Making Self Care Achievable
The U.S. Healthcare system continues its shift from fee for service to value based care. This shift has been a slow process, but over time the incentives have increased for providers and payers to adopt innovative programs and best practices aimed at reducing the cost of providing care to individual patients. One of the biggest challenges the system faces in this shift is engaging patients directly in their own care. Our company, Maya, is working with providers and payers to do just that.
Let’s get situated…
You’re a nurse and you see dozens of patients a week at the end of their hospital stay. In between making your rounds, responding to emergencies and filling out paper work, you find time to spend with each person leaving to teach them and their family all about their care; when to change the bandage, what each medication does, to call you if they feel discomfort, etc. Sometimes you give them a few hand outs about their disease progression, and maybe you even have some personalized information for them about their specific care pathway.
Before they leave the facility, you package all that up, with their new prescriptions, and send them on their way to recovery.
The 35 billion dollar problem
The reality is that about 12% of those patients are going to find themselves back in a hospital in the next 30 days due to some complication. Two out of three of those readmissions will be categorized as “potentially preventable”, meaning some action could have taken place that might have kept the patient out of the hospital (and at home, feeling well).
There are around 35 million discharges per year in the U.S. which means that about 2.8 million potentially preventable readmissions occur each year, and each one of these costs around $12,500 depending on a number of factors.
That is upwards of $35 billion per year in healthcare expense that could be prevented. These numbers are aggregated from multiple sources, but no matter what data you are looking at they all point to millions of patients that could be living a higher quality of life and spending less time in a clinical setting.
Why we are solving this problem
We founded Maya to take on healthcare problems like this. Maya exists to make self-care achievable for all patients.
We believe that allowing patients to feel comfortable talking about their health can improve their outcomes by providing resources, self-efficacy and education. The ideal place for us to start is by reducing hospital readmission in those 30 days after a patient is discharged.
How we are solving this problem
Maya partners with providers to fill in the gaps between interactions with patients. By understanding the details of a patient’s care we are able to deliver a personalized conversation that helps patients better self-manage and gives providers insight into progress as well as data and trends.
Maya is a conversation with a patient about their care that influences behaviors towards improved outcomes. Patients are able to talk about how their care is progressing and Maya is able to help with any issues they may have.
Maya also connects with providers to improve workflows and provide valuable insights, resulting in better communication and higher quality patient interactions. Providers working with Maya have a view into what care looks like when they are not physically with the patient.
The Team behind Maya
We are passionate about healthcare, and come from a diverse background of clinical care, enterprise solutions, product design and engineering. We don’t use words like “disrupt” or “distributed”, and instead focus on how to partner within the healthcare system to build patient centered solutions together.
We believe in the power of a diverse team to collaborate on problems and solutions that are innovative, elegant and that solve real problems for people.
