HealthHive, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, offers a software-as-a-service platform that creates a “community of caring” for aging adults and their informal care team, while also integrating their providers’ existing workflow and systems — all to address gaps in care planning, coordination, understanding and long-term management.
We sat down with Stephen Farber, CEO and co-founder of HealthHive, who talked about how baffling the healthcare system can be for patients, the company’s product and its ambitious plan to serve patients and providers alike.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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Please tell us about HealthHive.
HealthHive is a complex animal! We’re a tech platform working to solve, on one hand, problems that patients often experience with the healthcare system; and on the other hand, problems experienced by everyone who provides care or works with those patients.
When you get entangled in the healthcare system, you quickly find that there are too many silos, too many people and too much information — and none of it is actually built around the patient or their caregivers or family who are supporting them. In the broadest sense, our goal is to think about all the things that patients need and all the things that the people helping them need.
That sounds ambitious!
It’s going to take us a long time to get there. We’ve started with very specific use cases, building things around an individual “hive,” which is a place that houses all kinds of information related to someone’s health, such as care plan information, communications and data. Ultimately, all that will all be tied back into a broad range of providers.
One challenge is that there’s not yet a business model for solving these problems if your primary concern is serving the people that matter the most — the underserved and the uninformed. So the revenue model has to be driven by also solving problems for the health system and or for payers.
How does HealthHive work?
By way of example, we started by looking at what happens when someone transitions from a skilled nursing facility to home. We asked questions like: How can we help the family understand what’s going on with mom when she’s in the facility? How can we give mom herself visibility into what’s happening? And then, when she’s about to be discharged: What information does she and the family need to help her make that transition, and what kind of clinical or behavioral information does she need once home to stay well? If something goes wrong at home, who should be notified, and how?
And it’s all centered on the patient and their needs.
The hive is always owned and controlled by the patient, regardless of who else is involved. They can invite family members, caregivers and whoever else they want to include in the hive.
From a business model standpoint, the hive is also connected to an enterprise portal, so information is automatically coming in from a range of sources. We’re integrated with things like electronic health records, Medicare, payers and social resources.
But the thing is, people don’t really care about all that information so much as they want to know how that information can help them. So we’re working on our first artificial intelligence (AI) project that will do that. For example, instead of including just all the clinical information about a patient’s medication, our product will include what the medicine does, possible side effects, associated risks, and so on — all in layman’s terms. That way, if a family member in the hive sees that a loved one is taking nine medications, they’ll be able to see why and easily understand what each one does.
How did you get interested in starting HealthHive?
I’ve been a caregiver three different times in my life, including for my mother. My family includes five doctors, and we have resources, but we still discovered that dealing with the healthcare system was a nightmare. When I was caring for my mother, the one thing I knew was that while they’re great at being a neurosurgeon, a dermatologist and so on, they couldn’t help me because they didn’t understand the system.
So, I started a cardiovascular imaging business with two cardiologists in New York City just to understand how I thought the system should operate — which is totally different than how they do operate. We asked: How can we manage cardiac imaging and make it easier and more accessible? Eventually I sold that company and began working on this problem that I really wanted to solve. I started off thinking this would be more of a clinical-side business, but realized what’s also missing from the system is the social determinants of health — how much do patients understand? What are their individual preferences?
Are there any organizations in the AgeTech Collaborative you’re particularly interested in working with?
I think the Collaborative and what it’s doing is exactly what the system needs, and I look forward to when we can integrate with a lot of partners and the great products that are out there. Testbeds are always interesting to me, because that’s where the users are. Testbed environments that are focused on communities, whether it’s a clinical or social setting, those are the places we want to be because we can learn so much.
Want to learn more or connect with startups like HealthHive? If you’re already in the AgeTech Collaborative, log in to explore the ATC Directory and start a conversation. If not, apply to join us today and tap into the power of purpose-driven innovation in AgeTech.
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