Noora Health Named a Finalist in Gratitude Awards Competition; Winners to Be Chosen at SOCAP
Noora Health, led by Katy Ashe and Edith Elliott, has been named as one of nine finalists in the 2014 Gratitude Awards from the Gratitude Network to be awarded at SOCAP this coming week in San Francisco. The finalists were chosen from among 32 semi-finalists, who were chosen from among nearly 150 applicants. To learn more about the awards and SOCAP, see our story in Forbes. You can read all our coverage of the Gratitude Awards, including profiles of all nine finalists here.
Four winners will be announced on Thursday, September 4, 2014. We obtained a copy of the application from Noora Health so we could share it with you below:
Please describe your venture:
Noora Health trains marginalized patient families with the health skills they need to improve outcomes.
What is the problem are you solving and why is this important?
Noora Health delivers high-impact health skill training to at-risk patients and their families. By training families with simple, low-risk skills, we enable patients and their families to take care into their own hands and homes. Patients and caregivers around the world face a similar need – they are desperate for actionable healthcare information, but after Googling in desperation, are unable to find reliable, and easily digestible information. Leveraging human-centered design, Noora Health has developed a suite of services that can be implemented in both high- and low-resource settings. We meet our users where they are and, with our tools, are able to lower preventable readmissions, reduce length of stay, highly improve quality of care and patient satisfaction. Hospitals use our simple, interactive and low-cost platform, as an effective tool to prepare patients for a safe and speedy recovery at home.
What is your solution and business model?
As a non-profit, the core objective of Noora Health is to serve marginalized populations. Currently, through a partnership with a chain of low-cost hospitals in India, Narayana Health, we have trained over 7,000 patient family members with our caregiver training program. Coupling video-based lessons with in-person practice training, we teach family members how to coach basic physical therapy exercises, encourage proper dietary/lifestyle changes, and recognize early warning signs of medical emergencies. We create the opportunity for medically informed, round the clock support, improved recovery, and a safer transition home. Noora Health leverages the latest in digital education technology to deliver personalized, disease-specific education via a tablet-based application for patients and caregivers. Through our fun, interactive, skill-based learning, we make sure that patient families really have everything they need to succeed after a major diagnosis or surgery; replacing anxiety with competency and easing the transition from the hospital to the home. We cut out repetitive, generalized, scattered information from the workflow of doctors and nurses, freeing up more time to have meaningful, patient-specific discussions. We sell our technology in the domestic market and use the revenue to bring our tech to marginalized populations.
What is unique patentable, or otherwise not seen elsewhere about your venture?
Our technology platform that we developed using human centered design was created specifically to meet the needs of disenfranchised patient populations around the world. Our platform is available in 6+ languages so that despite language gaps, people can get the medical care and information that they need. We leverage the best in health tech talent and technology in the Bay Area with some of the biggest medical problems in India to solve massive problems at an astounding scale.
Please describe who your customers are and how you know they want your product?
Our customers are marginalized patient populations in India and the US, especially those who don’t have access to health education in their first language in a hospital environment. We know that people want this because we have spent the last 2 years working in Indian and US hospitals trying to solve this problem with a health knowledge gap.
In which country does the target population your company serves reside?
India
Please comment on the strength of the venture’s leadership:
We are a team of all stars and we met at the Stanford Design School while pursuing different graduate degrees. With several decades of experience our team brings together talents in design, engineering, global health, and medicine to form the dream team. We have led the team in India and US for the last 2 years
Please describe the impact your company will have or is having, the way that you measure your impact, and the scale you plan to reach?
We measure our outcomes obsessively. In our patient population in India we are: Reducing surgical complications by 36%, reducing readmissions by 23%, improving patient satisfaction by 54% and have saved 153 lives to date. We plan to reach 1.5M patients per year by 2016.
How is your organization innovative? Have collaborations with others enabled that innovation?
We are partnered with Stanford University, Narayana Health, Sutter Health, and other large health organizations that allow us to develop a best in class product and deploy it at massive scale.
Remember to “join the cavalry” by subscribing to our content here.
The post Noora Health Named a Finalist in Gratitude Awards Competition; Winners to Be Chosen at SOCAP appeared first on Your Mark On The World.