The MAVEN Project (Medical Alumni Volunteer Expert Network)

Physicians volunteering clinical expertise to the underserved   

Access to medical care is one of the most challenging issues facing our nation. The MAVEN Project is on a mission to change that. 

The Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion provided coverage for many, but insurance does not confer access to care for the 100 million people in the country who remain un- or under-insured.  While the nation’s community health clinics provide basic care to underserved patients,  complex medical care and specialty expertise is limited due to economic, social, and geographic barriers.  Individuals with chronic conditions (e.g., diabetes, asthma) often experience long delays seeing specialists until their conditions deteriorate, leading to emergency room visits and avoidable hospitalizations.

The MAVEN Project addresses this disparity by linking engaged, highly-qualified volunteer physicians  to community health clinics in need, using telehealth technology to match primary care providers (“PCPs”)  in the field with expert specialists.

The MAVEN Project’s volunteer specialty physicians—many retired or semi-retired—are a previously untapped workforce and an immediate solution for under-resourced clinics.  We carefully credential volunteers and provide them with malpractice coverage and technical support. Our expert network consults on cases, mentors and educates PCPs to increase knowledge, improve service delivery, and support long-term capacity building, fostering ongoing relationships to optimize patient care and engender mutual trust. With our easy to use platform, PCPs can obtain immediate answers to pressing questions; discuss groups of cases with our experts; review individual complex cases; or receive clinically-pertinent education, all via HIPAA-protected videoconferencing or phone.

By empowering clinic PCPs with knowledge and advice, The MAVEN Project helps keep care local and enables the PCP to offer a comprehensive plan of care during a single patient visit, obviating the barriers of travel and time away from childcare or work that deter patients from seeing specialists.  Better, immediate disease management augmenting basic primary care yields improved healthcare outcomes and reduced morbidity for patients and their families.

During the pilot phase of our work, we proved our value; our current objective is to increase our impact 10-fold by 2021 and to be available in all 50 states and begin pursuing international expansion by 2023.

The MAVEN Project is the only nonprofit that recruits best-in-class physicians to volunteer their clinical expertise using telehealth technology that enables outreach across the country.  While other programs place physicians in clinics, our model provides the volunteer flexibility to work from anywhere, anytime.  We are uniquely focused on meeting the needs of local PCPs, giving them practical not pedantic advice, on their terms.  We integrate into clinic workflow, suiting patient and clinic exigencies.  Comprehensive care at the point of service improves patient outcomes and compliance, and arms PCPs with the knowledge and resources to provide a high quality of care. 

Telehealth technology is critical to our model – it is the crucial enabler that connects our volunteer physician network to the primary care providers who desperately need their expertise in underserved clinics nationwide.   We leverage Software-as-Service (SAS)-based HIPAA-protected videoconferencing, phone and web-messaging to enable consults, education and mentoring sessions.  And, our new platform enhancements facilitate conversations via “available now” prompting for immediate access to consults as well as improved secure asynchronous messaging facilitating quick questions, longer conversations and scheduling in general.

We are seeking to continue the rapid growth pace we have set this year and more than triple our clinic network raising the number of patients able to access The MAVEN Project services from approximately 600,000 today to over 2 million by year-end 2019.    We will also be improving our data-capture and analysis processes to better monitor and quantify our impact as we scale.   We will continue to optimize our technology capabilities to efficiently match primary care provider clinic “demand” to our physician volunteer “supply” as we grow. 

Our goal is to expand to all 50 states and begin to pursue international expansion by 2023.    We aspire to reach more patients, from clinics serving 600,000 today to 20 million plus in five years.   In addition, we will also be taking a more targeted and disease-based approach with our consult and volunteer physician recruiting model.   We believe this focus will significantly multiply our impact on health outcomes beyond even the aggressive goals outlined above.    Finally, we will continue to invest in data capture and analytic resources to further prove our impact as we scale.     

The MAVEN Project has deep and numerous relationships and networks in the health care/medical, technology, and social sectors.  We will leverage these networks to reach and bring additional resources to our partners.  In addition, we will utilize direct outreach from The MAVEN Project staff and our partners via regular face-to-face meetings and updates and mass channels such as email, social media and direct mail.   

Our network of 40 clinics currently reaches over 600,000 patients.  We prioritize our offerings based upon the goals and needs of our partner clinics.  In some cases, we are providing practical educational sessions on topics clinics choose.  In others, we provide on the spot answers to clinical questions, or discuss cases in the aggregate.  In still others, we are mentoring PCPs who are often mid-level nurse practitioners or physician assistants, helping them with not only medical knowledge but also workflow, patient relationships, and efficiencies.    Our strength is that we tailor our work to the clinic providers’ priorities.

Our goal is to grow the number of patients with access to The MAVEN Project services from 600,000 today to over 2 million in 2019; by 2021 our goal is to reach 10 million. As we expand our network and the volume of consults increases, we will be taking a more targeted and disease-based approach to our model.   This focus will significantly multiply our impact on health outcomes beyond the aggressive goals to reach patients above. Finally, we will invest in robust data capture and analytic resources to further prove (and improve upon) our impact model as we scale.     

Dr. Laurie Green, Founder and President, continues to be the vision for the future and actively involved; she is a highly respected OB/GYN in California with 40 years of practice experience.   Laurie is an AARP Purpose Prize Fellow, 2018 California SF Chronicle Visionary of the Year nominee, a San Francisco Heath Commissioner and former President of the Harvard Medical School Alumni Association.   Our CEO, Lisa Bard Levine has an MD/MBA from Tufts and our senior management team collectively brings decades of experience in strategy consulting, business development, marketing and communications from Fortune 100 corporations and $75M+ nonprofits. 

We are a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and primarily funded by philanthropy and grants.   In addition, we also cover a small percentage of our service-delivery costs through payments from clinics able to pay us an annual non-clinical administrative fee which helps support the operational cost of delivering our services.    

Solve’s focus on innovative healthcare solutions and technology is a very strong fit with The MAVEN Project’s model.  Our model depends on telehealth technology to efficiently match underserved clinics with our volunteer physician network.    In addition, given our stage (i.e. leaving “proof of concept” and entering early growth phase) we believe the networking and expanded exposure that would come with a Solve Grant win would significantly accelerate our momentum by opening new knowledge pathways, partnerships and funding opportunities.

The demand for our services and the number of physician specialists who want to volunteer outpace our capacity to utilize them.   Financial support for our growth and services is our rate limiting factor to expansion and meeting the needs of safety-net clinics in underserved communities.  Adding new clinics brings an expansion cost of new technology licenses and volume, recruiting and onboarding, and insurance costs equaling approximately $7,000 to $10,000 per new clinic per year.