Welfie Health Equity Platform

Welfie is a health equity platform that addresses all four points of the MIT Solve challenge. 

1. We increase local capacity and resilience in health systems by creating career pipelines toward community health

2. We are building a population health platform to collect, track and report population health data to local health systems and governments to make better policy and program decisions

3. Our community health workforce is embedded in K-12 schools in the U.S. to better reach children, LGBTQ+ youth and engage women (moms) in the community

4. Our platform integrates into school and healthcare IT infrastructure to facilitate continuity of care, track primary and public health issues (COVID-19), chronic issues (Cardiometabolic diseases), mental health and well-being

In addition, as a company that is owned and founded by a black, African, immigrant. We are solving problems that impact communities of color, not only here in the United States but globally with the vision to develop an A.I. Community Health Worker to aid families wherever they may be.

The Welfie Health Equity Platform operates on a C.A.R.E. model

Community Health Workforce is embedded in the community and available virtually to build relationships, community engagement and collaborative leadership with in a community. We focus on K-12 school communities and underserved communities. 

Assessments of mental, physical and social determinants of health are made for individual members and aggregated across a community to take a “wellness selfie” (or, Welfie) of an individual, a family, and a community. 

Resources are recommended by our Community Health Workers to increase access to care on-campus, on-line and in the community. Connecting families to health and social service resources early and often. 

Education is personalized and recommended to increase health literacy, decrease stigma and increase the capacity for individuals to care for themselves, friends, family and community. 

This program is enabled by an integrated technology platform that bridges public education and public health.

Our current target population are families on Medicaid/CHIP (living at, below, or near the poverty line). Specifically, those with children enrolled in the public education system (Head Start, K-12) and are eligible for Title 1 benefits. These families are underserved with access to health education, preventive healthcare services, interventional health care services and lack culturally competent healthcare workers in their communities. Welfie is a health equity platform designed to address three root causes of health inequity (1) poor health education (2) lack of access to care (3) lack of culturally competent health care workers. We do this by putting Community Health Workers into Schools and communities to deliver health education, care coordination and community health.

For Dr. Steven Moyo (CEO/Founder) It is personal. As a black, immigrant, physician. I have witnessed the negative impact of health inequity on my family, patients and community. I’ve dedicated my life in the hospital and in the community to help promote health, prevent disease and deliver more equitable care to those who need it most. I realized in doing this work that I do not scale, and to have true, and lasting impact that I needed to build something that did, and thus Welfie was founded. 

Susan (Chief Marketing Officer/Co-Founder) was raised by a single mother in Oshawa, Canada’s most insecure city, where several of her school friends have since died from addiction, suicide, and poverty. Susan’s career has allowed her to see the influence kids have over their parents, and she has marveled at their ability to drive behavior changes in their families. Welfie is the culmination of everything Susan has worked for in  her personal and business life.  

For Lakshmin (CTO/Co-Founder), he is a father of two young girls in K-12. He sees firsthand in his home and community the impact of our modern world on youth mental health and wellness. He is drawn to use the decades of expertise he has in technology, artificial intelligence and business to build a more fair and equitable world with a focus on health and education. 

Nicole Trickett (Chief Education Officer) brings 14 years of experience in the K-12 education space to our leadership team. She has worked as a special education teacher, professional development coach for her peers, assistant principal, and principal in the San Francisco Unified School District. And, has intimate knowledge of the problems educators face and the challenges of in-school implementation .

We have been able to scale our software to 5 states, reaching 6 school districts caring for 80,000 students, of which we had 11,000 actively on the platform. We are in the process of closing contracts with a large school district with 120 K students, and the largest pediatric health system on the west coast that sees 280 K patients per year.

Our goal is to build a global company that helps address public health issues at scale and without sacrificing regional and cultural nuance. We are excited to potentially participate as an MIT Solver to connect with a network of social impact enterprises that are also thinking about similar, interconnected problems. This network is valuable for support, problem solving, distribution and expansion and we look to plug in to this network of changemakers.

On an operational level we are looking for assistance in financial stewardship, business model development and distribution logistics. Finally we believe that talent is the lifeblood of any organization and thus finding mission aligned talent is essential to our work.

Our community health workers deliver health education and care coordination to families on our platform. In doing so they are training machine learning algorithms to develop an A.I. Community Health Worker. The goal of this health equity A.I. is first to augment Community Health Workers to expand their capacity to care for more families. And, in areas where there are no service providers provide essential community health services to families via a personal health assistant for underserved families. We believe that this AI technology which will learn regional, geographic and cultural dynamics to best suit the needs of families in various regions can be scaled globally as it is trained locally by Community Health Workers in their various settings and tailored to the needs of families in their region. 

Our A.I. model will empower three main user types. 1) Community Health Worker (2) Family (Kids and parents), and, (3) Population health leaders that set policy and programs. This allows for immediate health education and care coordination for a family by our system, augmented follow up and evaluation by a community health worker and systemic policy and program alignment at a population health level.

This Year

Health Education
1. Improve Health Literacy

2. Decreased Mental Health Stigma

Care Coordination

3. Increased Access to Primary Care Services and Mental Health Services

4. Increased mental health and social determinants of health screening 

5. Increased utilization of Medicaid Benefits by Mediciad beneficiaries

Community Health

6. Total number of families enrolled in Medicaid

7. Total number of families signed up for internet connectivity benefit

Five Years

1. Number of Medicaid Families on the Platform

2. Estimated number of lives saved due to early preventive screening and care coordination

3. Estimated amount of money saved due to early preventive screening and care coordination

4. Number of Early preventive screening and diagnostic test completed for Medicaid families

5. Number of Community Health Workers trained via highschool pipeline and the number of community members they reach

6. Number of API calls to Health Equity A.I. to deliver personalized health education and care coordination

1. Good Health and Well Being

- We collect health metrics from kids, familis and the electronic health record that include mental health screens, cardiometabolic biomarkers (blood glucose, cholesterol) and biometrics (blood pressure)

- we can directly measure our impact on health

2. Quality of Education

- We collect academic and attendance metrics

- We provide health education in line with K-12 health education standards and can measure completion of credits, classes, courses and curriculum

- We embed our health education in STEM and Arts and can measure grades in those areas

3. Decent work an economic growth

- In highschools we aim to develop a Career Technical Education program for community health workers, we can measure the number of CHWs we graduate, certify and employ. The salary earnings generated by these workers and their participation in their local economies

4. Reduced Inequalities

- we'll be tracking individual, family, community and population level social determinants of healh and disparities data, and can measure our impact in this space, with the intervention of our community health workers, a.i. technology and programs

Goal:

Health Equity

Objectives

Increase Health Literacy for kids and adults

Causal Link

By improving health literacy in kids and adults we can prevent disease, decrease rates of illness and death. 

Outcome

Increase the number of K-12 graduates that receive quality health education that is aligned with National Health Education Standards and critical public health needs for youth, adolescence and adulthood.

Causal Link

“A lack of consistent, cross-grade health curriculums may reduce student health literacy.” https://doi.org/10.17226/10883.

Outputs

Product: Welfie Health Certificate for Kids - a virtual community for health education that allows students to obtain a health certificate that meets K-12 health education requirements, is equitably accessible, and, builds upon previous knowledge

Product: Welfie Health Certificate for Adults - a virtual community for health education that allows teachers and parents to obtain a health certificate that meets K-12 health education requirements. 

Causal Link 

People value what they co-create more. Kids learn better when they are having fun, and when they are mentally and physically engaged.

“Teacher education may affect teacher effectiveness in implementing health and health literacy curriculums.” https://doi.org/10.17226/10883.

Activities

Provide the opportunity for Extended Learning and Outside School Time Activities focused on health education that are fun, engaging and co-created by youth

Provide professional development to increase parent and teacher health literacy

Goal:

Health Equity

Objectives

Increase Access to Affordable and Appropriate Care via Community Schools

Causal Link

Community schools have had a cyclical existence, coming and going as funding is available and runs out. By linking the delivery of community health program via schools to population health outcomes for health plans and providers, we can create a permanent payment and funding source from state and federal medicaid. 

Outcome

Increase the accuracy and impact of health assessments, education, resource referrals and service delivery by standardizing, scaling and sustaining high quality community schools programs via an integrated, data centric, health and education data and analytics platform that is aligned with population health needs of health plans and providers. 

Causal Link

Community Schools are an evidence based approach to community health and have been shown to have a 3x - 7x return on investment by some studies. 

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32886319/

• https://www.communityschools.o...

Outputs

Product: Welfie Community Health Platform and Community - Community Schools Edition

Causal Link

Platform: By improving data collection, analysis and insights we can enhance the delivery of Community Schools programs. By connecting community school managers in a community we can standardize and share best practice and knowledge. 

Program: City Connects is an impactful program with over 20 years of evidence base and best practice informing an approach to Community Schools that is validated: Impact (bc.edu)

Activities

Platform: Build a comprehensive Community Schools Software Platform for Community Health Workers and Social Workers. 

Program: Welfie is translating evidence based Community Schools model and best practice from City Connects

Goal:

Health Equity

Objectives

Scale A.I. that is designed to help families, communities and population health managers make better decisions, globally

Causal Link

By building A.I. that augments the work of CHWs and that is purposefully designed to increase the delivery of resources to the most underserved populations - we can meet the primary and public health needs of people, globally

Outcome

Increase the volume and diversity of data points to inform the building of an equitable A.I. to help families, communities and population health managers make better decisions. 

Causal Link

By providing more CHWs to Population Health Leaders who benefit from their services we can increase the volume of community members that are cared for on our platform. 

Outputs

Increase recruitment into and retention within the CHW profession. Increase access to  job opportunities with K-12 schools, health providers, health plans and government

Causal Link

The demand for community health workers, and in fact healthcare workers is high. However, currently there is high turnover in the CHW arena, and a poor pipeline for healthcare workers. We believe that by providing a platform that supports and enables the CHW community in knowledge, empathy, impact, pay and social/career mobility can retain and attract more workers to this field. 

• Community schools/youth engagement: provide additional meaning and mission to the work to increase retention

• Content Creation: Create a social presence and story around the work of CHWs to increase recruitment into the field. Of note the majority of students want to grow up to become an “influencer” - what are CHWs if not “health influencers”?

• Entrepreneurship: creating one's own CHW company and business entity provides increased ownership and retention in the space. 

• Community: Creates network effects for the platform and retention as people feel a sense of belonging to the community, a powerful force for retention.

• Job Marketplace: decreasing path to employment

• Career Advancement: Increasing earning potential and retaining healthcare workers

Activities

Provide the Welfie Community Health Platform for Community Health Workers to organizations/partners that are involved in the training of CHWs. Enable upskilling in cultural competency, community schools, youth engagement, content creation (health education), and entrepreneurship. Provide community, support, job opportunities and career advancement pathways. 

Provide the Welfie Community Health Platform for K-12 Schools to deliver Career Technical Experience pathways to becoming a CHW. 

Diversity is core to who we are and what we are building. 

Welfie is black, immigrant, woman and minority founded. 

50% of our executives are women. 4/6 are BIPOC. 

We plan to hire a diverse workforce of community health workers and engineers to ensure decreased bias in the training and development of our a.i. technology. 

We serve diverse communities in K-12 schools and thus our organization being representative of these communities is essential. We bring youth into the design process and our organization and plan to employ a youth advisory council. 

We will be sourcing future legal, financial and technology services from minority and women owned organizations. 

SaaS

Health Education: Software/Content as a service - we charge school districts and health plans a per member per month fee to be able to subscribe/prescribe health education content and resources to their community members.

CPT

Care Coordination: Medicaid Billing. We bill Medicaid for health assessments, education, care coordination, collaborative care and population health services that are delivered by community health workers, behavioral health coaches and peer counselors.

Per Member Per Month

Our CHWs work to identify and close care gaps, such as medication adherence, increasing quality of care metrics and outcomes for health plans and providers. We charge a per member per month population health management fee.

Welfie maintains a diversified funding strategy to ensure future fundraising success.

1. Revenue - Projected $575,000 FY 2023. We will be increasing our sales and marketing activities over the next 6 months. 

2. Grants - We have raised over $150,000 in non-dilutive grants. And, we will continue to pursue grant funding from various sources. 

3. Government - We are aligned with several Government grant funding opportunities that include (1) Educational Funding (2) SBIR-NIH Funding (3) Federal Government Grants (4) State Government Grants. We will also pursue government contracts in the public health and public education sectors.

4. Investor - We have raised a $125,00 early pre-seed investment from Venture Capital and are currently raising a $3 M  late pre-seed

Revenue 

$100,000 Cigna

$375,000 Projected from a large Health system on West Coast

Grants - 

$40,000 - Headstream

$25,000 - Alliance Healthcare Foundation

$100,000 Google for Startups Black Founders Fund

$75,000 Prime Health Innovation Challenge

Government - We are aligned with several Government grant funding opportunities that include (1) Educational Funding (2) SBIR-NIH Funding (3) Federal Government Grants (4) State Government Grants. We will also pursue government contracts in the public health and public education sectors.

Investor - $125,000 from Visible Hands