Americare uses FeelBetter to address patients in long-term care's polypharmacy issues.

IMG Credit :GettyImages

 Launched six years ago, FeelBetter is a startup expanding its AI-based medication management system into long-term care via Americare's affiliation.

Established in 2018 by a group of doctors, clinical chemists, and technologists, FeelBetter was created to solve polypharmacy—that is, the difficulties with medication management for patients on multiple drugs.
Working with health systems such as Mass General Brigham and Atlantic Health System, the startup is now entering senior care with Americare, one of the biggest long-term care and skilled nursing facilities nationwide. Offering skilled nursing, assisted living, memory care, and rehabilitation services, it runs more than 120 senior living homes in Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, and Mississippi.
After a successful technology pilot, the provider signed a commercial agreement with FeelBetter. Americare now intends to increase the FeelBetter platform's acceptance among more of its sites by including the technology into daily clinical processes to support real-time monitoring and decision support.
Said Liat Primor, co-founder and CEO of FeelBetter, patients in skilled nursing homes and long-term care are mostly seniors who often take multiple medications for multiple chronic conditions, so opening opportunities for proactive medication management and helping clinical teams identify risks early and act fast to protect residents.
Americare will identify residents at risk of adverse events resulting from complicated medication schedules using FeelBetter's technologies.
FeelBetter will be accessible to its clients via the PointClickCare Marketplace as part of the expansion, having integrated with PointClickCare, a cloud-based healthcare platform for long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC) providers.
FeelBetter evolved what it refers to as Pharmaco-clinical intelligence addressing medication risks in senior patients living with multiple comorbidities using a machine-learning-driven approach. Its platform recommends quick interventions, such changes to medication regimens, to lower risks and monitor progress at the individual and population health levels. It also identifies patients who are highly likely of near-term hospitalisation related to polypharmacy problems.
The American Society of Consultant Pharmacists (ASCP) Annual Meeting is where the company intends to show the outcomes of the first Americare pilot. Executives said the pilot, which involved 370 residents across eight Americare facilities, demonstrated how FeelBetter's AI-powered platform might be used to precisely flag people for increased medication-related risks, so enabling more proactive, data-informed care decisions.
James Dunham, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Americare, said, "Polypharmacy is a complex challenge in senior care and we're committed to finding creative ways to address it". "The pilot results show how early action to prevent possible adverse events and proactive flagging of at-risk patients made possible by AI-driven insights will help our teams. With this collaboration with FeelBetter, we hope to provide medication management with a fresh degree of responsiveness and accuracy, so enhancing the outcomes and quality of life for our residents.
For FeelBetter, moving into the long-term care and skilled nursing market with Americare marks a major turning point.
Particularly in settings where drug schedules can be complicated, we are dedicated to arming clinical teams with the tools they need to proactively identify risks and react fast. This alliance with Americare presents a great chance to promote a proactive care culture that gives the welfare of underprivileged groups top priority," she said.
Originally trained as an industrial engineer, Primor worked 13 years in executive roles at Teva Pharmaceutical and saw the difficulties patients experience with medication management.
Older persons are becoming more and more concerned about polypharmacy since the number of drugs multiplies increases their risk of side effects or even life-threatening symptoms. Studies reveal that polypharmacy is the fifth most common cause of U.S. deaths and accounts for almost thirty percent of all hospital admissions. And about one-third of emergency hospital visits among those 75 years of age or older could be caused in part by drug-related issues.
"For me, it was a quest; how can we actually solve this on scale?" Primor asked.
She personally encountered difficulties with the healthcare system as well since she had to take several medications during her pregnancy. She noted that doctors have little time to go over all the data for complicated patients and that many times, they lack all the medical knowledge about a patient right before them. Primor teamed up with co-founder Yoram Hordan to launch FeelBetter since she wanted to provide answers to guarantee better patient outcomes and improved drug management.
Primor and Hordan, coming from the pharmaceutical and high-tech sectors, observed a notable discrepancy in the application of automation, big data and artificial intelligence in healthcare compared to other sectors. Combining the clinical and pharmacology knowledge of a clinical team with the advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence created by its technology team, FeelBetter is meant to close this gap. Focussing on patients with the most need, FeelBetter uses advanced technology and artificial intelligence to boost clinical chemist capacity. And the company claims that at scale, the technology enhances clinical decisions and patient outcomes.
Published in The American Journal of Managed Care, peer-reviewed study done at Brigham and Women's Hospital showed that FeelBetter's platform can be used to precisely evaluate and control medication risks in senior patients living with several comorbidities.
The study revealed polypharmacy patients who are at risk of deterioration and preventable, near-term hospitalisations as well as better resource allocation and prioritising for the most at-risk patients driven by artificial intelligence.
Focused on 108,817 patients, the retrospective cohort study revealed that FeelBetter's platform produced accurate medication warnings in 89.2% of cases and that in 97.3% of cases the warnings would be beneficial to doctors deciding on optimal medication therapy. FeelBetter also accurately forecasts hospitalisations ten times more than present techniques used to risk stratify patients likely to be hospitalised within 30-90 days.
With $2,500 in possible savings per high-risk patient, the platform can also help to lower costs.
Although patient safety is a concern related to medication management, especially with possible drug-drug interactions or adverse events, good management of patients' medication schedule also improves patient experience and treatment quality, Primor said.
"Effective treatment is what patients need. Should patients be unable to manage their conditions causing hospitalisations, While patients may be treated successfully, the long-term effects for that medication for that particular patient may affect, for example, renal function or other things that would harm them over time," she said. "When we're talking about medication management, I think that the language needs to move from adherence and drug-rug interaction to what are the medications really benefiting the patients and optimising for them to their life."
In 2023 the company raised $5.9 million. Firstime Ventures and Shoni Health Ventures led the round with Random Forest VC, The Group Ventures, and current FeelBetter investor Triventures also taking part.