Be the Signal, Not the Noise

How healthcare startups can help in the battle against COVID-19 

As a leading healthcare startup our company has both a unique perspective and a special responsibility in how we respond to the COVID-19 crisis. During “wartime,” it is equally important for us to know how to be helpful as it is to know what not to do. 

Here are the four basic principles we have chosen to follow.

1. Fight the actual fight if you can 

Every startup has a “currency” -- its strengths and assets that can be useful at this moment. One of the first questions we ask ourselves each day is, “does our currency matter right now? Can we play a real role in solving or at least finding answers to the most important issues at hand? What value-added role can we play?” 

Clearly the most direct way to put out the COVID-19 fire is to either treat patients or to create the physical assets needed, like masks, tents and shields, or to build and test equipment. That’s not our expertise. But we do have some assets that could help. 

LeanTaaS is an analytics software company. We are operations experts, mathematicians and software developers who build software tools that increase patient access to medical care by optimizing how health systems use expensive, constrained resources, like operating rooms (ORs), infusion chairs, and inpatient beds. That means we know healthcare operations deeply, and we are fortunate to work with hundreds of the hospitals and providers around the country who are directly confronting the COVID-19 surge. 

So if we can’t build masks or treat patients directly what can we do to increase -- not decrease -- our healthcare systems’ bandwidth right now? 

2. Evolve your product to support the fight against COVID-19

We spent the first couple of weeks listening and gathering information to determine how we could help. Based on direct feedback from our customers, we have made several changes within our products. 

For example, we enhanced certain features in our OR tools to better triage requests for surgical time for acute non-COVID cases. We created a free Elective Surgery Backlog Recovery Calculator that any hospital can use to determine how long it will require to complete the backlog of procedures postponed during the crisis. This model projects the estimated number of cases canceled and different options for increasing OR capacity in the future, like increasing prime time utilization or extending working hours. 

To help our infusion center customers create the maximum distance possible between patients, we’ve developed new templates that let them change the sequence of patient scheduling. Here too, we are predicting how long it will take to absorb the postponed infusion treatments many of our customers will need to backfill in the coming weeks. 

Similarly we’ve been working on a capacity huddle that models the need for inpatient beds, and tracks the adhoc capacity our customers are bringing online to handle COVID-19 and other urgent inpatients. As the situation evolves in the coming weeks, we’ll keep making adjustments.  

3. Connect, build and be the glue to your community

One of any healthcare startup’s biggest assets is its community of customers and it’s ecosystem. Consider connecting yours to one another behind the scenes for knowledge and asset sharing, or function as the central connection point to facilitate that process. 

In our case, we are able to convene health systems together on our online platform. As such, we have started a series of “in the field” webinars featuring our healthcare customers, sharing challenges, best practices and available solutions to the most pressing problems. Denver-based UCHealth revealed how their infusion centers are modifying life-saving cancer treatments. Experts from hotspots in Seattle and New Jersey discussed triaging the OR. Penn Medicine demonstrated its free capacity modeling tool for hospitals. 

Leveraging our ecosystem of relationships, we were also able to connect our academic medical center customers to CEOs in the tech world. For instance, contract manufacturers like Fast Radius and Zyci have significant production capacity for 3D printing and laser cutting that can ramp up the production of PPE. They are actively testing samples, and planning design modifications for larger scale runs in the coming weeks. 

Whatever you do, the key is to make the process fast and turnkey; strike the right balance so that you don’t require too much time or involvement for healthcare leaders.

4. If none of the above are true, stay out of way

I see a ton of startups and organizations who feel compelled to wade into the pandemic zeitgeist. I am still getting pitched by companies wanting to sell me hospital staff lists for sales and marketing purposes or promoting apps to monitor my heart rate. I would challenge all healthcare startups to aggressively question whether now is the appropriate time for such efforts. 

Imagine if your house was on fire, and someone selected that exact moment to try to sell you a new car. It might be a fantastic car at a great discount, but what you really need is a way to put out the fire. That’s akin to all the unsolicited alerts from various vendors notifying us of their unique COVID-19 approach, which often has no relevance to our decision-making process. We’ve seen third parties weighing in on the evolving epidemic trends and parroting “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” buzzwords. Even stories that are ostensibly not at all about the virus end up invariably being about the virus. While some have genuine expertise or assistance to provide, the vast majority simply become part of the noise. 

At LeanTaaS we’ve made a number of business decisions that we know will temporarily impact us as a company. For the duration, we aren’t proactively calling any prospects or customers for anything to do with marketing or new sales. We’re backing off some new implementations that are underway and letting our healthcare customers guide the right timing. Normally we might publish thought leadership articles about how data science can help hospitals save money, or showcase the increase in patient volume achieved for cancer centers or ORs. Now isn’t the moment.

If you do have something to say, make sure it is “contentful.” It could mean providing a well-reasoned, data-based perspective that’s driven by your unique expertise (not others’ viewpoints). It could be a set of tools and intellectual property that can help health systems recover. And finally, being contentful means having a growth mindset, so your position is constantly evolving based on what you learn as this crisis continues to change.

Be the signal, not the noise.

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