On Episode 1 of Season 4 of the Healthcare Reimagined podcast, I spoke with Manav Sevak. Manav is the founder and CEO of Memora Health, which helps healthcare organizations digitize and automate care journeys, and make complex care delivery simple for patients and clinicians to navigate. Manav's journey to building Memora health began with a personal story - a close friend with a chronic diagnosis, who despite being young and tech savvy, found it difficult to navigate his care.

There are three major challenges that Memora addresses: Digitizing clinical workflows, saving providers time by utilizing automation, and allowing patients to use text messaging to get the information they need about their condition.

By looking at the things that happen for every patient, every time, in the course of a particular care episode, Memora has been able to use technology to automate and even standardize certain follow-up procedures. That has cut down on inbox messages and phone calls, and even eliminated them all together. Research out of Dartmouth suggests that people forget up to 80% of what they’ve heard from their healthcare professional. As a result, getting critical information to patients in a digestible format is crucial, and text messaging has proven itself to be a very reliable format for Memora.

The best course of care will vary based on a given patient’s condition and their response to treatment. However, according to Manav, the way patients get reminded to manage their medications, come to appointments, and the way that symptom management are done, should look very similar across clinical areas. What Memora is aiming to build is a best in class process for conveying information to patients and receiving that information back from them.

Memora is also able to leverage its digital approach to ensure adherence to ever-changing guidelines. When the protocols for screening patients for mental health conditions during the prenatal period changed, Memora was immediately able to update their postpartum care program across different care sites to reflect best practices.

Manav and I went on to discuss the challenges of EHR integration for digital health startups, and the challenge of building technology before Memora had access to data from pilot customers. We closed by exploring what percentage of the back and forth between care teams and patients it might be possible to automate in the future, and the tradeoff for early stage founders between staying at a high level and diving into the weeds.

You can learn more about Memora Health on their website.