Founded by Aditya Mukerjee ʼ12SEAS and Benjamin Jack ’07SEAS, BoardRounds provides hospitals with transitional care management as a service, guaranteeing prompt post-discharge primary care physician (PCP) follow-up for all patients.
BoardRounds manages, streamlines, and automates appointment and transportation scheduling, saving hospitals money by reducing length-of-stay and readmission costs. Most importantly, Boardrounds provides analytics to hospitals to better manage discharge processes and sources of costly readmissions.
After graduating from medical school, Benjamin Jack began working in ERs all over the East Coast. Recognizing many hospitals’ struggle to follow up with recently discharged patients, Benjamin founded BoardRounds to help stem the tide of patient leakage and ensure that recovering patients get the follow-up care they need.
One in five patients who leave the emergency room returns within 30 days. Benjamin believed that the leading cause of revisits was poor communications between the patient, hospital, and insurer. The plan was to place a social worker in the ER to improve communication between patient and staff, raise patient satisfaction, and reduce costs.
As often happens with startups, the customers were not connecting with the original BoardRounds visioni. The team had their heads down, trying to focus on a myriad of challenges and day-to-day issues. Lost in the details, they lost touch with their customers.
Enter designer Maggie Breslin, a designer brought in by Columbia Entrepreneurship because of her extensive work at the Mayo Clinic optimizing clinical environments and health care delivery process.
Working closely with BoardRounds customers, Maggie sat in several ERs and quietly observed for how patients reacted to the BoardRounds solution. She collected these observations and presented the insights to the team. Maggie surprised them.
“On a visit to the emergency room, no one is at their best. Patients didn’t understand at first blush what we were trying to do. We were not communicating as clearly as we could”
As a result of the insights Maggie brought to BoardRounds, they have redesigned their training process to create a more seamless product patient fit. Read more about BoardRounds in TechCrunch