DIGITAS, LLC — Department of Defense STTR Phase II: AF20A-TCSO1

Description

Physicians are highly burned out (up to 80% of physicians) and the COVID-19 pandemic is making this problem much worse; Department of Defense doctors are at higher risk (caring for more patients per capita).  Burnout may manifest itself as sustained stress; but also leads to severe effects such as physician suicides, physician drug abuse, and increased patient medical errors.  Electronic health records (EHRs) are a well-known cause of burnout, including more advanced modern platforms.  GenetikTM addresses this problem by integrating with EHRs (e.g. AHLTA, Cerner/Genesis, or VISTA) to specifically make electronic health records better streamline clinical work and thus reduce burnout.  Phase 2 develops GenetikTM, a novel AI-based platform that mitigates burnout by reducing workload by at least 25% across all medical specialties.  While doctors are initial users, the system can scale to all frontline clinical users (physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, pharmacists).  Customers are base care facilities (hospitals or clinics) or other large divisions such as the Defense Health Agency or the Veterans Administration.  Besides burnout reduction, other major downstream benefits of the system include increased patient satisfaction, improved use of clinical standards, reduction in patient care delays, reduced racial disparities in care, and decreased medication errors.  If used by large sets of clinical users, the platform can be used as a primary mechanism to increase medical surge capacity across the Department of Defense.  The phase 2 objective is to build the initial system with a set of high-frequency clinical use cases, and prove the system’s value by measuring impact on reducing burnout (using validated qualitative and quantitative methods).  GenetikTM can also address the civilian market (total addressable market of $15 billion/year) without significant platform modification. Long-term the goal for the platform is to become a viable mechanism to reduce global healthcare costs and improve patient outcomes across all of medicine.