For the first time, Forbes is bringing together 1,000+ members of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list with some of the globe’s top leaders and mentors to create partnerships that will change the world over the next 50 years. The Under 30 Summit will take place in Philadelphia from Oct. 19 – 22.
Twenty-six-year-old physician and entrepreneur Joshua Liu is looking to change the way patients prepare for surgery. And he’ll be on stage at the Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia on October 20th. You can register here.
Liu’s simple idea: giving patients a phone app that serves as a “patient personal companion” could help them prepare for surgery and care for themselves afterward. The app aims to educate patients on their procedure and also reminds them to take their medications or to eat or avoid certain foods. It tells doctors whether the patients are following its instructions. It can be used not only on phones but on just about any computing device.
To explain how it works, Liu describes a hypothetical patient who experiences pain a few days after coming home from the hospital. The patient calls the hospital, and after hearing his symptoms a nurse tells him to come in for a check-up, “just in case.” But Liu claims that if all parties were using the app, the nurse could have followed the patient’s progress since his discharge. In that case, Liu believes the nurse may already know whether the pain is out of the ordinary. If it’s normal, the hospital saves resources and the patient saves stress, time, and gas.
Liu was midway through medical school at the University of Toronto when he began researching readmission rates – the frequency with which patients who left the hospital came back. They could be noticeably lowered, he realized, if patients adhered more closely to their doctors’ post-surgery instructions and if providers were better able to monitor their patients’ progress.
He took the idea with him to Canada’s Next36 startup incubator, where he met his cofounders Philip Chen and Willie Kwok for the first time. The product they came up with, which would become SeamlessMD, aimed to tackle the problem by replacing the paper-based instructions often given to patients with something more manageable, interactive, and friendly. Now it is live in two hospitals, one in Houston and one in Toronto, with three more set to go live by year’s end.
Like the best fitness trackers, SeamlessMD shoots for personalization. Right now, the app takes into account the patient’s hospital, surgeon, type of surgery, and date of procedure. But in the future, it may integrate information from the patient’s actual records, helping administrators make sense of all kinds of data.
The problem with digital health, says Liu, is that often it’s the wrong people who are taking advantage. “People who are the most healthy are buying the FitBit,” he says, using the popular fitness tracker as an example. “And people who are the least healthy, they’re the ones who need this product.”
