HIStalk Interviews Mark McCloskey, President, Oneview Healthcare

Mark McCloskey is president and founder of Oneview Healthcare of Dublin, Ireland.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I started my career in retail and then moved on to telecom, then into banking, and now healthcare. They’re different industries, but they are all focused on service. 

Oneview is an Irish company. In the last two years, we’ve grown from eight people to 44. We have offices in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Dublin, Dubai, Sydney, and Melbourne. We’re opening an office shortly in New York. All of our staff are shareholders. We’re energetic, we’re entrepreneurial, we have a passion for innovation, and we just love doing what we’re doing.

Our product empowers patients to be engaged in their care. It also optimizes clinical performance and workflow efficiencies within the hospital. It improves productivity and performance by delivering a good ROI.

Even budget hotels have had to figure out how to meet a minimum standard of entertainment and broadband services. Is that expectation moving into traditionally consumer-indifferent hospitals?

We’re seeing that hospitals are now employing people that have been in the hotel industry. The patient experience now is of huge importance. What we’re also seeing is that there are patient experience officers now at C-suite levels. That’s going to be the norm in the future.

Several companies offer interactive patient systems that use in-room monitors or mobile devices. What makes Oneview different?

We are very much operating in a global market — in Australia, the Middle East, and the United States – and that gives us a broad perspective on healthcare. We have an international advisory board with medical doctors and IT superstars and technologists from around the world and that group is transforming our product. That’s where we have the leading edge. We feel we’re on the crest of the wave in this market.

How important is it to extend the engagement beyond just the patient’s room to post-discharge follow-up on mobile devices?

Patients have to take a knack for all of their treatment and care. They have to expect better outcomes. For them to be truly prepared for that, hospitals and providers need to communicate with their patients before they come into the hospital, once they’re in the hospital, and also when they’re at home. 

We have built our own patient portal, but we also have an open architecture, so we integrate into existing patient portals. We’re not re-creating the wheel. We’re now also going to the assisted living market, and eventually by the end of this year, we’ll be in the home market and integrating with products that will give information back into the hospital about the patient’s condition.

What problems are hospitals asking you to solve using your technology?

The financial reality is that revenue is not going up, so cost must go down. There will be a continued shift to care in an outpatient setting and even in the home. The big problem for hospitals is that the average margin in the United States at the moment is about 2.5 percent. If the hospital performs poorly looking after a patient, they’re going to be hit even harder on that very small margin. There will be more care outside of the hospital environment and that would be obviously facilitated then by patient portals, where it’s going to make it easier for patients and clinicians to connect.

You’re doing some work with UCSF. What success metrics would a hospital or a health system track?

Number one is the whole patient experience and how patients view the product. It’s a fantastic hospital to work with. We’re across their three hospitals, which is a children’s hospital, a cancer hospital, and a women’s hospital. 

The metrics that they would be using is that the patient is much more engaged. They understand what the treatment is. They understand what their discharge dates are. They understand what their goals for the day are. They have a pathway to understand what they need to do to make them better and to get out of the hospital. Then by educating that patient through that continuum of care and continuing that education while the patient is out, it should reduce readmissions, which is a huge problem for American hospitals.

Are you getting product suggestions back from UCSF that will be rolled into future versions of the product?

Yes. One of the things that I’m very, very strong on is that it’s very much a partnership approach. When a hospital takes our system, they have the ability to join our advisory board. Dr. Seth Bokser is on our advisory board from UCSF. He has the ability to shape the product in consultation with the staff and other hospital leaders. There will be many exciting developments coming from UCSF in the future. We’re just delighted to be part of that experience.

I was impressed that you provide accessibility options, which health systems seem to pay little attention to even though they see special needs patients who need technical accommodation. Based on your experience with accessibility tools such as sip-and-puff, what should vendors be offering in their consumer-facing products?

I don’t think it should be a problem for any person, in whatever form of disability, to have an interactive approach within the hospital. We’ve leaped in with a couple of different companies.

You asked specifically about sip-and-puff, which enables a patient who can’t use their hands to navigate using sip-and-puff hardware. They can watch entertainment, they can watch their favorite movies, and they can be part of that whole media experience with the hospital. We’re also looking at eye tracking for navigating our system using the latest eye-tracking technology. A person will focus on a point and then that point will then open up whatever they’re looking at. They could be looking at an icon for a movie. We’re also looking at speech recognition and screen readers, which enable patients with limited sight to read on-screen information. It’s just making everybody a part of that multimedia experience within the hospital.

The hospital experience can be grim where you’re stuck in a bed with limited TV options and a nurse call button. Are patients surprised that they can carry on their lives with communications, entertainment, and Internet connectivity?

Surprised and delighted would be the words. I was at the opening of UCSF and I spent the week within the hospital, just going around asking people what they thought. We have messaging in our system where the patients or the family members can post a message. When the clinicians come into the room, the message is clearly visible for the clinician to see. The very first message we got was from a little boy who was seven years of age who said, "When can I go home?" I met him two days afterwards, and he said, "I want to stay here because it’s just fantastic. I’ve got a 65-inch TV, I’ve got a tablet, and I’m having a blast." I thought that was just fantastic.

Do you have any final thoughts?

We’re delighted to be involved in this business. We’re delighted to be part of something that I think is going to be fantastic for patient engagement and patient experience. Technology will play an important role in this. It will have to be from companies that have open platforms that are easily integratable. I think that’s going to be the top priority for hospitals for the next three years.