Health Systems Partnering With Tendo on Digital Engagement Platform
Doug McKee, M.D., chief medical information officer at Health First, a Florida-based health system, is working with a startup called Tendo Systems to connect many disparate data sources and present patients with a unified view of their health records.
“One of the bigger challenges in medicine these days is having information scattered all over the place,” McKee said. “Unfortunately, the sicker you are, the more that happens and it really should be the opposite, because you need that information to make decisions.”
Even health systems that have an enterprise EHR still encounter this problem, but for systems like Health First that have different hospital and ambulatory EHR systems, the different records are not connected in a meaningful way, McKee explained.
“Working with Tendo is our effort to connect the patient experience into one application, and to have that single pane of glass into a patient's experience in our system regardless of which EMR their data was in, or whether they have enrolled in the health plan yet,” McKee said. “We are paying the utmost attention to the patient journey and trying to make it as easy as possible, because healthcare is always going to be hard, and many times it can be scary. If you don't have all the information, that makes it even more difficult.”
Philadelphia-based Tendo was started by siblings Dan and Jen Goldsmith, who helped build Veeva Systems into a multibillion-dollar cloud software company for the life sciences industry. The company is seeking to create a digital engagement platform and suite of configurable applications that connect patients, clinicians, and caregivers throughout the care cycle. To develop the platform, it is working with Jefferson Healthcare in Philadelphia and Health First, as well as other provider organizations.
“We have this approach where we're getting five to 10 foundational customers,” said Jen Goldsmith, president of Tendo. “Our intention is to be developing in conjunction with these foundational customers to make sure we're getting it right.”
In March 2021, Tendo announced a partnership with Jefferson Health and venture capital firm General Catalyst. Jefferson’s CEO at the time, Stephen Klasko, M.D., M.B.A., said, “At Jefferson, we are changing the paradigm of delivery to one where patients are people who want to be able to thrive without healthcare getting in the way and access is simple; what we call healthcare with no address. Tendo shares our vision and has the experience and expertise to deliver the right technology for this change. For Jefferson, this is an opportunity to create the best of both worlds bringing together fast paced digital transformation within our healthcare ecosystem.”
Noting that a lot of people have tried to tackle this problem before, I asked Goldsmith if there were some fundamental mistakes others have made that Tendo was going to try not to repeat.
“There were what we perceive to be fundamental mistakes,” she said. “Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, but I think one of the fundamental mistakes when it comes to the patient experience in particular is starting with a single problem or starting with a shiny object. A lot of companies would gravitate toward an application to support a very specific need, whether that's a specialized condition, or a specialized function, and try to grow outwards from there,” she said. “People would tend to ignore the more mundane aspects of things, because they were mundane. But what we found in life sciences when we were creating Veeva Vault, you have to focus on the things that are hard and mundane first, in order to get to those shiny objects. The concept of creating a patient workflow in a way that is consumer-friendly and permeates this kind of consumer experience, and brings that out to patient communities was something that was considered a little bit mundane, but really needed a re-imagining, a new way of looking at it and required a platform beneath that as well,” she said. “This is the second mistake I'll talk about: I think people can go into the point solutions too quickly and forget about the power of having a platform, which can be a really loaded word in tech and healthcare in particular. But it is important to create a proper platform where you can leverage configurability to create new solutions without having to reinvent the wheel each and every time you accelerate innovation over time.”
Goldsmith said they work with the partners across three individual threads. “We work very deeply on the process thread to understand how things are operating today, and how the interactions between their patient communities and their clinical and administrative communities occur to identify areas for potential optimization or improvement,” she said.
The second area is in technology. “Oftentimes you see a landscape one of the foundational customers refers to it as a ‘fruit salad of different vendors’ within their ecosystem,” she added. “We look very deeply at that and try to identify where there are areas for simplification.”
The third thread involves value. “We have a discipline within Tendo that is focused on understanding the value and the metrics for success. As we go out into implementation, we ask what are the tangible ROI metrics that are quantifiable that we can start to measure to show the success of the program?”
McKee brings it all back to simplifying the patient experience. “We are trying to make sure that the patient can see their med list of problems or allergies, contact their care team, and that their lab results, their radiology results are available in a really convenient way,” he said. “I think that with so many patient portals, there are multiple steps to get into them. And then you have a hard time even finding the lab results. Part of what we're trying to do with Tendo is to focus on not only getting the information there, but making it easy to navigate through.”
Goldsmith said the company is looking to move into pilots with its health system partners this summer. “Our goal is to iterate to get to a point where we feel comfortable releasing it more broadly to the healthcare community,” she added, “so we'll stay in the foundational customer program, and iterate heavily there until we feel that the product is ready for broader use. Then we'll open it up.”