GetWellNetwork Brings Home Comfort to Patient Care

At age 28, GetWellNetwork founder Michael O’Neil Jr. was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. While an inpatient at Johns Hopkins, surrounded by the best science and medicine but an outdated television, O’Neil dreamt up the interactive patient care concept, which promotes patient involvement in the recovery process. GetWellNetwork now partners with 60 hospitals to educate, entertain and empower patients. dcTechSource.com visited GetWellNetwork in Bethesda to learn more.

By Avery Fellow | January 25, 2010

In 1997, GetWellNetwork founder Michael O’Neil, Jr. was studying law and business at Georgetown when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and became a 28-year-old cancer patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital. "I’ve never felt so unempowered in my life," O’Neil said.

"Every morning at about 10 o’clock the same person would walk into my room and ask me for six dollars to turn on my TV," O’Neil said. "In a hospital like Johns Hopkins, there are so many visible assets around the patient—people, medication, technologies—but one of the laziest assets was the TV monitor."

So O’Neil launched GetWellNetwork, which through a concept called interactive patient care, channels entertainment, education and communication through the hospital television.

"The concept is more important than the company. If you engage patients in their care, they are going to be healthier," O’Neil said.

"Ironically, the hospitals in this country that are known for giving the best clinical care are historically the worst environments of care," O’Neil said. "The focus has been so much on the science of medicine and not the healing environment."

The Interactive Patient Care system, which displays in multiple languages, allows patients to watch movies, access the Internet, and communicate with hospital staff via their bedside television. Patients can access hospital information, videos about their condition and details on medicine they are taking, as well as request help from hospital staff. The system is currently operating at 11,000 patient bedsides, reaching nearly 2 million patients a year.

The system can be seamlessly integrated with medical documentation programs that nurses are already using, according to former nurse and GetWellNetwork Product Line Director Carrie Hallock. "We’re able to build an interface with just about any clinical information system out there," Hallock said.

GetWellNetwork has a patent pending on workflow engine called Patient Pathways, which takes an existing clinical workflow and creates a parallel patient flow, prompting patient message delivery at different points of their care process. 

Instead of flooding patients with information three or four hours before they leave, the Interactive Patient Care system aims to teach them throughout their stay. "When they are ready, when they are not in pain, the system says, ‘Let’s learn about these two medicines you are on’—not all ten," Hallock said. "It enables clinical staff—whether it’s the staff nurse, discharge planner or hospital pharmacist—to have what they need at the right moment to engage the patient."

GetWellNetwork is currently researching if its Interactive Patient Care system can address a current healthcare problem, patient falls. In October 2009, Medicare announced that if a patient fell in the hospital, it would not pay for the cost of incremental care. GetWellNetwork is currently measuring if its system can reduce patient falls by informing at-risk patients at their bedsides.

The company is also researching if its products can help reduce the hospital readmissions among heart failure patients. According to O’Neil, more than 23 percent of the people who are admitted to a hospital for heart failure are readmitted within 30 days, usually because they are not maintaining medication protocols and post-discharge instructions.

One of the major business drivers for GetWellNetwork is payment reform. Last year, Medicare started requiring hospitals to publicly report their satisfaction and quality scores on hospitalcompare.gov, and next year top-performing hospitals will get reimbursed at a higher rate than those who are lesser-performing.

After adding the system, hospitals have seen patient satisfaction numbers soar from 1 or 2 percent to 70 or 90 percent.

"These are numbers that take them years to move even a half percent," said Shannon O’Neil, director of pediatrics at GetWellNetwork.

GetWellNetwork’s newest product is GetWellTown, launched late last year, which is aimed at children hospital patients. In 2006, GetWellNetwork traveled the country talking to children and their parents about what they want during a patient stay. Shannon O’Neil said every single one of the children wanted to learn more about their condition. GetWellNetwork incorporated medical information into a colorful, interactive visual center for young patients. The Disney Children's Hospital in Orlando, Florida was the first to go live with the program, and it is currently live in two other children’s hospitals.

To keep up with all this growth, GetWellNetwork brought on Michele Perry as COO late last year. Perry has a track record of business strategy development successes, most recently as chief marketing officer for cybersecurity company Sourcefire Inc., which she helped grow from $9 million to $76 million in revenue. She is working to make sure that GetWellNetwork consistently delivers its products as it scales to more clients, ensuring that executive leadership, nurse engagement, and clear goals are present as the company enters each new hospital. "We have so much opportunity right now," Perry said.

Perry said the market for interactive patient care exists. "It’s not a matter of if this will happen. It’s a matter of when it will really take off!"

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