These Three Finalists Will Vie For The $50K Prize In WashU Olin’s BIG IdeaBounce Pitch Contest

BIG IdeaBounce Finalist: Patient Led Health

School Affiliation: University of Virginia Darden School of Business

Description:

Today, personal medical records remain locked behind healthcare providers’ closed electronic filing cabinets, forcing patients to hunt down and piece together non-transferable data; our app flips this paradigm by enabling individuals to capture, store, analyze, search, share and manage their own records across many patient portals.

Problem:

Think about the waiting room at your last doctor’s appointment, or the e-checkin you completed in advance. You likely guessed at medication start/end dates, dosages, your last immunizations, and provided incorrect or incomplete information to your medical provider. You may have failed to mention past symptoms or tests which may have resulted in time and resources wasted by repeating tests. Worse, you may have missed sharing a key puzzle piece that could prolong or derail your path to the correct diagnosis or necessary treatment.

Solution:

Research shows that patients who are more actively involved in their healthcare experience achieve better outcomes and incur lower costs. This is obviously what all Americans want for themselves and their families, but the lack of easy access to their own healthcare history makes it nearly impossible. Informed patients advocating for themselves is better for healthcare providers too, who want to provide the best care they can, but are severely limited in their capabilities by the tools and time that they have.

The app will integrate with medical portals as a patient-centered hub to curate, analyze, visualize and also share images, reports or aspects of their records with other providers or caregivers. We will utilize AI to analyze patient records and information to identify insights across previously siloed information, share preventative health suggestions, catalogue diagnostic test results, immunization records, a comprehensive list of prescriptions and surface insights to prepare for specialist appointments. It will enable patients to have the power of their medical records where they belong: in their own hands.

Market:

Our app will benefit people of all ages who have more than one medical provider, want agency and control over their own health information, and know that a complete picture of their health history will support and enable better health and care.

Our first niche markets will be:
1. People living with chronic disease/illness (this population experiences extremely challenging circumstances with organizing, accessing and sharing records with providers, insurance providers (i.e., payers), disability providers and caregivers)
2. Parents managing their own healthcare and that of their children
3. People with chronic disease/illness
3. Seniors
4. Divorced or separated parents

Additional use cases:
1. Anyone who has moved countries or states
2. Veterans adding private health care services to Tricare/VA
3. Students moving from their parents’ healthcare to their own.

Millenials and Gen Z demand greater agency, autonomy, organizations and convenience in their personal lives than prior generations. This app will enable them and all adults navigating the increasingly complex and secure medical records management world to utilize technology to realize this expectation and improve their overall outcomes.

Competition:

We have done extensive research on competition. There are merely two apps on the Apple Store that offer a way to manually collect and organize your health information. Neither provides direct access to patient portals, nor AI to analyze or integrate any of the insight. Apple Health has built an extensive personal health monitoring system into iPhones, which includes the ability to connect to some healthcare providers. However, the UX/UI is clunky and fixed; we suspect like the Weather app or others, it will have information and insights, but only the basics, not best in class.

We want to be patient obsessed and purpose built: it is not enough to have static medical records on-demand, we believe patients should have the power of integrated, searchable records with data and insights immediately accessible and presented in a way that is intuitive and useful. Patients also need the ability to interact with the data and within the app, such as taking personal notes, integrating upcoming appointments with their calendar app or setting reminders that go beyond the out-of-the box solution.

Value Creation:

The documented physician shortage is expected to increase in the next decade, which is exacerbated by doctors leaving medicine due to red tape, and lower reimbursements, opting for career changes or early retirement. The burden is falling to nurses, NPs, PAs, and Artifical Intelligence, as well as increasing reliance on English as a Second Language providers to fill the gap. It is imperative that patients can better understand their medical history to advocate effectively for themselves and their loved ones. Further, providers feel the pressure to move patients through appointments more quickly, send patients for fewer tests and prescribe faster, while information security and piracy threats are ratcheting upwards.

Patients do not need to become medical experts, but they do need to have tools to serve as expert advocates for their current and past medical history. They need a means to manage their personal medical data to ensure it does not get lost in a sea of portals, permissions and provider regulations.

According to an NIH study, 88% of cases they studied involved ordering at least 1 unnecessary medical test for first day due to lack of information, with 72% of those tests having no impact on patient care or outcomes. This accounts for millions of dollars per year in wasted healthcare costs, not to mention patient mental and physical discomfort. Today, 6 in 10 Americans have a diagnosed chronic disease. The CDC predicts that for the population who are 50 years and older, the number with at least one chronic disease is estimated to double from 71.522 million in 2020 to 142.66 million by 2050. About 90% of the annual $4.1 trillion health care expenditure is attributed to managing and treating chronic diseases and mental health conditions. With chronic disease comes a gauntlet of providers and medical histories and sharing insights, but with human memory being highly unreliable, patients diagosed with chronic illness may miss an appointment, a prescription, or a prior diagnosis, which can further complicate thier cases.

We believe we can cut a significant chunk out of wasted healthcare time and cost by ensuring patients know their data and information and have the tools to “brief” their providers on their own health history. There is a growing body of evidence that demonstrates patients who are more actively involved in their healthcare experience achieve much better outcomes and incur lower costs. The Patient Led Health Coalesce App is inspired by that achievable goal.

The Team:

Caroline Holt, MBA ’26
Justin Ryan, MBA ’26
Astrid Domenico, B.A. and Certificate in AI at UT Austin

DON’T MISS: WashU Olin’s BIG IdeaBounce: 13 Startups In The Business Of Health Compete For The $50K Top Prize