Center for Social Innovation

SPONSORED SUPPLEMENT TO SSIR

In 2010, BeWell Mobile faced a dilemma all too common among startups in the health care field: how to fund the growth of breakthrough innovations that both lower costs and improve the standard of care when the patients and providers who often benefit the most have the least ability to pay.

The San Francisco company develops customized disease management software that operates on devices like cell phones. In an eight-month pilot study with the San Mateo Medical Center, funded by the California HealthCare Foundation, 50 bilingual, uninsured teens with severe asthma recorded their symptoms by phone at least once a day using BeWell’s technology. The real-time feedback, reminders, and other interventions they received in response caused the patients’ drug compliance to more than double, their need for rescue medications to ... Read more