An Interview with Scott Laster, MiCare Path CEO: ‘“We’re Incredibly Blessed to have a Tremendous Clinical Design Team in our First Market Play Within Musculoskeletal’

“We have over 35 orthopedic surgeons representing major institutions coast to coast. These medical minds are truly progressive thought-leaders across all of the sub-specialties we have targeted.”

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are disorders of the muscles, bones, nerves, and other systems due to unergonomic working conditions. Low back pain and long-term arthritis are common. MSDs are the second most common reason patients seek care in primary care clinics and therefore bring huge economic burdens to the country and self-insured enterprises.

In light of the foregoing, we’re thrilled to present MiCare Path — a healthcare company that offers a remote patient-monitoring solution aimed specifically at people with musculoskeletal disorders as their leaping-off point.

The company was incorporated in 2019 and is based in both Memphis, TN and Dallas, TX.

Scott Laster, MiCare Path CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. Why start in the musculoskeletal space with your Remote Patient Monitoring business?

Patients with musculoskeletal issues, both acute and chronic, are no different from those with diabetes or hypertension, they’re people facing long-term and sometimes life-long conditions. In fact, many of the other chronic conditions get rooted due to the inactivity caused by the pain from managing musculoskeletal conditions – so really, if we successfully manage these patients, we’ll be preventing many of the downstream medical needs of other chronic issues (e.g. Diabetes or Hypertension) and making a much larger overall economic impact. Even if we don’t consider these ‘trickle-down’ impacts, there is still a massive economic space for improvement. Currently, in the U.S., our health system spends more than $874 billion on both direct and indirect cost of care in this field. That is more than is allocated for our national defense budget…hard to believe that we spend more on our body’s joints than we do on fighter jets, but true!

The good news is that we can apply the foundation of what has made remote patient monitoring successful in other specialties instantly to this critical field. The need in this space comes from the fact that the current healthcare system forces non-operative patients into virtual abandonment to self-manage painful and dynamic conditions and as a result, this space is the least understood and therefore has the most upside for improvement for innovative care. We feel the change agent comes in the form of concierge support through a remote patient monitoring platform to keep the greater than half the US adult population (>127 million) struggling with musculoskeletal issues informed, trusting, and ultimately empowered to improve.

Q. Explain your services in brief.

That’s a good question because the description of remote patient monitoring doesn’t get at the spirit of what we feel is important in our solution. When we started this company, our vision was to provide peace of mind to all the stakeholders through remote and intelligent healthcare solutions, and the first place we saw a tremendous need was with the remote patient monitoring field. This is a space that should not simply track metrics of patients but should engage the people and empower them to not be defined by their condition. Through a comprehensive set of tools, we keep people informed of the latest preventative and conditioning measures and connected to a dynamic care network that has informatics enlightening them with personalized guidance for their individual needs. We like to say we’re the ‘digital glue’ that binds the patients to the providers to create a true, seamless, and continual pathway of care that upends the old system of broken, intermittent insights.

Q. What is the key to maintaining the satisfaction level of the patients?

As alluded to earlier, patients are people – like all of us, and people need to be engaged and informed so there can be trust ultimately leading to inspired, positive action – which is our goal with this platform. As we achieve this goal across the arc of their experience on MiCare Path, their satisfaction will be the natural result, because they will not only see the improvements, they will feel them every day with reduced pain and improved mobility. They will experience this concierge care by being connected to their care team, and ultimately, they will know they are on the right path and under the reliable watch of their care team all along the way. These aren’t just hopes on our end, but we plan to monitor this space directly with key Patient-Reported Outcomes (PRO’s) being tracked at every step.

Q. How do you gather insights to prepare personalized health plans for the patients?

This is a fascinating space, because currently there is an overabundance of generalized information – greater than 250,000 peer-reviewed publications in the orthopedic hip and knee market alone. This does not include the vast amount of information and misinformation out there on the internet in general. This data is oftentimes challenging to access, overly generalized, and in many cases conflicting. As such, we are pulling from the latest patient-centric surveying methods as well as aligning ourselves with the brightest minds in the respective specialties (>35 healthcare providers at top institutions in one specialty alone) to create adaptive and intelligent care paths based on experience from the masters within the field, but aligned to the end-users’ goals and expectations. These pathways will be one of the unique trade-secrets for our company as we grow and learn, and even with the earliest phases of them in place, we are already advancing the care options generationally. All this being said, with our full vision, we’re only at the start of the journey. As our next step, we will capture on-going outcomes across both population health and personalized inputs and constantly challenge these care pathways for improvement potential both in the musculoskeletal space and in future medical areas of expansion.

Q. What are the anticipated trends in the remote patient monitoring segment?

As a young market segment and one that has recently shared a spotlight with telehealth throughout the global pandemic of COVID-19, there is a lot of innovation runway. First, the market is exploding with growth – which fuels the innovation of care. With all this potential, the expected trends will range from hardware (wearables, implantables, breathables, etc.) to analytics (population health, artificial intelligence, etc.), but the real macro trends will be towards personalization of care and the shifting of that care from in-facilities to at-home, real-world settings.

Q. Do you have skilled/qualified individuals who can help you give your best always?

As referenced earlier, we are incredibly blessed to have a tremendous clinical design team in our first market play within musculoskeletal. We have over 35 orthopedic surgeons representing major institutions coast to coast. These medical minds are truly progressive thought-leaders across all of the sub-specialties we have targeted. They have aligned with us to build and drive this new vision of a Remote Healthcare marketplace. They see and have provided guidance to create something deeply meaningful and in a solution space where there was nothing before. They constantly keep our efforts laser-focused on what matters to them and their patients while allowing us to see a few steps ahead in strategy with future needs and demands.

Q. Do you have any new services launching soon?

We are in discussions with both other healthcare specialists and a few businesses in various specialties to determine which medical markets our solutions would be best suited to address moving ahead. There are so many issues, both acute and chronic, that could benefit from this new Remote Healthcare mentality. Frankly, there are so many underserved markets; I feel our biggest hurdle will be the bandwidth to create the capacity to serve the markets that have the best opportunities for unmet clinical needs as we continue to roll out the demand within our current space.

“We like to say we’re the ‘digital glue’ that binds the patients to the providers to create a true, seamless, and continual pathway of care that upends the old system of broken, intermittent insights.”