Cohealo Q&A: Connecting Patients & Technology for Smarter Health Care

When the prestigious IBM SmartCamp hosted its kickstart Miami healthcare entrepreneurship competition last month, we at CareCloud knew to expect one particular entrepreneur to be involved – Mark Slaughter, founder & CEO of Cohealo.

We’ve previously crossed paths with Mark through this year’s Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce Technology Leaders of the Year program, in which he was a finalist for Technology Student Entrepreneur of the Year honors, and through his involvement with The Launch Pad at the University of Miami, an entrepreneurship-fostering organization CareCloud has close ties to.

Like CareCloud, Cohealo is using technology to disrupt the healthcare industry for the benefit of decision-makers and consumers. Cohealo works in the medical equipment space, using innovative methods to make surgical equipment and other clinical technologies more accessible to hospitals and patients.

Mark sat down with us to discuss how his company’s unique service offerings fill a void in the healthcare industry, share his thoughts on Miami’s role as a community for startups, and tell us how he thinks the cloud will impact the future of health IT. 

Your company, Cohealo, provides hospitals with “collaborative healthcare logistics.” What does that mean?

‘Collaborative healthcare logistics’ is a fancy way of saying that we analyze non-emergency equipment usage patterns and then use this information to create a logistics plan for transferring equipment to different facilities within a health care system. Our goal is to enable our health system partners to save money by maximizing their revenue per asset and eliminate equipment redundancy.

During several years of selling minimally invasive robotic and laparoscopic surgical equipment, I came across two extremes: hospital systems were either over-equipped or under-equipped. I saw that much of the surgical assets that hospitals purchased would go unused for days, even weeks at a time – and was surprised. Worse, patients were not getting treated with today’s technology, but rather, yesterday’s.

To prove our theory, we tracked a single piece of surgical equipment in a single South Florida hospital over a six-month period. We discovered that this $120,000 device went unused anywhere from 19 to 25 days each month (a total of 133 days out of 181). This excess capacity in surgical equipment was not an effective use of capital to say the least. Yet the hospitals didn’t have the information to know that they could do better.

So, in June 2011, we created Cohealo – to shift silo behavior to collaborative consumption based on real-time, smart data.

How does Cohealo’s real-time analytics system factor into clients’ use of your services?

Our real time analytics dashboard provides health system management the answer to: “How are we doing?”  Our application gathers data on equipment utilization by MD, department, hospital, cluster/region, and the entire system.  Management can compare equipment and technology investments across functions to see how they are performing compared to other initiatives.  The analytics provide hard data for making the right equipment investments.

Like CareCoud, Cohealo operates on a web-based infrastructure. How important is cloud computing to the future of the healthcare industry, in your opinion?

Cloud-based infrastructure is crucial to modern healthcare from a cost and efficiency standpoint.  Missing, slow, or miscommunicated data causes unnecessary complications.

At this point in healthcare data evolution, it is about interoperability.  I think most of us find it quite frustrating when data is not translatable or transferable between competing systems, especially when nearly every other function of our lives is web-based.  Data should be application and device independent, accessible in a standardized and communicable format.  Healthcare has been slow to adapt, citing patient privacy and security concerns.  But, if my bank and credit card company are able to keep data relatively secure, why should health records and information be any different?

You’re not a South Florida native, but you chose to start your company here. What are your thoughts on Miami as a hub for startup activity?

I think it is a perfect time to start a business in Miami.  There is a lot of technology start-up activity and the beginnings of a strong and supportive entrepreneurial culture. Further, Miami specifically and Florida in general have a number of significant healthcare systems so that we can cluster our program rollout.   Florida investors understand the healthcare space.

How do you see Cohealo growing and changing as the company expands? What are your hopes for the future of the business?

Cohealo’s develops technology-supported processes to enable healthcare system management to make more cost-effective decisions and improve the quality of care for the entire value chain.  Currently, we are focused on equipment utilization, precision purchasing decisions, and widening the scope of technology.  As we grow, we see the opportunity to migrate additional aspects of healthcare workflow and processes to cloud managed solutions.

Cohealo provides a service to clients that can lower the cost of care while improving quality. What other types of solutions do you think have the power to lower overall healthcare spending and improve patient care?

We believe in the strength of the network effect.  Cohealo is building a network of intelligent equipment.  CareCloud is building a network of medical records.  Sermo is building a network of MD’s to compare and discuss clinical experiences.  We see all of these functions creating a more open, mobile and dynamic healthcare environment.

Learn more about Cohealo at Cohealo.com!

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