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Conversa Wants to Fill the Gap

Conversa is a brand new company, aiming to fill the space between physician visits with easy and useful communications between doctors and patients. The logic is that most health care happens outside the exam room, but most of the effort of automating health care has been put into recording what happens in the medical setting, with little feedback or follow up from patients (HealthLoop is another company aiming at this space).

Why are we featuring Conversa? Well somewhat unusually for a Health 2.0 startup they come with buckets of experience. CEO West Shell was at the helm at Healthline, Product Head Phil Marshall built lots of tools at WebMD and Chief Marketer Anna-Lisa Silvestre was behind the roll out of probably the biggest patient portal ever at Kaiser Permanente.

I got all three of them on the video-line to tell me about Conversa.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVD2f1VK24M&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

Learn more about Conversa’s launch here.

Categories: Uncategorized

5 replies »

  1. only way hospitals can really cut back on cost is to reduce physical plant investment which the cap ex numbers and facility plant age show the past decade and cut salaries which you are seeing with the hospital employment numbers the past few quarters being the slowest they have been in raw numbers terms since the late 90s.

  2. Besides getting acquired or forming unique relationship on a regional basis, a few hospitals are starting to do some really crazy stuff like explore leasing/selling the ground they own beneath their facilities to free up cash flow or some more unusual and exotic bond offerings.

    Not to mention that NPF hospitals are also facing the increasing challenge of local municipalities that are still increasingly desperate to finance their budgets and look for new sources of revenue.

    Talked with a GS analyst last week on their US hospital capital expenditures model and they see a world of hurt coming to US hospitals especially to NPF hospitals in states that didn’t expand their Medicaid coverage and aren’t critical access hospitals.

    NPR revenues are increasingly and looking a bit more promising in FY14 but the simply reality is that the hospitals don’t have enough capital expenditures to keep up the requirements being thrown on top of them & readmissions aren’t really growing either. Bullish case this year is for a 1% increase in readmissions nationally. Bear case is 0% growth.

  3. Exactly. Take hospitals for example. Their two largest cost categories are physical plant/infrastructure (which has rapidly increased the past decade in the US with the average hospital facility age now at 10+ years vs just 8+ years at the start of the 00s) and salary.

    The only way hospitals can really cut back on cost is to reduce physical plant investment which the cap ex numbers and facility plant age show the past decade and cut salaries which you are seeing with the hospital employment numbers the past few quarters being the slowest they have been in raw numbers terms since the late 90s.

  4. “Research shows that unnecessary doctor visits and related inefficiencies exert a massive financial toll on the health care industry. Juniper Research estimates that mobile health monitoring technologies could save the medical industry $36 billion over the next five years. Americans collectively make over 1 billion visits to doctors each year. In many of these cases, doctors are giving disproportionate attention to patients who could be taken care of with automated, clinically accurate, personalized information.”
    __

    That is spot-on.

    But, every wasted dollar is part of someone’s income.