Both veterans in the healthcare industry, Nick Adams and Andrew Shearer had long heard the complaints from nurses and doctors about electronic health care platforms.
Different members of care teams were regularly behind on what was going on with their patients, and when one shift ended, the new care team had to figure out what had happened while they were gone, often a timely task.
According to the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, 80 percent of serious medical errors result from miscommunication from two or more providers as they exchange patient care information.
"Our goal is to smooth out the transition and take care of notifying everyone on the care team."
To smooth out the transition, Adams and Shearer founded Care Thread, a real-time app that provides secure mobile messaging, clinical information and collaborative workflows for care teams.
“We actually are reducing the amount of interruptions in care work for doctors and nurses,” Adams, the president and CEO of Care Thread, told Rhode Island Inno. “Data shows the more interruptions per day increases the chance of patient errors. … By reducing the clerical burden, we are reducing interruptions.”
The app offers hospitals a number of different components.
With Care Thread’s end-to-end encrypted, HIPAA-compliant platform, doctors and nurses can send individual messages or messages to the entire care team, allowing its members to keep up with a patient’s progress from their home. The messaging feature also offers medical speech recognition.
Additionally, the app pushes a patient’s clinical information — such as, if a patient just completed a test or started antibiotics — directly to a team member’s mobile device as it becomes available, saving a medical professional time from having to access a patient’s electronic medical records.
“Care Thread is designed as a complement to electronic medical records,” said Shearer. “There is a lot more collaboration being passed from one provider to another. Our goal is to smooth out the transition and take care of notifying everyone on the care team.”
The last major function of Care Thread is offering collaborative work flows through the app’s patent-pending care team mapping, which helps all care team members keep track of tasks for each patient in real time.
The Care Thread platform can be configured uniquely for different customers. For instance, the app can store data or research for a certain amount of time, or be set to send out reminders or notifications on a rolling basis or after a certain event occurs.
"What we are really getting into is the ability to automate more workflows,” said Adams.
The company makes money through a subscription model, but is flexible enough to provide a perpetual license.
While the Care Thread frequently engages its customers, Adams said it is close to making the platform one that can be solely used and managed by a hospital’s information technology team.
Since launching more than six years ago, Care Thread has made three contracts with health care systems comprised of roughly 60 hospitals; the app is currently being used in three hospitals and seven non-acute facilities.
But Adams said the plan is to market Care Thread nationally and even internationally, as the company has drawn interest from healthcare systems in Southeast Asia and the Philippines.
Ultimately, medical errors are the third leading cause of preventable, treatable death, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Adams believes Care Thread is a platform that can reduce this problem, and maybe even eliminate it.
“This is a systemic problem that can be fixed,” he said. “We are providing tools to staff that give them more time to take care of their patients.”
