Predictive Healthcare Helps Anticipate and Prevent Surgical Site Infections
While doing volunteer work, serial entrepreneur and software engineer Talal Ali Ahmad witnessed the challenges faced by surgeons and patients, particularly in monitoring surgical site infections. Drawing on his prior experience co-founding a medical device company, he set out to create a groundbreaking AI-based platform, MyHealthPal, to predict these infections remotely — improving patient outcomes and reducing healthcare costs.
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Background
When a friend talked Talal Ali Ahmad, a software engineer who worked in telecom infrastructure, into volunteering his skills to the Global Smile Foundation (GSF), Ali Ahmad had no idea he’d end up a medtech entrepreneur. It was 2012, and he was taking the year off after his company, Centrix, was acquired. Soon Ali Ahmad was traveling extensively on medical missions to help provide IT infrastructure and tech support to the Global Smile surgeons as they performed corrective procedures for people with cleft lips and cleft palates.
“This really started my exposure to the medical field,” says Ali Ahmad. “I quickly started to identify some problems we could use tech to help solve.”
One such problem was monitoring patients for surgical site infections following the procedures. When the Global Smile Foundation surgeons arrived, there’d immediately be a queue stretched down the block. They’d treat as many patients as they could and discharge the patients and provide instructions on how to take care of their wounds. The majority of the patients lived far and it was difficult for them to return for a followup appointment with the local surgeon. As one surgeon put it, “the patients go home and we don’t hear from them or see them unless they end up in the emergency room.”
Ali Ahmad dug into it and soon realized that this wasn’t just an issue in countries with limited access to medical resources. The reported infection rate of open incision surgeries is between 10–30%. These infections lead to major complications, increasing the risk of sepsis, major organ failure, and even death. It’s a costly problem as well, to the tune of more than $3.3B spent because of surgical site infections in the US annually.
Origin Story
Before he began tackling the issue of remote incision site monitoring, Ali Ahmad co-founded a different medical device company in 2014 — Proximie, a virtual operating room which allowed surgeons to “scrub in” on a surgery from a distance. It started as a way to address the need to train local doctors on how to address cleft palates, but it quickly transitioned to a resource the US doctors who work for GSF wanted to bring back to the states.
All that to say, by the time he set his sights on infection sites, Ali Ahmad was well-versed in the way physicians, particularly surgeons, think. He knew their time was both limited and expensive and that you don’t want to be the one wasting it. He also knew physicians were tired of having to download and utilize new apps and wanted all relevant patient information to be on their EMRs (electronic medical records).
Ali Ahmad set out to create a way to virtually monitor surgical sites that seamlessly integrated into the normal workflow of the clinicians. The key to its success rested in the accuracy and actionability of its data: how well can the AI in the digital platform detect early signs of surgical site infection (SSI) and prevent readmission? He and his team of engineers and programmers set to work, creating a system to analyze wound photos and up to 30 other key performance indicators, such as the patient’s temperature, pain levels, medication adherence, and wound temperature
When they had a beta version ready, they found willing trial partners in the Global Smile Foundation, who set up 300 patients and their families to use the tool to monitor their postoperative surgical sites. This early trial was a success, with an 85% patient compliance rate and an 80% prediction accuracy rate — numbers high enough to prove the usefulness of the tool and push the team forward to train the AI towards even greater precision.
Under the Hood
Predictive Healthcare’s first offering, MyHealthPal, is an AI-based digital platform that predicts surgical site infections remotely, detecting early signs of trouble and preventing readmission and other post-surgical health complications. It’s a HIPAA-compliant solution that integrates seamlessly into a patient’s EMR, alerting physicians to infection risk and providing a comprehensive overview of the wound status and patient entered data to allow the care team to make quick decisions.
In the typical day-to-day of surgery, a patient heads home with a stack of information on how to take care of their wound and little to no follow up from the healthcare team. The hospital workflow doesn’t offer an existing procedure on wound followup and healthcare providers often only hear from a patient when something’s gone wrong. MyHealthPal helps the patient track their healing progress, guiding them through taking clear pictures at the right angle, keeping track of changes and symptoms, which lets healthcare providers catch early signs of surgical site infections (SSIs) while antibiotics will still be effective.
For abdominal and open incision surgeries–things like C-sections, colectomies, liver and pancreas surgeries, hernia surgeries, abdominal hysterectomies, and the like–this type of close monitoring is especially important because these procedures have double digit SSI rates. Not only does this represent an enormous amount of money spent on readmission costs, but it also hits hospitals on their CMS rating.
Then there are surgeries involving an implantable device, like a knee or hip replacement or putting in a pacemaker–if an SSI arises after the procedure, it often means a complete redo where the entire apparatus is removed and replaced with a clean device. The hospital loses financially, the physician loses time, and the patient faces a longer recovery, additional missed work, and insurance issues.
“MyHealthPal gives doctors the data they need to catch an infection early and prevent this cycle,” emphasizes Ahmad.
Next Steps
Predictive Healthcare plans to take MyHealthPal to market this year, focusing on those surgeries with the highest SSI rates, such as colectomies. Using the data from their pilot, they’ve developed a clinical cost saving calculator and aim to reduce hospital readmission rate by as much as 50%. “In healthcare sales you have to get to the point, and our point is reducing that readmission rate.”
Their target market will be hospitals and healthcare systems, private surgery centers, and accountable care organizations (ACOs), offering them an annual licensing fee to use the platform with a per patient cost for six months of monitoring. Predictive healthcare has found the surgeons themselves are their biggest champions in getting MyHealthPal into hospitals. As Ali Ahmad puts it, “once they get it and buy into its value, they lead the charge and take us up the ladder.”
It’s been quite a journey for Ali Ahmad, from telecommunication to the healthcare world, but one he’s glad he made. Just recently he was sent a picture from the Global Smile Foundation of a two-year old boy named Gael in Ecuador whose parents monitored his healing after cleft lip surgery using MyHealthPal. “We designed our technology to make a real difference in surgical site infection monitoring, and it’s an honor to be part of a community transforming healthcare.”
Our Take
By honing in on a very specific problem in postoperative patient care that no one else was taking on, Predictive Healthcare sets themselves up to own their corner of the remote patient market. It is a smart, focused intervention based on input from surgeons who know the risk of infection and what it means for their patient’s outcomes, not to mention the cost of time and money to the healthcare system.
CEO Talal Ali Ahmad is a proven leader in the startup space with the stamina and patience it takes to see a company successfully off the ground. He’s put together a strong executive team as they prepare to launch this year, with proven track records in their various fields. We can’t wait to see what they accomplish with their first offering and how it continues to grow in the years ahead.
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Published: Nov 16, 2023