Wellbe Snags $2.4M For device to guide sufferers via remedy

Jeff Engel, January 05, 2015

Wellbe, a Madison, WI-based supplier of software that helps guide sufferers via clinical therapies and surgeries, has raised $ 2.4 million from buyers, the company announced lately.

Wellbe has now snagged about $ four million from investors due to the fact that CEO James Dias co-founded the company in 2008. traders within the newest round embrace Terrence Gibbons, former Pharmacy OneSource CEO; Greg Stanley Baldwin, former Baxa CEO; Mark Bakken, former CEO of Madison-primarily based Nordic Consulting companions and founder of recent healthtech fund Madison HealthX Ventures; and Philip Seeger, Medcor CEO and president.

Wellbe creates cloud-based totally software that helps sufferers more easily apply the steps essential to verify a a hit surgical procedure or medical remedy. Say, for example, a patient schedules a hip substitute. Wellbe’s white-label instrument will information the patient thru the whole course of, including filling out forms on-line, providing checklists and reminders about actions that need to be taken earlier than the surgical procedure, and having the affected person fill out pre- and put up-surgery surveys that help docs determine if it was a hit.

Dias likened the instrument to a GPS for sufferers, offering “turn-via-turn directions in the meanwhile they want it.” That’s more practical and more convenient than having sufferers take a seat via a three-hour session that unloads a ton of data on them abruptly, he stated. “We take all that subject material and parse it out.”

the idea is to help doctors collaborate more closely and effectively with sufferers. not directly, Wellbe pros consider its device can assist hospitals provide better care at lower costs. to this point, the company has signed up 10 hospitals nationwide, and early outcomes from a few of them express the software has helped lower affected person readmission charges and the length of health center stays, Dias said.

“Healthcare continues to be too fragmented and complex,” Dias (pictured above) said. “Visionary health center leaders across the country reworking their companies for price-pushed care have decided that a navigated affected person experience can deliver excellent results in reduced possibility and more advantageous efficiency.”

Wellbe is part of an explosion of startups nationwide which are looking to remedy issues in healthcare with device and different new applied sciences. but these efforts are fraught with barriers like govt laws and (now and then) slow-shifting hospitals—making healthcare an business tougher for tech corporations to disrupt than, say, commute or buying.

“This business is not going to grow to be in a single day,” Dias mentioned. “Healthcare is a long sport. You’ve got to be affected person. You’ve received to speculate time and energy educating the market concerning the function sufferers can play. … from time to time it will possibly feel very gradual for firms, tech firms, used to moving issues very fast.”

Wellbe at first focused its tool toward pediatrics, specifically helping children overcome obesity, Dias said. however the company made up our minds it was once too troublesome to promote healthcare tool in an instant to customers. “The American shopper just isn’t used to, as a subject of lifestyle, procuring healthcare merchandise,” he mentioned.

Wellbe shifted to selling its device to hospitals on a subscription basis, with caregivers providing the product to patients as a portion of their treatment. About 3,000 sufferers have used the software, Dias mentioned.

“people have in reality found this guided method very valuable to [understanding] what they need to do and once they need to do it, and to prepare for these every now and then momentous medical tactics,” Dias stated.

With new cash in hand, Wellbe intends to continue enhancing the software, elevate its sales and advertising spending, and beef up its workforce, Dias mentioned. the corporate employs about 20 folks, and plans to add every other handful of staff.

“For a couple years, we’ve been grinding away at proving out the worth proposition, proving out the trade variation, getting our methods right,” Dias stated. “Now, it’s all about scaling throughout the u . s ..”

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