Summary
Telehealth in the US is increasingly becoming a key resource in doctor’s toolkits when it comes to treating and managing patients on an ongoing basis. With our interconnected lives, doctors more than ever can provide preventative treatment and disease management by communicating with patients via telehealth platforms.
But what if we could take these tools and go a step further? That is the question Tony Zhang set out to solve when he began to build Bluejay Mobile Health, to enable individuals to conduct rehab from the comfort of their own home utilizing AI-powered mobile telehealth tools.
With this innovative solution, Tony and his team hope to better enable people to rehab from strokes and other physical ailments. It is a really exciting application of telehealth that has the potential to positively impact millions of individuals. We sat down to learn how he and his team are accomplishing this and why you should invest in their Redcrow offering.
Funding Round Details
Can you tell us the origins of BlueJay Mobile Health?
BlueJay was founded over 5 years ago, by myself and two partners Di Shan and Chen Peng who are great software engineers in the bay area. I was trained as a scientist and co-founded two biotech companies before I co-founded BlueJay. At that time, my dad suffered a stroke in China, and he stayed home without anyone guided him on home exercises.
Fortunately, my physician friend came to his home often and helped him to manage home exercises and he recovered well. I thought it would be a valuable thing if we could develop a mobile platform for physical therapists and physicians to remotely guide patients in their rehabilitation at home. We decided to build such a technology and it became our product, BlueJay Engage.
How have you managed to build your current client-base of over 30,000 users?
We haven’t yet built our sales and marketing teams, but we have attended different conferences and directly developed businesses through talking to management and owners of rehab companies.
What are some of your biggest differentiators from others in this space? Who are some of your competitors, if any?
We are the leading telerehab technology in that we developed AI-powered video visit, such that therapists can measure patient’s range of motion (ROM) online while doing the video visit, and prescribe home exercise video programs to patients during the telehealth session.
Other telehealth tools are just video calls. In addition, the platform contains patient outcomes and compliance tracking, clinical decision mapping and care coordination features. Therefore we are a “complete solution” for tele-rehabilitation.
There are a couple of rehab solutions providers. However, they are more single solution providers and none of them are telerehab solutions.
- Medbridge: already leading the market (>50% PTs), easy to implement telehealth.
- PhysioTrack: implemented telehealth.
- Physitrack: HEP solutions
- Reflexion: bio-feedback based HEP and telehealth service (not technology)
Can you talk about the onboarding/client acquisition process? Do you go to clinics and other healthcare-related centers and sell them on the cost-savings?
No, we use channels. For example, we integrate with leading electronic medical record (EMR) companies so that their users will get to use our products within the EMRs. We also partner with professional societies (such as CPTA) to promote our technologies.
What have you heard from your customers/users? Are they seeing marked improvement in patient outcomes as well as cost reductions?
From one of our client CICN, they have improved patient outcomes by 40%, meaning on average, patients spend less time (40%) to recover from a number of health conditions.
How do you plan to expand BlueJay Mobile? Do specific states have some issues that others don’t when it comes to something like telehealth?
We will focus on one or two areas such as home health providers and expand to other areas such as worker’s compensation. The expansion will mostly be lead by B2B business development and sales, but we will use different marketing channels to raise awareness. Some states are ahead of others to reimburse the telehealth sessions such as New Hampshire, so we will focus on these states first.
Will there be significant regulatory hurdles for BlueJay to overcome? If so, what’s your plan to tackle those hurdles?
We don’t need FDA approval, but we need to be HIPAA compliant, meaning we need to secure patient data. We are HIPAA compliant and will take good care of data safety.
Can you talk about potential product roadmap and what you plan on adding on to BlueJay?
We will develop several new products: 1) BlueJay TVbox, a TV set-top box that delivers the BlueJay Engage application to TVs. 2) AI-powered patient self-test applications. Patients can measure their own progress with our AI solutions on gate stability (fall risk), balance, tremor (Parkinson’s) etc.
What are some of the biggest issues BlueJay Mobile faces?
Telehealth reimbursement is just starting. In most states, PTs are not directly covered for reimbursement from Medicare (although more than half of states can get reimbursement from private insurance companies.)
Who is on your team today and what hires are necessary for BlueJay Mobile to take the next step?
We have an experienced management team (http://www.bluejayhealth.com/about.html), but we will hire a sales team and a marketing team after we raise additional funding.
It may be a few years down the road, but what do you see as potential exit opportunities for you and others in the telehealth space?
Leading EMR or medtech solution companies, orthopedic device leaders, technology companies (such as Amazon) could be interested to acquire BlueJay down the road.
