Healthcare providers are overwhelmed and medical protocols change fast. AgileMD ensures that nurses and doctors can rapidly understand a patient’s status and follow the most current clinical best practices to provide optimal care. The company’s software offers real-time predictive analytics and adaptive clinical guidance that is deeply integrated into the electronic health record (EHR) workflow, exactly where healthcare providers are assessing and treating their patients.
To date, AgileMD tools have touched more than 1 million patients and have been used by more than 40,000 providers in over 100 hospitals, including some of the nation’s leading academic medical centers. AgileMD is backed by premier accelerators MATTER, YCombinator, and Rock Health, and their cutting-edge machine learning analytics are built on a decade of ongoing research at the University of Chicago. In 2021, AgileMD earned nearly $3 million dollars in combined federal research and development funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Health and Human Services (HHS) to further advance their clinical decision support platform.
TWO CHICAGO ENTREPRENEURS UNITE
Dr. Dana Edelson, AgileMD’s President & Co-Founder, was barely into her second year of residency when an eighteen-year-old patient declined from cracking jokes to dying from septic shock in just an hour. That experience, like many to follow, had a profound impact on how she approached safety and medicine. An NIH-funded researcher, Dr. Edelson dedicated her hours away from the bedside to developing predictive tools from EHR data and deploying them in the clinical setting. She would later become the Executive Medical Director of Quality and Safety at the University of Chicago Medicine.
Meanwhile, Borna Safabakhsh, AgileMD’s CEO & Co-Founder, was tackling a related challenge: how to make clinical pathways – the essential step-by-step guidance for nurses and doctors – more accessible and adaptable to support healthcare teams. AgileMD’s initial offering had earned top prize in the University of Chicago Booth School of Business New Venture Challenge and the Chicago Biotech Consortium Competition in 2011, also becoming a grantee of the University of Chicago Innovation Fund.
Edelson and Safabakhsh connected on their complementary capabilities: predictive analytics that gives care teams the chance to quickly see which patients are most at risk and clinical pathways that provide the most current guidance on how to care for these patients. From there, Chicago land’s abundance of diverse medical centers and its strong entrepreneurial support landscape offered the ideal environment to build partnerships and scale the offering.
AGILEMD’S COVID-19 PANDEMIC ROLE
Many health systems rely on static clinical pathways – printed decision trees that outline how to triage, diagnose, and treat myriad patient conditions. Often tacked to a nursing station bulletin board, these protocols are prone to becoming outdated and ignored as medical best practices and resource availability change. When hospitals became inundated by COVID-19 patients in 2020, they scrambled to assign medical staff from across specialties and experience, just as protocols for how to manage and treat COVID-19 patients needed daily adjustments. The science and guidelines around how to isolate patients, what protective gear to wear, and which medications to prescribe – among many other critical processes – were evolving rapidly.
Throughout the pandemic, AgileMD customers have easily updated and disseminated protocols directly within the EHR workflow to keep pace with the latest research and CDC guidance, using adaptable AgileMD clinical pathways as the home base from which care teams manage their patients. By designing and wiring best practices directly into the tools nurses and doctors are already using, AgileMD’s platform offers guidance in the moment of care, reducing confusion and often eliminating the need
for extra, time-consuming training. Clinical leaders also receive regular usage dashboards to easily measure uptake and promote adoption.
AgileMD’s health system customers continue to leverage clinical pathways to address COVID-19 care and beyond, including decreasing unnecessary diagnostic testing and increasing the appropriateness and timeliness of medication administration. As a platform, which includes AgileMD’s eCART risk prediction tool, the software addresses some of the toughest challenges in healthcare, including reducing the mental burden
of harried medical staff, lowering variability in care decisions, and improving outcomes such as hospital mortality and length of stay.
