A Winston-Salem startup – spun off from research at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist – reached an important milestone this month for its proprietary digital health platform: commercialization.
In partnership with California’s virtual care platform company Carium, CareDirections commercially launched StokeCP, a digital health platform that engages patients and providers for follow-up care after a stroke. Carium is powering StrokeCP through its own patient engagement and virtual care management platform solutions.
Designed by researchers at AHWFB’s Comprehensive Stroke Center and the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, StrokeCP aims to reduce the recurrence of secondary strokes and its related costs by personalizing care plans and assessing patients’ functional and social determinants of health (SDOH).
Patients with three or more poor SDOH – such as living in areas with low income, low housing quality and high levels of unemployment – are two and half times more likely to have a stroke. If they are a stroke survivor and have these SDOH, they have twice the risk of poor recovery, according to the American Heart Association.
StrokeCP was created from the results of a five-year study, known as COMPASS, led by Wake Forest’s medical school. Conducted in 40 hospitals across the state, COMPASS was funded by a $14 million award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
Wake Forest Innovations, the commercialization arm of the medical school, helped create the startup and AHWFB provided an undisclosed amount of funding from its Catalyst Fund program.
“Changes in health care delivery and associated costs have challenged provider and patients to monitor and manage care beyond the clinics. The number of stroke survivors leaving the acute hospital after a brief three-to-four day stay with multiple preexisting comorbidities and unaddressed social and functional determinants of health is increasing,” said Pamela Duncan, founder and CEO of CareDirections. She is a retired professor of neurology and adjunct professor of internal medicine at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
“StrokeCP ensures these patients are discharged with a personalized care plan to ensure a successful long-term recovery and the best positive outcomes,” Duncan added.
CareDirections employs five staff members and launched StrokeCP in 2023 with $1 million in funding, according to Duncan.
StrokeCP integrates electronic medical records and enables providers to capture social and functional determinants of health during care. By combining clinical, demographic and medication data with its proprietary algorithms, StrokeCP can assess stroke-specific barriers that can interfere with a patient’s recovery.
Patients using the platform receive evidence-based personalized care plans and the platform also uses remote monitoring, coaching and provider-patient coordination and communication to ensure best outcomes.
David McCormick, COO of Carium, said that StrokeCP is able to help both clinically and financially, making it a worthwhile value proposition for health systems.
“Wake Forest clinical researchers demonstrated that StrokeCP optimized care across the entire post-acute journey, improving not only clinical outcomes but financial results as well through reductions in length of stay and readmissions, operational efficiencies, in-network follow-up care and enhanced quality metric reporting for value-based care incentives,” McCormick explained.
CareDirections and Carium said they are collaborating to apply StrokeCP’s platform for other conditions, such as dementia, post-acute cardiac recovery, weight management and bariatric surgery.
