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VO: How can more federally funded research projects transform into viable commercial
products? Teach faculty how to think like entrepreneurs.
Dan O’Hair: The goals are to take an existing piece of research that the National Science
Foundation has funded, and to take it to the marketplace.
Dan O’Hair: For a number of years, Congress-who funds NSF--has wondered what they’re getting
for their investment.
Derek Lane: What the National Science Foundation and others have done is they’ve suggested
they’ve dropped a lot of money into social scientific research, but they’re afraid
when the grant cycle is over, the projects end up on somebody’s shelf, or they end
up--worse--in the garbage somewhere.
Derek Lane: So the National Science Foundation was the first group to step up and say, if
you’ve had funding in the last five years, you’re eligible for this funding”.
Dan O’Hair: They put together this program called “I-Corps” which stands for the
“innovation corps” to help researchers commercialize their ideas.
NSF selected 24 teams, each with a promising technology concept, for a $50,000 grant and
a specialized curriculum. UK’s technology, developed by the College of Communication
and Information, is tailored messaging.
Derek Lane: Much of the research I’ve done at the University of Kentucky has revolved
around messages around ***, STD, and pregnancy prevention. Dan’s worked with the Weather
Service. How do we get messages to people that tell them “shelter in place” or better
yet, “evacuate”? How do we get them to do that? Tailored messaging is all about,
“How do I give you a message you need to get you to do what you need to do?”
Jen Dupuis: So we’re taking this research and we’re applying it to healthcare. You’ve
been in the hospital for, say, a heart attack and they’re sending you home. You’re not
at the top of your game, you’re probably a little scared, and you go home and suddenly,
you’re in charge of your care. So, we want to send tailored messages to these patients.
Maybe it’s something like helping them manage their diet, or their medications, things that
seem very basic but can be very overwhelming to these patients.
Part of what we’re doing with the project is kind of coming up with a short survey that
patients will answer. And that will help us decide, you know, what we need to do to tailor
this message specifically for them. We have an evidence-based arsenal of information about
the kind of questions that you need to ask, “When you’re speaking to your doctor,
do you often find it hard to understand what he or she is saying?”
Even though we’ve done a lot of research into this, and we know what works, we don’t
know what might sell.
VO: Teaching this 10-week crash course is one of the top entrepreneurs in the world,
Stanford’s Steve Blank, author of The Four Steps To The Epiphany.
Randall Stevens: So what Steve talks a lot about is that startups … usually don’t
fail because the technology is bad, they fail because they don’t know how to get customers.
Dan O’Hair: His notion is that a business couldn’t conceivably succeed unless you
know what customers are thinking. And so the requirement was to talk to 100 real customers—people
who would eventually write a check for the product.
Randall Stevens: As soon as you begin talking to a customer, you’ll figure out that what
you thought was either wrong, or a lot of times you may find there’s even bigger opportunities,
and that means shifting either what you’re working on or the way that you’re approaching
going into the market.
The team that we have working on this doesn’t necessarily have domain expertise in the healthcare
industry, so a lot of what we’ve been going through these last 10 weeks has been just
some nose-to-the-grindstone trying to understand what’s going on; where what we’re talking
about would fit. Who are the players in the market?
Derek Lane: We’re looking at people who have heart failure. We know the three behaviors
associated with heart failure patients are: sodium intake. They have to reduce the amount
of salt in their diet. They have to weigh themselves every day, because if that varies
it can actually change the way the medicine is acting and reacting. And then they have
to take the medicine and do the exercises and do everything as it’s prescribed. And
if they don’t, they’re more likely to be readmitted.
As of November, Medicare/Medicaid will not pay for readmits within 30 days on average
it costs $11,000 for a patient to be readmitted, if Medicare and Medicaid won’t pay for that,
somebody’s going to have to. So it’s in the best interest of medical facilities to
try to reduce that readmit.
Wes Brooks: “This is all great and well and good, but what’s going to drive the
real change for theses hospitals is going to be Medicare and Medicaid saying, “Do
this.”
With healthcare, it typically moves at a very slow pace, and it’s a very reactive market.
So with that kind of market, you have to go by what is going to force the change, and
regulations are what typically will do that.
Jen Dupuis: We see it as integrating with the systems that the hospitals already use.
They use systems called electronic medical records, EMRs, and there’s a lot of different
pieces to those EMRs. So we’d like to be a piece of that.
Wes Brooks: Something that’s called a “personal health record” to basically make it easy
for patients to track all of their doctors’ digital information, take all of your information
and simplify it, make it something easy to digest, and something you can actually learn
from for yourself.
So we feel like we’ve got a new point of entry, and that these doctors who think that
“Well this is great science!” now have a way to say this is great science and it
just makes sense. It actually fits in our workflow.
Jen Dupuis: and so that way it would work in with the workflow of the hospital and however
they transmit messages to their patients. It might be via a patient portal that the
patient logs in to; it might be via text messages, emails, even a phone call.
As we’re talking to all of these people, they’re getting excited about the product
as well. So, not only are we helping to develop our business model and to really clarify what’s
going to be the best product that we can produce, but we’re kind of developing a list of people
who are probably going to buy. In the I-Corps language, they call it an “EarlyVangelist”—someone
who is so excited about your product that they are willing to pay for it even before
it’s perfect.
Dan O’Hair: Probably the most rewarding part of the project has been the reaction
we get from people when we talk about our ideas. Again, we’re academicians, and we’re
not used to having to sell things. So to finally have people say, “You know, this is what
patients need. This is what the healthcare system needs to right itself.” This is pretty
gratifying.
Derek Lane: We get funding from these different organizations to test our messages, but then
once we’ve got that, this commercialization lets us say, “How do we make life better
now that we know these things?”
Wes Brooks: Personally, I kind of hope this keeps going and that we can turn this into
a full-fledged business and that I can help to run that over time. I think there’s a
definite need for this.