Pitching a Medtech Startup with Susan Perry (CEO, SpeechMED)

Thank you very much. So, I'm Susan Perry. I'm the CEO of SpeechMed, and we are— we have reinvented patient communication to save hospitals time and money, but also to help patients understand their instructions. So, imagine that you're the CEO of your local hospital, and you have 3 big challenges that are really keeping you awake at night. You've got an extremely high rate of readmissions costing you millions of dollars in fines, your patients are giving you low satisfaction scores, and you're facing expensive lawsuits. In fact, Harvard just had an independent study that showed that Harvard and 16 of its hospitals over a 5-year period lost $1.7 billion in malpractice payouts and 2,000 lives due to miscommunication. Our fully functioning suite of language and audio products, SpeechMed, is designed to end those sleepless nights that hospital administrators have. So SpeechMed speaks to your patients in the language that they understand so that they can follow instructions that lead to a safe recovery. We have basically a 14% proficient health literacy rate in the United States in English. Everybody else struggles. Um, SpeechMed eliminates misunderstandings that lead to low patient satisfaction scores. When patients understand their medical instructions, they're much less likely to, um, have mishaps that lead to malpractice lawsuits and death.

What happened?

Did I— oh, sorry. SpeechMed's enterprise system and mobile applications allow patients and caregivers to hear vital medical information spoken aloud, and this is the most important part, in the language that they understand. We often learn to speak a language but don't necessarily learn to read it well, and so people that speak a language other than English, English as their first language run a 22% greater chance of having a medical mishap every time they touch healthcare. Our system is also specifically designed for seniors, the visually impaired, and other patients who do not read English well. So, our potential for annual subscriptions for SpeechMed with adults who have low literacy for whatever reason alone is nearly 13 $1.5 billion. And for our first year, when we've already enrolled one, we plan to enroll 6 hospitals and 36,000 patients over the next 12 to 18 months. That's— that'll generate $3 million in our first year to 18 months. And how do we plan to scale? On an enterprise level, we're working on forming channel partnerships. Our inner systems partnership gives us access to two-thirds of all electronic healthcare record systems in the United States because it acts as the backend for systems like Epic, which is the largest in the United States. Beyond US hospitals, other target markets include global hospitals, accountable care organizations, practice management companies, and we are currently we've signed an agreement with one, home healthcare agencies, and direct-to-consumer sales. While there's competition, no one addresses spoken multilingual need like SpeechMed does today, and we're planning to license our technology to our competition. That's our goal, to be their front end, because we think we do that patient engagement better than anyone. In the last year, we've received numerous innovation awards and recognitions: 50 Best Innovation Leaders for AARP and Med City News, an award from the Small Business Association, and we're really proud of, you know, how well we've done with Founders Institute. That's the most important thing. We have a great team, um, to meet the needs of complex healthcare solution we're providing. We've built a kind of solid management team that brings years of experience from different disciplines because it is a complex problem. You need a lot of different people that think differently. And we're seeking an investment of $300,000 to help us intensify our marketing and sales efforts. And thank you very much, and I really appreciate the time that you spent listening to us.

All right, awesome. Thank you, Susan. Um, you want to— there we go. Awesome. Yeah, the system's a little wonky. So thank you for that. So as usual, everybody, get your questions in. And I have a few questions for Susan as well, just to kind of get us started, but I'm sure your questions will be more interesting than mine. So start asking them. So yeah, a question that I had was, Well, actually a call-out first. Okay. So if there are any entrepreneurs that are watching this, Susan had a slide, their market slide, right? Normally you look at a market slide and it just will say something like our market's like a trillion dollars, right? Susan, you broke out your market slide into the market, the total addressable market, the target market, right? And that is how honestly every entrepreneur should do it, to be honest. It's a breath of fresh air whenever I see it. Because yes, everybody will have—

I learned it from you.

Everybody will. Everybody's always going to have the hockey stick. That's fine, right? But, you know, I will see slides where people will say my market is women, just all women everywhere, every woman on the planet, you know, and they'll say it's a $3 trillion, like, you know, break it down into a total addressable market and your target market. So anyway, that was great. I guess the first question that comes to my mind is I noticed, you know, so you, you're looking at this product from two different angles. You have a B2B side and a B2C side. Was there, you know, was there, you know, did you think about it going in with one way, with one end of the market, or, you know, just, just try to, you know, we, we looked at B2B, but The reality is that when hospitals issue it, they're only interested in the patient for 30 to 60 days because that's what keeps them out of trouble, basically.

So what happens to the patient after that? And what we found was the patient wants to continue a subscription. And so we get some subscriptions that way. And then I went through it pretty quickly because you gave us 3 minutes, but we have a caretaker app. There's 65 million people in the United States that are taking care of someone else. So, for example, when I was taking care of my mother, we're in Miami, I only speak English, and frequently a caretaker would show up that spoke Spanish or French Creole. If it was Spanish, I could call my son-in-law and say, "Would you please tell this lady this or that?" But French Creole, totally out of luck. And so the system would have really helped me as an individual caretaker. And it gives caretakers the ability to kind of be at work, look on their cell phone, and know what the person that they're taking care of is doing with their medications and appointments and things like that.

That makes sense. Okay. So Marina asked, and I think this is a good question, Sanjay asked a related question as well. So you've been talking about translations. Are these, is this something that's done by an algorithm or is this something that's done manually?

Both. We— yeah, it depends on the area and what's being translated. So you can trust translation for simple things, you know, an algorithm for simple things, but you have to be a little bit more careful about very specific instructions. And then we use scripting for medications because Dilantin is Dilantin no matter what language it's in. So we use a bunch of different techniques after testing. We basically know what works in what area.

Yeah. So my guess is from the— yeah, I mean, you work in healthcare and there's very specific, um, you know, when we talk about translating stuff in healthcare, there's a lot of liabilities involved with that, right? So I would definitely suggest you go through the chat, um, and answer some of these questions too afterwards, just I'm gonna ask a few more here because I'm seeing them, but they're all basically talking about liability and the like. But I'll ask a few of them here. So John asks, are there laws or regulations that demand the use of paper notification?

That demand the— I'm sorry, I didn't hear the last part.

Are there laws or regulations that demand the use of paper notification?

Not really, however, you know, we allow— we give both. In fact, whole discharge can be uploaded to our system that can be read too because we're trying very hard to communicate in as many levels as we can. The reality is though, paper fails most people. My mother-in-law, whose primary language was French, died as a result of a medical mishap, and it had to do with the fact that she was handed 20 pieces of paper at discharge that she couldn't read. So she didn't follow instructions and she died. So paper— there's always the ability to do a paper backup, and in fact we can upload it and patients can even print from our system.

All right, and I'll ask one last question here, but definitely there's been a lot of questions coming in through the chat, and these are mostly, you know, kind of just— I mean, you work in healthcare, so I imagine you are answering a lot of these questions all the time. Alessandra asked an interesting question: How do you get low-literacy senior citizens to download an app? So I guess that would be—

we don't. Okay, we don't. What we do is most, like, for example, we're doing a pilot at the hospital. They're handed an app, but you'd be surprised at what low-literacy seniors can actually do. I mean, we can assist them through the phone and it's one button. We've tried to make everything as simple as possible. But if it comes from the hospital, it's been done for them.

Right. All right, great. So definitely, Susan, I suggest you— there's a lot of questions coming in there in the chat. So yeah, but thank you, Susan. Definitely solving, solving a problem that, you know, affects a lot of people. So—