an understanding that the current methods in place for patient support are insufficient to provide proper support and care. Our company is built with the patient experience as our number one priority because we ourselves have lived through what it feels like to fall through the cracks.
We've helped tens of thousands of patients more effectively manage and coordinate their care, and we're just getting started.
