Janus Choice offers an interactive, mobile platform for matching patients with post-acute care providers.
Silicon Prairie News met up with Janus Choice co-founders Alexandra Goodwin and Darryl Palmer in St. Louis to learn more about their company. Janus Choice is a portfolio company of Singularity University (SU Ventures), an organization that supports entrepreneurs using exponential technologies to solve global challenges, and Jumpstart Foundry, a healthcare-dedicated organization in Nashville. Goodwin and Palmer founded Janus Choice in 2014 in Chicago, and in 2016, they relocated the company to St Louis after becoming a recipient of an Arch Grant.
Janus Choice seeks to solve healthcare problems globally to address what its founders view as an ongoing crisis in post-acute care placements. In simple terms, Janus Choice is a platform that helps patients needing post-acute care after a hospital stay. The platform, to be precise, is an AI-augmented decision-making tool that guides and follows a patient from the hospital through recovery.
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The Janus Choice platform is a clinical tool that matches patients needing post-acute care with a provider based on certain clinical, social, and financial criteria. Janus Choice reduces search time from three to five days, on average, to just twenty minutes for 80% of patients. This reduction in time, according to Goodwin, leads to better outcomes and improved patient experience, as well as reductions in length-of-stay and readmission rates.
The Janus Choice software can be used to place patients within a specified radius of hospitals, all depending on the care needs of each individual patient as determined by their provider.
“Although currently our platform is being developed and used in US market only, it has a truly global application,” said Goodwin.
Goodwin described the problem resulting from the growing trend of working-age adults caring for their elderly loved ones. According to Goodwin, conventional methods for placing patients results in up to three million, or 70% of those patients being readmitted to acute-care facilities annually as a result of post-acute care mismatching.
“Family wage-earners who care for elderly loved ones often experience a substantial reduction in their incomes, as well as social and emotional effects,” said Goodwin. “The challenges associated with finding rehabilitative and post-acute care not only leave families feeling confused, stressed, and constrained, but also result in hospital readmissions that could be avoided with better alignment between patients and post-acute care facilities. Janus Choice provides a solution that addresses these problems by accelerating the matching process. Our solution is available at the most stressful moment for all participants in the discharge process, the time during which they are making rehabilitation decisions in the best interests of the patient.”
Goodwin added, “Janus Choice not only accelerates the matching process; it places high quality, curated and verified data at the fingertips of the patient and case manager at the moment they are making this important decision; our platform provides the patient and the care team the data that would otherwise take months for them to gather on their own – if it’s even accessible to them at all. The Janus Choice solution is all about empowering patients to make educated and informed decisions as to how to continue their care. Janus Choice is not a marketing platform – it is a clinical tool that curates up to 3,000 points of data for each unique match. The tool is tremendously helpful to case managers by equipping them with and managing data that would otherwise be too voluminous to manage independently.”
Janus Choice licenses directly to hospitals. The platform’s bedside integration with Epic, Cerner, and Meditech enables a patient and case manager to use a handheld tablet, patient education TV-system, or laptop to navigate post-acute care options and facilities. The case manager initiates the search and the patient completes the selection process. The platform is designed to provide patient support from acute hospital discharge to post-acute care admission, transport, and finally patient feedback after post-acute care has concluded. Janus Choice never charges post-acute care referral fees.
Goodwin’s impressive resume boasts graduate astrophysics degrees and an MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Palmer also has a strong foundation in data science and technology, having worked at NASA at age 16 and becoming the youngest ever recipient of NASA Space Act Award. Janus Choice’s core team also includes Dr. James Galloway, the company’s Chief Population Health Officer, a cardiologist and internist, who served as Assistant US Surgeon General during Bush and Obama administrations.
Janus Choice is working on rolling out a new version of its platform with leading health systems in the Midwest and East Coast.
Visit http://www.januschoice.com/ to learn more about this company.
