Pressure Injury Monitoring Without More Room Checks

From the episode captions, lightly cleaned. Speakers are not labeled, and the text may contain small errors. Time links play the episode from that moment.

0:00 In medtech, the difference between a good quarter and a great one isn't always the product. It's the friction standing in the way. Broken sales cycles, misaligned teams, deals that stall at the finish line. Every leader feels it, and the best ones know how to remove it. Welcome to Zero Friction, the podcast where we go inside the minds of MedTech's top commercial leaders to uncover the real barriers they face, the decisions they make, and the systems they build to keep the revenue moving. I'm your host Terry Coutsolioutsos. Let's remove some friction. Welcome to the Zero Friction podcast. This is Terry Coutsolioutsos. We have another great episode today with a founder and a CEO.

His name is Naveen Gogumalla and he started and founded a company that is really designed around patient monitoring and relieving the friction around potential pressure injuries for patients and facilities. His company is NthJen and they have a remarkable remote monitoring sheet that goes on the bed called the MediSheet. But I'm going to let him kind of dive into his personal journey, the mission behind the company number one, and then tell us about the product and what they're trying to solve in the healthcare community. So Naveen, great to have you here today. Appreciate it. Give us a little background on yourself and tell us a little bit about the company. Well, Terry, thank you so much for having me on. Uh, absolutely. I appreciate you having us here. I think we're addressing a very big problem. But my background real simple in why this actually happened was in 2000 uh you know I was IT guy but also in healthcare. One of the EMR providers here in Kansas City. But in 2014 I lost my sister to a heart attack. She

Had a heart attack. She was 49 years old. She was she had her son in the house. my other sister in the house and um for three hours no one found her. So, one of the things I was doing while I was there um I was hitting her Fitbit on the table and and I saw data pop up on it because it still had a battery and everything else and I saw a couple of pieces of information including the heart rate that was really low. It was around 20 beats a minute. And in my mind, I at that time, I didn't really think through the whole process. But to me, if I saw that, I would expect something to be someone to be alerted. I mean, even the paramedics when they finally showed up, they tried to resuscitate her, but she was already black and blue. And so, so, you know, to me, if it was, if it happened earlier, maybe within minutes of her actually

2:43 Dropping her heart rate and things like that, they may have been able to save her. But that's what prompted NthJen. It was using our fitness data and things like that or fitness trackers and things like that. Not just for the fitness side of it, but to also alert folks of, hey, they're having a negative reaction, negative event. We need someone there ASAP. So, and finally in 2017, I decided to go raise some money, pull the company together, and we started NthJen, which essentially stands for solution that transcends generations. So, your father can use it, your son can use it, your kids can use it. And we started building our solution in 200 uh 25. We got published in USA Today which kind of started pushing us down the track and we started pulling everything together. Got to the point where we have an MVP ready to go on beds. Solutions there's ready hardware is ready. Now we just need to go put it on a bed and get pilot clients working.

So that's where we are. It's the go-to market strategy and here we are with you. Good. Well, that's exciting. So tell us about like the problems that you're trying to solve for health care. So let's start with the problem and then we can kind of go into the product a little bit. So what are the challenges that you're solving for hospitals, providers, long-term care facilities? Tell us a little bit about that. You know, a lot of folks will go immediately to elderly care when they hear some of the things that we're doing. But it's not just elderly care, right? The last conversation I had, a young man, his mother was in the hospital and the exact same things that we're solving for happened, which is her getting out of bed and falling, her getting a pressure injury where a skin breakdown happened. So, so it's very relevant, but what we are trying to do, one of the biggest things that we want to do is not just around the patient,

But also the caregiver. We're about to walk into a situation in the next three to five years where we have a shortage of 350,000 caregivers, which which means now they're going to be overloaded. Now, some of these folks have already been overloaded, right? I mean, if you if one of the biggest things CO taught us is we need to get ready. We need to get ready for a mass number of people hitting the hospitals. Not because they're injured or hitting the hospitals in the elderly care area.

5:30 Not because they're injured, but because they're getting old. It's what we do, right? And so a lot of people don't like the idea of, hey, I'm going to grow old at home. Some do, some don't because they want that safety and security. So it's how do we monitor them without being invasive? No cameras. We got to give folks their dignity and things like that. So, we really sat down and thought through where we can get this accomplished. How do we get that patient or that that caregiver to go on demand versus having to do a 2hour round? And if you think about it, 20 rooms, every two hours, you're pretty much doing that constantly in a way. So, how do we make it easy? How do we make their lives easy? How do we make a caregiver see that we're trying to make them efficient as possible? And MediSheet is actually what came out right today. The two major things we're going after is uh um um pressure injuries. This should be known as bed

Sores and absence from the bed. A lot of the times you've heard the stories, right? my father fell in the bathroom and found him for five, six hours. Those kind of things we have to get rid of. So that's when we put uh a MediSheet together. Um so yeah, got it. So we have monitoring capabilities in terms of leaving and coming back. We have making sure patients are being properly manipulated and rotated. Yeah. Yeah. Adjusted if you want, right? Um for pressure injuries and then anything else that we're we're sort of caring for. Are those the two big those are the two big pieces. But think about this, right? You're not sure if somebody's in the bet, especially an elderly person, right? Sure.

You don't know. You You can't get up and walk over and look at everybody else because you're losing your efficiency and your leverage. So, we also give you the capability. It can be on any computer, right? It doesn't matter if it's a brand new laptop or desktop where where basically you can you can download you don't even have to download anything. you go through the web browser and what you're able to do is remotely validate if that person's in bed or not. And one of the key reasons that we saw that is while we were testing it out at one of the facilities here in Kansas City, the biggest thing is that the folks in those beds at 2:00 in the morning don't really want somebody to walk in check in on them at 2:00 in the morning, right? mainly because that gets them so nervous, so scared. They don't know who that person is that just walked in. We all know it's someone like a caregiver, so on so forth. But that

8:30 Person at that time, elderly, maybe dealing with dementia, things like that, and they start waking up and fighting the caregiver, thinking that it's somebody, right? Which also potentially leads them to a heart attack. So you've got multiple in multiple things that could potentially have happen to them. So don't go into the room. You put a camera in that room, you're taking their dignity away. There is no way I want my mother on a camera with her night gown and things like that on. So it gives you the capability to remotely see them, right? Which also promotes the whole idea of safety, security, and comfort.

Hope for the patient, the family, everybody uh involved, right? So, yeah, those are those are primary things that we want to get to. And then our eventual what we do after we release uh to release this and get everything going is to go layer in other devices or other modalities to go capture different pieces of data that define you. heart rate, blood pressure, potentially other things that we can get off that patient and get all those wires that you have with all the machines around them out of the way. It's it's not just for the patient, but it's also for the clinicians that come in and provide care for. So, yeah, it's a bigger strategy, but right now, absolutely. Pressure injuries, absence from the bed to That's remarkable. And it operates as a system. So the sheet, it's a connected sheet, right? It has sensors in it.

So the sheet fits a standard size bed, hospital bed uses uh um,00 little less than,00 sensors, you know, that we have in a matrix. So once you put that on top of the bed uh on top of the mattress, you put your bedding on top of it. You secure it to the mattress and then you put your bedding on it, whatever you want. And when we check a patient in, regardless of when we bring them into the room, maybe two weeks after the last one or if it's a continuous one year type of a thing, we calibrate them. We understand where they are from a baseline perspective and we use that data to make sure we know that it's that person that's laying in that bed and then we are able to provide those alerts. Now you can change them per per person and you can use the sheet on multiple folks because it's very similar to hospital beds right now. The surface is clean with isopropylene and it's the same thing with us. But the

11:15 Patient never touches the surface of of the sheet. Well, let's do this. Can I jump on the website real quick and maybe give the viewers a little visual and I'll share our screen. Yeah, that's great. So, I am on the website right here. Yeah. And you know, basically, I guess this is sort of the system laid out on the bed over here where you have your monitor and your sheet. Yep. Yep. And it, if you see, there's a button down underneath where it shows um what does it say? The device.

Yeah. And if you click it, there you go. So, so without going into all the the page two and three, the first page is very simple, right? So, you've got got the device, you got the case, the carrying case because this is also created for home, right? So, what you're seeing is the the sheet cover, a surface that we put on top of it. Yes, that's the sheet and that's the cover. And then we use a mini computer. What you're seeing at the bottom is a very mini computer that remotely connects to your Wi-Fi and and there's several options that we do with that Wi-Fi. We can do your home Wi-Fi. We can do the facility Wi-Fi.

We can get a cellular hub. I think it shows some of the application how it looks. There you go. Yeah. And so this is a monitoring system here. So we have detailed alarms. You have a whole data system and and Yeah, the the the alarms, the data system, you're seeing the bed layout, so you know where they are. The screen on the I guess my right or the one with the little blue square is really how you know we can actually see that person on that bed. So you're seeing those time ranges, right?

And most common time range is 10:00 at 9 to 8:00 in the morning. get up and go to the bathroom. Disoriented a little bit. They may fall. Well, I want them to come in. If they don't get back to the bed in 20 minutes, and that's what I use. They're they're notifying the caregiver to go in there and take a look. It may be that they're in the bathroom falling or it may be that they're walking around the halls in in the facility. So, it's really kind of important to have something like that.

A lot of these when the absence from the bed, you're you're ending up with somebody falling and having a injury that now needs to be treated, taken care of, fixed, all that fun stuff. Well, that gives that person a sense of what happened, who did not take care of me, right? I'm bleeding, things like that. This helps them go figure out, hey, they're not in bed. Let's go take a look what's going on. Right. Um the then you got you got other places. But one of the biggest things on that detailed alarm log that you were showing earlier, right, is that we capture we capture a lot of data. So what you're basically seeing over here is it's the type of a type of um notification that went out. ulcer, things like that. But also, when did it go off? When was it reacted to by the nurse? All this data is saved because, as you know, these injury lawyers are starting to go after facilities, elderly care facilities, and I believe the last

14:57 Lawsuit was $7 million settlement. H those are plus with a pressure injury at stage two they're popping into anywhere from 20,000 to 150,000 to rectify that is huge right well and the patient as well right like that those sores don't heal well nope yep you know a lot of them have cellulitis a lot of them have vascular issues and and those pressure wounds can end up causing bigger and severe problems and complications down the road. So, a sheet like this in terms of visibility, in terms of being able to adjust patients, being able to make sure you know where they're at or whether they've come back to bed or not, and giving you those alert systems, as well as allowing the staff to actually use their time efficiently and effectively is probably another great value proposition with this.

Yeah. And I mean speaking to um defense lawyers and things like that, they want assistance. Today they go into court, they're pretty much dealing with did you do your job? Yes or no? Right. This provides, hey, yeah, we did. we are doing it and we understand that we are doing it on a regular basis but now we're capturing data that basically shows you what our process is how it is and what we do with that data right so there's a lot of stuff that we'd like to incorporate that makes managing the facility easier as well so working with the CEOs the those folks yeah they've given us an opportunity to do some work with them but we also want want to make sure we're doing it for various areas like elax, hospitals, having all of that in the software so that we're not creating oneoffs for people and trying to going through hell to manage because I've seen that before in my past healthcare. It's what we do.

So tell us about the product itself. What makes it unique? Are there other things like this in the marketplace that are out there? What brings the MediSheet in NthJen into sort of a a unique category? When I first started working with with devices, I started trying to figure out, hey, is there a injury that I need to find, right? Hey, there's a body in well, unfortunately, pressure sensors are not sensitive enough to go pick up the difference between a band-aid and a stab, right? They're very thin. So, what we decided to do is say, let's not let's not get all Star Treky on what we're trying to do because it's, you know, they're they're looking for that type of technology and I think we're far away from it. However, if I can tell that the person's been laying there for hour and a half and not moved off the sensors that they originally started countdown on, it gives me an idea that they've been laying in that spot for an hour and a half and I need to reposition. So

18:07 Rather than just saying, "Hey, I'm looking for a wound." I'm telling you, you're we're making it efficient for that nurse. So that's that's the the the sheet gives you that ability. It tells you when they're not in the bed. It tells you when they're laying there too long without movement. And and you as clinicians and caregivers can actually get that set up so it's effective for that particular person. And yes, there's several different people have different needs. And so for that reason, we give that caregiver the ability to change what they need to do. Uh that one of the key pieces. Okay. And that's what distinguishes us because I've seen them, right? I've seen folks overseas trying to do something with these um with these sensors and unfortunately everyone gets caught on, hey, I'm trying to figure out if this is a this is a wound or if it's a band-aid or if it's just something else, right?

False positive. That's where you'll get to when you're trying to do it from that perspective. Now, when you're telling them, hey, I've got a timer. I know they've been laying there. Go now because it's time. That's very different. It's ondemand caregiving in my mind. Providing that care and it's prevention, too. At the end of the day, you're preventing the injury versus, you know, trying to treat the injury, right? So, it's all designed around prevention. Well, good. So, you know, you're getting ready to go to market with your first sort of data gathering exercise. Where are you going now? Is it local? Is it in Kansas City? Are you taking it to other places in the market?

Like what is the sort of the game plan around getting this thing out there? Yeah. So, um I mean not to go back to 2019, but you know it resonates because that was the that was the plan. Right. Right. Get it in front of clients that could actually give me some data back in an environment where you have these problems. So, we had it at an elac and of 19. We have worked with them. and we got everything to the point. So, we were ready. People see the value in it. So, that's what we're doing today. So, went back to the the National Pressure Institute show in St. Louis this year.

Same place I got the client before 19. And so, our first step is to absolutely get that pilot client. Doesn't matter if it's Kansas City, doesn't matter if it's someplace else. We're even doing it in in the home, right? So, we're finding folks that want to do it at home. What we got to what we have to finish up is getting in with them, them putting the sheet on the bed, defining exactly who's going to get there. In a hospital, it's easy. You've got caregivers. At home, it's a little bit different because you've got external folks having to come, nurses, and so on to come check you out. But our first first step is to go get a pilot client. We are which we are in the process of demoing to a couple of folks. My thought is we get this in by December, get it get it running, get it showing value to them, and then using the data to be able to go show others, hey, we're

21:21 Ready for this. Now, we're also giving folks an opportunity to use it for a couple months and then start paying for it. It's very simple. So, you're getting ready to go to market. What does that preparation look like today? What would be like a really good profile for a customer for you? What what I'd really love and the reason I'd love it is because Elax long-term acute care hospitals, right? They're they're a perfect candidate, right? a hospital is too, but you know, they're running around so much. I don't know if we'll get that focused attention that we would need, especially if capturing data at the very beginning.

But I think there's a couple hospitals we're talking to that would do that and are very excited about it. But if I had my brothers, it would be an elac. Most of the time, elacs, you are coming in to recover. you're coming in to get better, whether it's injury or whatever or medication or physical therapy, you know, those kind of things. And people are tired, right? So, the way that I see it is you get up in the morning, you go do breakfast, you go physical therapy, you come back, you rest again, and then you're up again in the evening doing the same kind of thing. And I, you know, from what I've seen, anywhere from um a week to a month is what they're what what the time is that they stay in there. So, it gives us that shorter period, multiple folks that we're working with that we can go figure out and it'll give us that three threemonth one, but we'll do hospitals, we'll do

Sniff, uh special nursing units and things like that. It's it'll give us the same kind of value. You know, I in ELTAC, we were there before. I have somebody on board that also has worked with ELAC before in therapy. So, we're going after a lot of them. There's there's several places here in Kansas City, and that's one of the big ones. I don't even have to get in a on an airplane and go someplace, but they belong to the large large uh health systems for us. We got them right here.

Feet to the street. Let's go. Let's go the south pretty much it and provide the value. So long-term care facilities, nursing facilities, sniff facilities. What facilities have the highest rate of pressure wounds? Seems like that would probably be the huge opportunity out there because of the health care implication, the liability implication. Like it just feels like it's a very costly endeavor for everybody, right? facilities to treat and and to deal with. Right. Right. So, the two areas, right, where they're trying to recover, you you you take meds, right? You take some meds, painkillers, whatever it is, you fall into deep sleep, and guess what happens?

24:18 You don't move. You lay in that bed. It's like, so it's it's elax. It's hospitals, right? They have these folks all the time. And and they they don't have to be elderly. They can be young, right? I mean, they're walk out of bed, you trip, you fall. Nobody knows. You You lay in bed, you just took XYZ medication, it knocked you out, you're out for an hour and a half. Well, guess what? You're you're laying on the same spot for that time. Now, there's a there's there's things out there that say that these types of facilities sniffs big because you already have skin breakdown with elderly, right? and and and and now you've got them laying on certain spots. So So yeah, every one of those that I mentioned before, and I'm not saying all of them have it. I'm saying there's quite a few and it's made enough of an impact that pressure injuries are 26.8 billion impact on this country every year. Elderly, you are 65 and over, you fall once, you're going to

Fall again. $55 billion a year, right? You're talking about 2.5 million people acquiring pressure injuries and way more when you're talking about folks that fall. U I've got two of them at in my place, right? My mom and dad live with me. Um, and dad, they're what, late 80s, early 90s and and it scares me when I get up and look at them and I can see them shaking or or you know their walk is not that great. It freaks me out. But mom fell the other day, right? She fell on her own bed, hit her side. Said these are the things that I want to try to figure out how we get people to you immediately. not 10 hours later.

So, if I were a facility leader in one of your target facilities, what's the one message they should take from this episode that we're talking about today? Like, what's the one thing you'd like them to leave with? Uh, I think I think they've done an incredible job, right? I mean, you're talking about all kinds of people clearly on all of that. So there's no way I want to uh belittle any of these organizations. They've done a great job. Fortunately, we as a population have grown, I mean, tremendously. We're we're at what 320 million people out of that third is elderly now. So about to be se what 65 and over. 74 million of them.

27:00 Never have we in this country faced that kind of uh situation. And all these guys also have to go and uh take care of the younger kids, right? He's in 40s. All of them go through injuries, whatever it is, right? The thing about MediSheet is that we aim to provide you efficiencies and relief, technologybased relief. Your caregivers are running away because there's more and more work being put on their shoulders. This MediSheet and what we're doing NthJen will allow you to start making it efficient but then giving your folks some relief all over the place whether it's management or whether it's taking care of the patient.

Got it. Well, Naveen, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. I think the MediSheet is a novel concept that you know is preventing a huge problem and I think that's the the key message I'm getting from it is an ounce of prevention can go a long way in saving our health care system $25 billion in complications. Yeah. And and that's just the economic part of it. I mean, think about the human part of dealing with a non-healing pressure wound is a tremendous challenge for the patient. And so, having technologies like this that put patients on a rotation, allow caregivers to have data and insights on how to manage the patient adjustment versus just putting them on a straight rotation where care can be given where it needs to be given.

So, if the patient's moving around, why would you go in and interrupt them, right? if they're already adjusting themselves versus the patients that actually need the adjustment and need the attention and need the care. Um, and I think that kind of goes back to what you were saying is that there's a an extreme shortage of caregivers and technologies like this that allow patients to be cared for when they need it is a much more effective way than just putting everybody on the same rotation. Yep. 100%. And that's it can get you focused. So give a stall.

Well, how would they get a hold of you guys? n enth.com. So we have nthjen.com. Correct. That's the website, right? And if they want to get a hold of you, are you on LinkedIn or you have a email you want to give or anything like that? Yeah. Yeah. I am on LinkedIn Naveen Gogumalla. But your uh nav njn.com is our is my email. Well, good. Naveen, great to have you here. I appreciate it. We wish you and NthJen and the MediSheet great success in the future.

29:52 Thanks, Terry. I appreciate I appreciate you having me on here. Uh, phenomenal. Thank you so much. That's a wrap on Zero Friction, the show built around one simple idea. Remove the barriers and the revenue will follow. If today's conversation was valuable, please subscribe and share it with somebody who needs to hear it. That's how we will grow this community. I'm Terry Coutsolioutsos, revenue architect powered by AI. Come find me at my website, myrevrx.com, and let's talk about what friction is costing you and your organization. Until next time, keep removing the barriers and keep the revenue flowing.