Role : Founding CTO and Director Product Strategy
When : Full Time 1999-2010
Exit : Acquired by Cardinal Health
Summary
Curaspan’s SaaS helped hospitals find post-acute beds and services for patients who were ready to be discharged. As Founding CTO and Director of Product Strategy, Bennett played an integral role in shaping product-market fit, spending a lot of time in hospitals and post-acutes to understand the case management workflow and how to best address pain points with features. He collaborated with “power users" to gather product insights and better align the product to solve customer problems. He co-led the technical sales and implementation efforts for the first 100 hospitals dialing in process and best-practice for go-to-market. Blending people, process, and technology Bennett created a program that led to successful implementation at an additional 500 hospitals and ~8000 post-acutes handling 20% of US patient transitions.
Value Proposition
Hospitals
Hospitals were able to discharge patients on time, reducing their Average Length of Stay and realizing 7-figure ROI annually. In addition, moving patients to an apropos care setting reduced adverse events and avoidable readmissions.
Post-Acute
Post-acute providers (Skilled Nursing, Homecare, Inpatient Rehab, Hospice, etc) realized seamless data and transaction flow with their hospital partners and post-acutes who participated realized significant competitive advantage booking patients compared with those who did not.
Monetization
Hospitals and post-acutes all paid a subscription fee to use our SaaS product.
Adjacent Complimentary New Product Launches
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Bennett launched an adjacent new SaaS product to coordinate non-emergency medical transportation to move patients from the hospital to the post-acute setting. We moved a phone/fax based process online, directly integrating workflow with dispatch systems, and were able to realize time savings of hours to days when transporting patients as part of discharge. Medical transportation providers and hospitals paid additional subscription fees to use this product.
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Bennett launched an adjacent new SaaS product to coordinate payer case manager review and approval of post-acute services. By integrating data and workflow between hospitals and payers, case managers were able to obtain necessary payer approval to expedite the discharge process, further reducing the ALOS and increasing hospital value proposition. Hospitals and Payers paid additional scubscription fees to use this product.
Challenges
This was early days in hospitals and healthcare connectivity. We didn't have the "cloud" or many of the modern development tools. We had to create most of what we did from whole cloth.
Hospital Adoption
Case managers are busy and it was difficult getting them to use the product when they could very easily revert to their legacy phone/fax based workflow. We overcame this by making the product incredibly easy to access and use, and also by helping managers understand value proposition so they could effectively instill buy-in from their staff, and effectively drive utilization.
Post-Acute Adoption
We discovered that hospitals drove the market dynamics as the source of patients and new business for post-acutes. We used a regional strategy leveraging the network effect - if we could get one hospital in a region, we would get their post-acutes, which in turn made it easier to sell other hospitals and drive additional post-acute adoption. We used a traditional market manager sales approach for hospitals, and an inside sales team to call, sign-up, and train post-acute customers.
UI/UX
Many markets had required forms and deviations from standard workflow. We had to design a universal part of the product that all customers accessed, and create a separate lane for the customized workflow on a site or regional basis.
Regulatory Compliance
In addition to HIPAA, we had to accommodate most state laws and demonstrate our ability to safeguard sensitive data. We achieved an ISO-27001 certification which answered virtually every security question raised during sales calls and allowed us to focus on value proposition instead of getting bogged down in regulatory and security questions.
Scale
As the founding technologist in the business, I was able to scale this platform from concept to profit over the course of a decade. We made some good decisions up front like using Oracle (at the time Oracle was more scalable than postgres - side story, I ran the TPC benchmarks as part of the postgres commercialization effort called "GreatBridge"). We prioritized stability at the hardware and software layers through top 5 monitoring (top 5 slowest queries, top 5 slowest pages, top 5 code modules with errors, etc). Having a cogent stability program (these days automated by CI/CD - but that didn't exist then) we were able to hyper-tune our database and web app code for performance and scale up to 50M patient records in our data warehouse, and the ability to load 5k+ new records per hour. We were able to accomplish this with a relatively small full-time team of about 5 and an ecosystem of contractors with the most concentration on DBA, database tuning, and HL7 integrations.
Technology
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Oracle data warehouse for 50M patient records
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Real time full-census EMR integrations with 600 hospitals
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Dynamic front-end with focus on UI/UX to facilitate complex workflow
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Private cage in bare metal tier-1 data center