information about central line infections, where a venous catheter was inserted into the baby—the type of line, etc. This data is then de-identified and sent securely to our clinical decision support platform in the Amazon cloud. The data is analyzed and recommendations can then be sent back to the nurses in the NICU via the mobile app/device. Reporting and analytics also can be done on the aggregated data. We are just entering Phase 2 of this pilot with UNC. Once we get the results, we’re hoping to sell this product and service to other NICUs and hospitals around the country.
On the product side, we’re always looking for ways to automate what are called evidence-based treatment protocols. In any hospital or health delivery organization, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of protocols and care guidelines that clinical care staff must follow. We’re hoping to develop an efficient way to automate what are mostly paper-based documents, and build those into the already-installed electronic healthcare record systems. So, for example, if a baby in the NICU needs to be started on an iron supplement before discharge, and that hasn’t yet been done, a simple reminder would be sent to the nurse who is responsible for that baby, in a workflow-sensitive way. The timing is important because there are hundreds of alerts and alarms going off in a hospital. We’ve got ideas on how to do this more efficiently.
What we’re doing is not specific to the NICU. It’s applicable to all healthcare delivery organizations. We’ve just got strong domain expertise in the NICU, given that one of our founders, Dr. Emory Fry, is a neonatologist.
X: Could you explain how Cognitive’s Socratic Grid open source community contributes to development of your clinical decision support (CDS) platform?
DB: We’re big open source and open standards advocates. Our vision of Socratic Grid is a robust and vibrant community where we encourage, challenge, and incentivize talented people to develop solutions for hard problems. Our vision is that much, if not all, of our fundamental CDS platform is open source, so that a dedicated group of engineers can take this software, which is and will be licensed under an Apache 2 license and extend it and build on top of it.
[Apache 2.0 is the latest version of free software licensed through the Apache Software Foundation and allows the software user the freedom to use it for any purpose under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties.]
This is not just for healthcare organizations or problems. We hope that the software will be used in other industries. We believe that too much money is spent on basic infrastructure for healthcare IT in healthcare delivery organizations in the U.S. today. There is a lot to do before CDS can become an effective, large-scale reality that improves clinical outcomes and reduces health delivery costs.
If we can lower those barriers to entry and further the research and development in this area by releasing what we’ve done as open source, then we help everyone move the industry and the science along in adoption and implementation.
But we’re just getting started on our Socratic Grid initiative. We’ve released a number of things in our core platform as open source and we’ve hired a person to start building and managing that community.
X: Where do you go from here?
DB: We still have a lot of work to do to build our vision of the company and the products and services. Our top-level goals are to double the size of the company (Sales, Revenue, and Profits) this year and to begin to build our second product. As we continue to grow and execute our business plan and model, we’ll become more of a software products company. But, we’ll never give up the services side—that’s fundamental to our growth strategy, and is a great way to test market demand for future products and services. We think we can continue to grow without having to raise outside capital, and we feel that bootstrapping and using cash flow is the best way to build a software products and services business.
