My introduction to the US Health Care System was in the summer of 1990 when I helped one of my Yale professors on a project comparing health care policies in the US, Canada, and other developed countries. The facts then and now remain the same. The United States spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world ($4.3 Trillion in 2021) and we rank dead last in outcomes relative to other developed economies.
The US government alone is spending $1.6 Trillion a year on Medicare and Medicaid and the challenge of improving health outcomes and managing costs seems as intractable as ever. So when I learned that a startup in Rochester, NY had a solution that aligned the care and cost goals of treating elderly patients, I was skeptical, but agreed to meet them out of sheer curiosity. Today, I am proud to announce StartFast’s investment in Patient Pattern's seed round.
Patient Pattern CEO Steve Buslovich is a highly regarded geriatric specialist whose experience in nursing homes gave him first-hand experience of the fragmented information systems that made care planning difficult and the regulatory requirements that too often drove billing and coding priorities. Steve’s initial insight was the development of a unique Frailty Index that enabled care providers like him to get a true picture of the current status and future care needs of patients. The company’s flagship product Care Coach took more time to develop given the need to access patient data from multiple siloed systems (that existed within the same health plan).
Today, Care Coach is rapidly gaining traction among high value Medicare Advantage plans (Integrated Special Needs Plans and PACE programs) that are catering to the sickest and most vulnerable elderly population. Care providers like it because this one system gives them instant access to the condition of individual plan members (Medicare patients) so that decisions around care can be made efficiently. Plan administrators are excited because Care Coach offers an integrated solution that directly links what the providers are seeing/doing to an auditable submission of quality metrics and Medicare billings. The bottom line is obvious: Less work and better patient care on the provider side; greater transparency and better reimbursement results for the plans.
Patient Pattern is transforming the quality vs cost landscape for US healthcare and StartFast is delighted to join Steve and his high performing leadership team on this journey!
