ChronoKair, the D.C. health startup that took second place in the city's regional Challenge Cup competition, has been meeting with investors and interviewing companies to help build their beta platform (due in March). According to founder Kelly Swords, the company is getting "very close" to obtaining Institutional Review Board approval to perform simulated lab tests of their digital dashboard for patient care.
In October, ChronoKair was one of 21 teams accepted into the National Science Foundation's
DC I-Corps program, a program sponsored by the University of Maryland, George Washington University and Virginia Tech that helps researchers commercialize their discoveries. ChronoKair finished the seven-week program Nov. 19.
Swords, who is also completing a fellowship in urology at Children's National Medical Center, designed a one-screen complete visual summary of a patient's hospital stay to make shift changes and patient "handoffs" smoother. The platform is designed to "facilitate and reinforce communication during shift changes," she explains. "Sixty to eighty percent of medical errors are from poor communication." Those medical errors can have big impact. Medical errors cause up to 98,000 otherwise-preventable deaths each year.
ChronoKair's platform gives physicians access to typical components of a patient's medical chart—vital signs, lab reports, devices and monitors attached to the patient and a history of major events—on one screen. Clicking the "handoff" button brings up another screen where patient caregivers who are changing shifts can jointly summarize care and events, complete checklists and fill out an escalation scale for future care.
"[The platform] is a time saver for after handoffs [or shift changes] happen," Swords explains. "You don't have to flip through pages and pages of a chart." Having all the data in one central location also minimizes errors that result from miscommunication during these handoffs.
The feedback Swords has received so far has been good. "Physicians in training programs are super excited to have a product to log and track handoffs," she says. "And patients, especially long-term patients, are happy to not have to re-explain their journey."
In addition to lessening patient frustration after handoffs, Swords thinks that ChronoKair will also give patients more access data about their care. "Unless patients ask, hospitals don't usually give printouts of lab work and so on," she explains. "[With ChronoKair,] patients can own themselves, in a way. People deserve to see [their data]. Data will help them make better decisions. It gives patients better command of their own health care."
Swords acknowledges that the medical field has been one of the last to embrace the kind of change ChronoKair represents. "[Medicine] is very litigious," she says. "No one wants to do anything wrong. I'm hopeful we can change medicine and bring it up to speed."