Vidscrip, a Minneapolis-based patient engagement startup, has inked a deal to provide its video-making software to physicians across Partners Healthcare in Boston. It's the two-and-a-half-year-old company's largest deployment yet, and Vidscrips will open up a Boston office to support the rollout.
"We had an opportunity to present what we were doing to their senior population health leadership [at Partners] and they really got it immediately," Vidscrip CEO and cofounder John Brownlee told MobiHealthNews. "They really saw the opportunity to utilize vidscrips in a population health setting in particular, where motivating change and having patients involved in their own care is critically important because the provider’s now taking risk on for the outcomes of the patient."
Vidscrip offers an iPad app that helps clinicians to quickly and efficiently create video content explaining prescriptions, conditions, and therapies and then deliver that video content to their patients across a number of different possible channels. The main draw, Brownlee said, that sets them apart from other patient engagement services that deliver similar video content, is that the content always comes from a patient's own physician.
"That’s the trusted source the patient needs, and we think that’s the source that will motivate change in behavior or action on the part of the patient," he said. "The fact that it comes from their own doctor. That’s what really sets us apart. You can go to YouTube and watch videos all day long about vaccines or whatever. But I’m not going to hear that information from my own doctor and it’s not going to be prescribed directly to me. That’s really what we’re trying to play up."
In addition, making the videos is a very quick process for the doctor. Rather than the doctor having to write a script, the software "interviews" the doctors, asking them questions which they then answer on camera. The software turns those clips into a website patients can access that has all the questions organized as different video clips, as well as links to the provider's other websites or the doctor's bio. Patients can also then share the videos on social media if they so choose. Physicians can print out a card with the URL, email it to patients, or make it accessible via the patient portal. And although the videos currently have to be made on an iPad (longterm plans include expansion to Android and Microsoft Surface tablets), they can be watched on any computer or mobile device.
The company has raised no investor capital since its founding two years ago, but it has rolled out pilots around the world, including a large client in the Netherlands and two programs in Ireland. Both Irish projects are with pharmaceutical companies -- a pilot with Roche around oncology and one with AbbVie around rheumatology. They've also worked with the Mayo Clinic on a project related to heart failure. However, the project with Partners is a full-scale deployment and the first to necessitate the company opening a new office nearby.
The rollout will start out in just a few departments in the Partners network, but the license makes the offering available to all 6,000 Partners physicians to use it.
