Medical technology has come a long way in terms of innovations in treatments, improved surgical outcomes, and the management of previously untreatable illnesses. However, there is a disconnect between provider and patient when it comes to communication.
“It’s no secret that healthcare is behind other industries when it comes to the patient or ‘consumer’ journey,” said Lucienne Ide MD, Ph.D., the Founder and Chief Health Innovator of Rimidi, an Atlanta-based cloud-based software platform that helps to bridge the gap in provider/patient communication.
“Complex medical procedures and episodes of care require extra communication and transparency between patients and providers, but currently many of the processes for complex care are outdated. They are inefficient for providers and frustrating/confusing for patients. As a patient, you should feel like you’re getting at least as much transparency and support from your surgeon as you do as an Amazon customer tracking the status of your recent purchase.”
Rimidi enables personalized management of health conditions across populations. This doctor-created company was founded in 2012, with the goal of providing significant and enduring solutions in healthcare. Rimidi avoids the disconnect in connected care by combining patient-generated health data with clinical data from the Electronic Health Record (EHR) to drive patient-specific clinical insights and actions.
“Over the years we’ve moved from a single disease application to a comprehensive platform approach,” said Ide. “We’ve enhanced our solutions by integrating additional devices and wearables, enabling patient-reported outcomes to be measured, expanding clinical decision support capabilities…This results in the ability to deliver personalized management of health conditions across populations, which in 2020, led us to grow our customer base by 600%.”
Ide is a physician-scientist by training. As she got into clinical practice, she became increasingly frustrated by the inefficiencies in the systems and processes in healthcare and the lack of alignment of those processes and policies to what was in the best interest of patient care and clinical satisfaction.
“I left clinical medicine and began working with a venture capital firm to invest in better healthcare technologies,” said Ide. “I quickly noticed a gap in clinical understanding on the teams developing new technology for healthcare — both from a clinician and patient experience standpoint. This gap in clinical understanding, coupled with my passion for problem-solving and drive to have a positive impact on others lead to the creation of Rimidi.”
Ide received her undergraduate degree in physics from Middlebury College. She began her career working for the National Security Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, where she worked on communications technologies as a signals analyst and developed a passion for data. After spending some time in venture capital, she returned to graduate school at Emory University to earn a joint M.D./Ph.D. in pharmacology from Emory University. In graduate school, she focused her work on gene therapy and then went on to do clinical training in OB/GYN at the University Pittsburgh Medical Center.
“As founder and Chief Health Innovator at Rimidi, I bring a diverse experience in medicine, science, venture capital and technology to transforming healthcare delivery,” said Ide. “As a physician and technology executive, I have a unique perspective on the challenges facing our healthcare system and the complex points of view that factor into potential solutions: clinical, financial, legal, regulatory, and emotional.”
Rimidi’s apps are built using SMART on FHIR technology. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a standardized API that enables better data exchange between software systems used in healthcare such as different EHRs and health IT apps. FHIR essentially created a shared, highly standardized language for health IT systems. Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART) enables users to engage with third-party applications inside the EHR workflow, enabling both single sign-on to third-party applications as well as an integrated user experience.
“Similar to how you can add a new app to your iPhone and use your fingerprint or face recognition to log into that app, doctors can use their EHR credentials to authenticate to our apps and use them right there within their EHR experience,” said Ide. “SMART on FHIR has already driven significant innovation in healthcare and will drive a new pace of innovation over coming years that has been lacking in healthcare.”
New Partnership with Emory Healthcare
In February 2021, Rimidi and Emory Healthcare announced a strategic collaboration designed to further enhance innovation in the healthcare arena. The collaboration will allow physicians to connect with patients across the continuum of care, from their home to the clinic and operating room.
“This collaboration was founded on the premise of envisioning a better patient journey for orthopedic surgery and deep brain stimulation procedures,” said Ide. “Historically, technology integration into a physician’s workflow is difficult. FHIR-app technology is the clear winner for helping all health systems communicate and integrate. It lets technology companies, like Rimidi, integrate into legacy systems, like Emory’s EHR, without disrupting the physician workflow and ultimately, improving the patient experience and health outcomes.”
As a result of the partnership, Rimidi and Emory Healthcare developed new patient and provider-facing FHIR apps for patients undergoing orthopedic surgery as well as for those referred to the deep brain stimulation (DBS) program for Parkinson’s and other neurologic conditions at Emory Healthcare.
“These apps bring together clinical data and protocols with patient-reported outcomes and education in the context of the patient journey,” said Ide. “By leveraging FHIR-based apps to collect and share data, we have the opportunity to deliver a more complete picture of each patient’s health, ultimately driving more personalized medical decision-making, and collaborating to build better experiences for patients and providers. “
Rimidi chose to focus on orthopedic and neurologic conditions for these two apps because neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery are two of the busiest and most innovative service lines, and are hyper-focused on the patient experience. In both cases, perioperative care involves many complex, multi-step processes that can be daunting for the patient and inefficient for the clinical staff.
“Overall, patients didn’t feel in control over the process, and therefore their outcome, and there was a need for more transparency and better communication,” said Ide. “The ability to communicate and collect as much data as possible postoperatively is really important for surgeons, not only so they can share with their patients, but so they can ensure they’re tracking the impact of emerging procedures, techniques, and devices. It’s a continuous improvement model so the more data we can make available to drive that analysis the better. Overall, these apps offer a better patient experience and an integrated and efficient way for clinicians to manage the complex pathways.”
Emory also uses Rimidi’s clinical management platform, which is built on the same SMART on FHIR framework as these apps, to manage patients with chronic cardiometabolic health conditions like Type 2 Diabetes, Heart Failure, Fatty Liver Disease, Hypertension, and Obesity. Rimidi’s platform is built around a set of core
capabilities: interoperability, remote patient monitoring, clinical decision support, and predictive analytics. The platform can be configured to support almost any service line.
“There are areas we are interested in exploring with Emory and other clinical partners such as oncology, infectious disease, organ transplantation, and more,” said Ide.
