“Sense.ly’s tech­nol­o­gy has appli­ca­tions across a broad spec­trum of med­ical con­di­tions and rep­re­sents an excit­ing new tool in our efforts to address the grow­ing bur­den of chron­ic dis­eases,” Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Francisco’s Dr. Van Sel­by said in a statement.

Par­a­digm change — this is some­thing I was com­plete­ly unaware of and it’s about Oba­macare. This quote from a recent Ven­ture Beat arti­cle makes it pret­ty clear.

“In a sense, doc­tors will no longer be paid for the patients they see; they’ll be paid for patients they don’t see”.

Med­ical providers will be giv­en a fixed amount for tak­ing care of a giv­en patient pop­u­la­tion. So if you don’t have to spend mon­ey to see a patient in per­son while main­tain­ing high med­ical stan­dards means you as the doc­tor becomes more prof­itable and can actu­al­ly make more mon­ey. It would mean they want patients to main­tain the high­est pos­si­ble health at all times. Keep­ing patients as far away from ER vis­its or hos­pi­tal re-admis­sions would be the wis­est and most cost effi­cient pol­i­cy for doctors.

Sense.ly, a San Fran­cis­co-based start­up that has now raised a new $1.25 mil­lion in ven­ture fund­ing to address var­i­ous aspects of patient well­ness and engage­ment. This is a young and upcom­ing prod­uct manager’s dream.

In the age of social media, Sense.ly has cre­at­ed an avatar or vir­tu­al nurse that goes by the name of Mol­ly. Mol­ly is your inter­face and point of con­tact for patients. This elim­i­nates hav­ing to dri­ve any­where for med­ical atten­tion. The soft­ware will allow you to give and receive infor­ma­tion from their provider. Mol­ly direct­ly inter­faces all infor­ma­tion she receives to an IBM Wat­son super­com­put­er, which will link the symp­toms to prob­a­ble caus­es, then pro­vide rec­om­men­da­tions. If Wat­son decides that a real-time con­nec­tion with the doc­tor is nec­es­sary, Sense.ly will estab­lish a videoconference.

Sense.ly CEO Adam Odessky states the invest­ment mon­ey will be used to “build out Sense.ly’s prod­ucts, fur­ther expand the team, and broad­en the company’s cus­tomer base”.

Odessky claims they have already bagged a num­ber of big hos­pi­tal cus­tomers to use the plat­form. I am not sure if the fund­ing came before or after the big clients but any­thing that allows the pro­lif­ic use of the soft­ware is ok by me. Sense.ly’s plat­form com­bines advanced sen­sor capa­bil­i­ties and mobile tech­nol­o­gy to reach out­pa­tients. The sys­tem is also designed to have addi­tion­al sen­sor com­po­nents applied to the extrem­i­ties, so a clin­i­cian can keep a con­stant eye on move­ment and oth­er metrics.

The test pro­gram found a 28 per­cent reduc­tion in patient calls. Sense.ly says it can return a fifth of the doctor’s dai­ly productivity.

The Ven­ture Beat arti­cle says that Sense.ly was incu­bat­ed with­in Orange S.A., the lead­ing France-based tele­com and tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, and launched inde­pen­dent­ly in 2013. It is cur­rent­ly a mem­ber of the Launch­Pad Dig­i­tal Health accel­er­a­tor pro­gram; pre­vi­ous­ly, it was a grad­u­ate of the Alchemist Accelerator.

If you watch the attached video below…

You imme­di­ate­ly real­ize the pos­i­tive poten­tial of this type of tech­nol­o­gy, but what I picked up imme­di­ate­ly was the fact that, yes, costs are ris­ing, and sup­port is lim­it­ed. In the video there were pre­req­ui­sites in the patient’s answers; well what if you can’t answer the ques­tions due to ill­ness. How does Mol­ly and the Wat­son super­com­put­er make a deter­mi­na­tion? I could pic­ture thou­sands of indi­vid­u­als inca­pable of uti­liz­ing the soft­ware that need help. Will Wat­son just direct every indi­vid­ual to a doc­tor, there­by defeat­ing the pur­pose of the tech or will you get an “I’m sor­ry, we can’t make clear what you are say­ing; please hang up and try again”, leav­ing peo­ple with­out support?

Unless the logis­tics have been thor­ough­ly thought out and made very easy for the elder­ly to use, there’s gonna be a prob­lem. On the pos­i­tive futur­is­tic side, I could see future hos­pi­tals being mini air­ports with fleets of drone doc­tors fly­ing in and out people’s homes and scan­ning their bod­ies and per­form­ing a full workup right in your very home.

Sense.ly could be the begin­ning of some­thing prolific.