INNOVATION DIFFUSION:
Q&A WITH PERSONAL MEDICINE PLUS CO-FOUNDER NATALIE HODGE

Natalie Hodge is a board-certified pediatrician and has been serving children for more than 20 years in St. Louis and Paducah, Kentucky. Her experience has given her insight into the difficulties of behavior change and the importance of maintaining a simple strategy to improve health. Along with public health advocate Brandi Harless and tech entrepreneur Jay Campbell, she founded Personal Medicine Plus to help patients create “a personal health feedback loop for real behavior change.” From their headquarters in rural western Kentucky, CMO Hodge shares more about their digital health innovation:
What is the mission of Personal Medicine Plus? What problem are you working to solve?
Our mission is to end lifestyle disease. We are trying to delay
What is your solution and how does it work?
We use iOS and Android platforms to deliver our software to patients. Physicians or care managers “prescribe” the software and help patients download the software in their offices at the point of care. Once the software is on the phone, this simplifies the conversation and counseling around behavior change. Behaviors are clearly tracked on a dashboard with a gamified interface that’s engaging and fun for patients to use. The goal is to “get your screen to green” by the end of the day. Three health behaviors can affect 80 percent of healthcare costs: Water intake, fruit and veggies intake, and daily steps. Three simple behaviors. Our software flows data from connected health devices to simplify use and reduce user data inputs. It gathers data from home scales, blood pressure cuffs, and blood sugar monitors.
What resonates most with patients?
I tell patients the first step in improving your health behavior is to track your health behavior. Then, I tell them this is health industry software, not a consumer application. I give them my coupon code that identifies my population. And I tell them their use of the software connects to a population health dashboard that I can see, tracking the entire patient group’s every step and their every weight—as well as their
What are the pros and cons of being based outside Silicon Valley?
We come from a deep understanding of this population’s daily lives and routines. We are not a Silicon Valley consumer app which started and iterated with the needs of the affluent millennial or educated
Where are you in the development process? What are your immediate goals and challenges?
We have bootstrapped and self-funded all the way through to complete iOS and Android versions, with internal research showing increases in health activation and patient engagement through
What projects and partnerships are you working on now?
We have a number of clinical research projects in progress with academic centers and health systems. We are finalizing 12-week pilots with our Pioneer Physician groups, which have been implementing our solution in their prediabetic and prehypertensive at-risk patients over the past 12 weeks. We have a great
What are your next steps?
We are in the early stages of certifying with ONC as an EMR module for clinical decision support intervention. Certifying agencies are on standby for the final reporting period to be over at the end of this May. ONC will finalize testing criteria by the end of the second quarter. We expect full certification by fall. Actually, I am tracking several of the testers now remotely, and they are just waiting for the green light from CMS. So we will actually meet
Published on: http://health.oliverwyman.com/drive-innovation/2015/05/innovation_diffusion.html