Andrey Ostrovsky is a pediatric physician, CEO and co-founder of Care atHand, and social entrepreneur. While there is a place, he believes, for healing one patient at a time, he wants to affect entire populations, starting locally, then regionally, across the globe. Read Part 1
Dr.
Ostrovosky set out on an unusual thread right out of high school. While his “not so tactical grandparents” were
happy that he decided to go through medical school. The seams zigzagged well outside the pattern.
“What did you do after high school?”
“What did you do after high school?”
“I went
to Boston University for undergraduate.
I took six month off to move to Geneva and work for the World Health
Organization as a data analyst. That was
my first large scale, high-level work experience. There, I started to get a better
understanding of health systems and just systems thinking in general.
“During
my time at the World Health Organization, I helped organize a conference. The memorable from that conference was a
nonprofit called the Health Systems Action Network. Throughout the end of undergrad and into
medical school, I had been an advocate for involving trainees into global
health to help strengthen health systems.”
The program came about from meetings in 2005. “I was invited by the board to run that
organization. I ran that organization
while I was in medical school. My
pathway of early acceptance into medical school allowed me to do that.”
In his third year of medical
school, he went to work with the Doris Duke Foundation. He moved to San Fransico, California to work
on a technology project for the health department in finding correlation between brain volume using MRI
and neurodevelopmental outcomes in neonates with congenital heart defects.
Yet, another break, he spent
six months of his senior year working for U.S. Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland.
It was during the stretch of time he spent in San Francisco to the time he spent in the U.S. Capitol that Care atHand began to take shape. The idea came about when Doctor Ostrovsky’s friend, Jeffrey Levy, came to understand the challenges of caring for aging parents. It wasn’t until April 2011, that Andrey’s friend contacted him.
“I knew he had ideas and frustrations regarding care for
his parents. He reached out to me as a
physician and someone who had done some technology stuff in the past. He quit his very lucrative job in Silicon Valley. He asked me over. I flew to San Francisco for a full day of brainstorming
and meetings. That was the beginning of
Care atHand.
“The
name came from simplicity. We had a vision of something lightweight, something
mobile. We focused on a mobile,
low-skilled workforce. A mobile device
would be carried in these caregivers’ hands, helping them to collect and communicate
important information on patients they encountered in the community.”
“How has that changed over the years?”
“Initially,
we wanted to automate workflow within home care. Typical home Personal Care
Assistance services - we wanted to help with the activities of daily
living. We thought there was a big
opportunity in this community to introduce mobile into that workflow and
workforce. We had a very innovative
scheduling system. We had very simple
design, easy to deploy. It was easy to
use by a workforce that may be technology illiterate. We saved a little money for our customers in
homecare but we did not have the impact
we imagined.
"We did this for about a
year, year and a half and decided to take a step back. We looked at where our passion was, where our
strengths were. When we looked at the
intersection of the two, we realized that we were definitely on the mark with
the workforce. We are on the mark with
the non-clinical folks. Especially those
that were unaccounted for, the gray workforce that’s not official. It doesn’t have a MEDICARE reimbursement code
behind it, a family care giver, a community health giver. So we knew a lot about that workforce . We are experts in that workforce and we are
already experts in care coordination and transitions. We are experts in big data, at least from the
financing side of it. So, what don’t we
fit all this expertise together and focus in on digitizing care coordination. We wanted to make care coordination a smarter
process and in doing so, always emphasizing - how do we leverage the benefit of
the community health worker and at the same time a clinician like a nurse? That is the germ that led us to where our
software application is now. “
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