MD Ally

Each year, more than 96 million non-emergency 911 calls are made to emergency medical services. These calls strain finite emergency resources, increase overcrowding in the ER, and drive billions of dollars in excess costs. MD Ally is a 911 care coordination platform that enables public safety agencies to triage non-emergency callers to on-demand telehealth care, appointment scheduling, and alternate transportation. Our goal is to ensure the appropriate use of emergency resources and improve the long-term healthcare outcomes of non-emergency callers. When successful, we will reduce excess costs by 94% and eliminate chronic barriers to accessing routine care; especially for those in low-income communities. Globally, the overuse of emergency resources is a challenge for all countries with emergency medical services. We believe that by leveraging our innovative technology in the 911 space we will save millions of lives and improve the health and financial welfare of many more.

More than half of the 192 million calls made to 911 each year are not an emergency and in 2006 Health & Human Services found that 25% of the 16 million ambulance transports did not require an ambulance or a visit to the ER. Non-emergency callers also effect the Emergency Room. According to the American Health Association, 90% of all large hospitals are operating at, or above capacity, which exhaust the ER staff, increases wait times, and limits the amount of space allocated to emergency patients. The Health and Human Services show that, for patients with a true emergency, being admitted to the hospital when the ER is overcrowded can drive an 8.9% increase in the patient’s risk of death. As urban populations grow, calls to 911 also rise. According to the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), “Among patients living in low-income ZIP Codes (i.e., the lowest quartile), the ED visit rate increased 23.0 percent—from 493.5 visits per 1,000 population in 2006 to 607.1 visits per 1,000 population in 2014”. Without our non-emergency navigation solution in that city, it will become more inherently challenging for ER staff to attend to patients’ healthcare needs efficiently.

We participated in numerous ride-alongs with EMS responders in several major cities nationwide. We went into the homes of both emergency and non-emergency callers and realized that the non-emergency callers often call 911 due to a lack of knowledge on what constitutes an emergency, ways to access routine providers in their area, and a lack transportation to that provider. They also desire immediate medical attention and other avenues to immediate care are currently not being provided to them. Our solution for non-emergency navigation will not only improve the quality of care non-emergency callers but also the callers with true emergencies. Emergency callers will see an increase in ambulance availability and decrease in overcrowding in the ER, which improves their medical care overall. For non-emergency callers, we will also reduce medical costs by replacing costly ambulance rides and ER visits with organization providers that will perform triage and telehealth care and arrange more appropriately-priced transportation, and scheduling with a more appropriate site-of-care. We aim to improve healthcare access for all citizens, regardless of their income level, current access to routine healthcare, or medical insurance coverage and improve first responders’ ability to attend to true emergency more efficiently.

MD Ally is a proprietary, cloud-based platform that integrates with 911 computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and electronic patient care reporting (ePCR) systems to expand and streamline the patient journey beyond pre-hospital care to highly-qualified healthcare providers. MD Ally will gather key demographic information documented in the CAD/ePCR system by the 911 dispatcher or onsite medical responder, (i.e. First Name, Last Name, Date of Birth, Address/location, etc.).  Md Ally will also receive 911 call notes; such as chief compliant, triage questions answered by the caller, etc. Patients with low-acuity medical concerns are connected to providers through the 911 dispatcher or onsite EMS responders, via MD Ally’s two-way audio/video telehealth platform, that provide on-demand virtual triage and telehealth, appointment scheduling to a more appropriate site of care, and will arrange alternate low-cost transportation. This moves up the clock of care for patients from hours to a matter of minutes, comprehensively and conveniently in any location, and at any time. Providers leverage MD Ally’s appointment and transportation scheduling functionality to ensure that patients receive any follow-up care needed and eliminate any barriers to keeping scheduled appointments. After the completion of the call, the patient encounter automatically syncs with the provider’s electronic medical records system or EHR. For all Triage Assessments, in which the Triage Disposition is something other than an ambulance to the emergency department, a provider will follow up with the patient within 24 hours, preferably at a mutually agreed upon time. This follow-up is designed to determine how the patient is doing and if any additional support is needed.

There are currently no non-emergency solutions that respond in real-time, connect callers to virtual triage and telehealth, scheduling and transportation, and follow-up care all-in-one, similar to a concierge service. This makes us unique and gives the caller more control over their healthcare, providing them the opportunity to choose an alternative avenue of for patient-centered care, especially in urban areas where EMS team experience a higher volume of utilization and where callers with a true emergency concern are the most adversely affected.

MD Ally’s cloud-based care coordination platform that integrates with 911 dispatch centers’ computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and electronic patient care reporting (ePCR) systems. then integrates key demographics into the provider organizations’ EMR and our two-way audio/video telehealth platform allows the provider to proactively engage low-acuity patients in real time. MD Ally also integrates with our non-emergency medical transportation partners’ non-emergency medical transportation platforms and appointment scheduling systems to coordinate any additional follow-up care needed. AllyNet is a intuitive bridge between 911 and provider organizations.

Given the novelty of our approach, it was very important that we spend sufficient time validating MD Ally’s concept and execution plan with key stakeholders. Therefore, we completed ride-alongs with EMS teams where we went directly into patients’ homes to educate ourselves on key demographic characteristics and their willingness to adopt an alternative solution. We traveled to urban cities, such as Houston, San Francisco, Arizona, etc. to shadow call center dispatchers and do day-long ride-alongs with emergency medical technicians (EMTs). We’ve met with over a 100 EMS and dispatch personnel, patients, public safety leaders, payers, providers, health system leaders, non-emergency transportation vendors. With their input, we determined that we will be able to effectively avoid 81% of unnecessary ambulance transports and 28% of non-emergency ER visits; improving capacity for public safety agencies and health systems.

Currently, we are in the launch phase. By next year, we expect to be in 3 cities with a total population of 300,000 people. In 5 years, we hope to be in 12 cities serving the non-emergency population of approx. 3-5 million.

In February of 2019, Health & Human Services (HHS) announced a new, groundbreaking reimbursement model to support 911 non-emergency telehealth and triage. Starting in January of 2020, The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare’s (CMS) new model called Emergency Triage, Treat and Transport (ET3) will conduct a 5-year performance period with 40 (2-year) participants that answered their call-to-apply. We aim to be one those participants. We hope launch MD Ally in the 2 of the 6 cities where we are finalizing agreements with, start generating revenue, and recruit additional talent in the areas of product development, sales and marketing, and a CFO and COO. Within 5 years, we aim to serve at least 8-10 major cities and be incorporated into the ET3 model after their performance period. We also plan to incorporate image transferring capabilities to AllyNet.

Our current barrier is a lack of sufficient office space and funding to recruit additional staff members for product development, sales and marketing, a CFO and COO. We also lack funding to travel to major cities in our sales pipeline to foster relations with potential partners. Within 5 years, we will run into barriers pertaining to office space that we will need on the both the East and West coast, and staff recruitment as we continue to grow. 

Our solution for funding is to move from the bootstrapping stage to raising seed capital. We also plan to purchase or lease office space on the East and West coast, and create a recruiting department or look to outsource for our recruitment needs.

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We have 3 full-time staff members, 5 part-time interns for the summer, 1 contractor, and 4 members on our advisory board.

Shanel Fields is the Founder and CEO. For over a decade, Shanel led sales and marketing teams for AT&T and Athenahealth, an innovative healthcare technology company. She has experience in Healthcare tech sales and marketing, Mobile technology sales, Cloud-based healthcare IT, National Health Systems, Payers, ACOs, and Independent Health Entities (IHEs). She also skilled in Mobile healthcare app marketing, Organization and new team scaling. She graduated with a MBA from Wharton Business School in May 2019.    

Kojo DeGraft-Hanson, Technical Lead, leads MD Ally’s database management, SQL, and interface development. As a technology project management consultant, he’s worked with senior leadership to set a strategic direction for software development, tooling, migration, etc. As a manager, Kojo also successfully directed agile conversion, development, and implementation on high visibility projects with a multi-million dollar impact on the business. He also received an MBA from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Brian O’Neill is our Technical Advisor and is presently CTO of Monetate, where he leads the SaaS-based AI-driven marketing technology company in all aspects of Research and Development. Previously, as CTO of Health Market Science (HMS), Brian led the healthcare-focused data management company through a successful acquisition by LexisNexis. Prior to that, Brian helped build Gestalt LLC, acquired by Accenture, navigating complex organizations and systems, providing business and technology consulting services to the government, energy, and utility sectors. He is a graduate of Brown University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and holds patents in artificial intelligence, data management, and service orchestration.

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Our goal is to drive as much volume as possible to the platform and this means creating zero barriers for getting EMS clients on board. For our provider organization clients, our pricing model is very straightforward, and this is where we will generate revenue. We will charge a certain amount a month for the provider organization to have access to new patients and obtain access to our platform for their physicians to provide triage assessments and telehealth care to patients (callers), which they will then bill for reimbursement and scheduling for follow-up care.

We have been in the bootstrapping phase of funding since our start and continue to apply for funding through startup competitions. Within the last month, we began the process of raising investment capital and applying for grants aimed to assist minorities and women, and federal, state, and city level grants. Within the last year, we have gained commercialization traction in the public safety market by running awareness campaigns in the last six months that brought nearly 30 cities/counties into the early stages of our sales pipeline and progressed 6 cities/counties into the latter, “Proposal” or “Negotiation” stages. We anticipate generating sales revenue by early 2020 with our payer sales agreements.

The reason that we’re applying is because Solve MIT resources would have an incredible impact on our business. We are at a critical stage in growth and leveraging knowledge from experts in transitioning from the development to launch phase is paramount. We’ve gotten strong, positive responses from prospects in held sales meetings and are negotiating agreements with prospective clients late in our sales pipeline. This includes decision maker and influencer meetings at some of the larger cities and payers in the country. We are also looking to acquire funding for additional staff in the fields of technical development, sales and marketing, and finance management and travel to cities that may be potential partners within our sales pipeline. In these cities, we also plan to conduct ride-alongs, continue our research on the needs of that city, and conduct several pilot programs before we finalize agreements and launch in that area. Being able to gain access to Solve MIT’s network, and utilize fundraising, legal, and technical development mentorships to is invaluable. Solve MIT will help ensure that we optimize the opportunities before us and accelerate our milestone attainment. It will also have a long-term, positive impact on our team development and business, which is which is vital to our future success.

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Public safety agencies and provider organizations. 

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The ability for EMS and emergency rooms to respond to the threat of infectious diseases proficiently, the over-utilization of these finite resources needs to be diminished. If we were to win the Innovating Together for Healthy Cities Prize, we would allocate funding to both recruitment of additional talent to the MD Ally team and expenses related to research in cities that may become potential partners, ride-alongs, and pilots. 

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As a female founder in the 911 innovation and healthcare technology space, I rarely have the opportunity to share the work that MD Ally is doing in this male-dominated industry. I find this to be a shame, as millions of women from varying demographics, professions, etc. are incredibly impacted by emergency medical services and deserve more of a voice in a space so critical to healthcare. I would love to utilize funding from the Innovation for Women Prize to recruit talent, conduct additional research, and encourage more women to join me in the healthcare technology space and/or become apart of the MD Ally team. Together will continue to drive innovations in the 911 space and ensure that our work has a lasting impact on the world around us and helps everyone, regardless of their socio-economic status, particularly when they’re at their most vulnerable.