For decades, monitoring children after they left the hospital for the first time was done with pen and paper. Now it’s done with an iPad, and a Charlottesville tech startup is leading the charge to provide communication services in that niche of the healthcare industry.
Locus Health connects parents with their kids' doctors to monitor vital signs following NICU stays. For parents, its platform has an intuitive data entry process, educational materials and video links; and for doctors, it provides real-time information on children after they’ve left the hospital, without requiring an in-person visit.
“It shifts the burden of care back toward the clinical team supporting [patients], and creates an environment where both sides are more informed and fully engaged in getting the patient better,” founder and CEO Kirby Farrell said.
The software is used at 16 major children’s hospitals in the U.S., likely with more to come. Locus just received a major endorsement from Apple with a video highlighting it and the UVA Health medical team, and it was invited to Citibank’s private healthcare IT investment conference, where it will present to and meet with health-focused investment firms.
Founded in 2009, Locus has raised $7.2 million in funding from investors including the Rothman Institute and the University of Virginia Health System. The hospital group helped the startup develop its product from the beginning and is what Farrell calls its “mothership customer.”
Farrell sold his first health tech startup, Integrex, in the 1990s to a large San Diego firm before founding another company that provided IP services via satellite to the U.S. military. When he moved to Charlottesville 15 years ago, he met Karen Rheuban, head of telemedicine at UVA, who encouraged him to rediscover his healthcare roots.
Farrell initially created a consulting firm that helped health systems outsource monitoring services. It landed an investment and five-year partnership deal with UVA, but his team identified holes in the monitoring technology and started developing its own platform, which eventually became the Locus app.
“We were leveraging the UVA relationship to work with doctors in the children’s hospital, and that showed us that was a great way to focus,” Farrell said. “For the technology to work, it needs engaged clinicians and engaged patients, and no one is more engaged than parents.”
Farrell said there’s little competition for doctor-patient communications platforms at children’s hospitals, making them a prime entry point for Locus to access the rest of a health system.
“Our goal is to land in the NICU department, expand within the children’s hospital, then toward the full EMR, and then the full enterprise,” he said.
The platform is configurable to adult populations as well, so the company soon plans to enter the organ transplant marketplace – where post-operation monitoring is crucial.
About 1,500 patients and 100-150 doctors are active on the Locus app at any given time, and Farrell said he expects those numbers to double this year. The startup plans to be in 30 children’s hospitals by the end of 2019, all of which are part of larger health systems.
To accommodate the growth, Farrell expects to add 15 employees this year – mostly in Charlottesville – to Locus’ current headcount of 25.
“In an incredibly complex, hot space, we’ve figured something out here,” he said. “Our unique relationship with UVA has enabled us to get this going and now we’re doing everything we can to leverage that.”
