Transitions of care—moving patients from one care site to another—continues to be a challenge in healthcare. If done poorly, care transitions can lead to patient safety issues and unnecessary hospital readmissions.
Nearly 1 in 5 Medicare patients discharged from a hospital—approximately 2.6 million seniors—are readmitted within 30 days, at a cost of more than $26 billion every year, according to data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Startup Kouper spent the past three years working on this problem, taking a tech-based approach that uses generative AI to ensure patients don't fall through the cracks after discharge.
The New York City-based company emerged out of stealth armed with $10 million in funding from General Catalyst, 25Madison and CVS Health Ventures. The financing also includes a number of healthcare angel investors.
Kouper automates follow-ups and scheduling, keeps people engaged and pulls in real-time data from across ER, inpatient and urgent care. It’s built to make health system teams' lives easier—no extra staff or complicated rollout required, according to the company.
Salman Ali, co-founder and CEO of Kouper, said a combination of lived experience and observing others' personal healthcare journeys motivated him to launch the startup.
"An unfortunate reality of the current state is when you go to the hospital and when you leave the hospital it can be very fragmented. The idea behind this was how can you support some of the existing work that's being done and in a more thoughtful manner that's customizable for the patient journey," Ali said in an exclusive interview with Fierce Healthcare.
"In essence, being as I was a care delivery support member for my family, I've lived in this kind of journey a few times. Lived experience brought us to this structured hypothesis," he said.
Kouper worked with 25M Health, a health tech venture studio, and Lifepoint Health to test out its approach to care transitions. 25M was launched by venture capital firm 25Madison and Brentwood, Tennessee-based health system Lifepoint Health to focus on building companies from the ground up. Lifepoint Health has a nationwide network of acute-care hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals and behavioral health hospitals.
"We iterated with these large health system partners to understand, 'Hey, is this a real pain point that you're consistently seeing?' So spending time on the ground with clinical team members, spending time in the emergency room, meeting with clinicians, meeting with physicians to understand, 'How can we make your job easier?' That's where the benefit of AI and care navigation became very clear," Ali said.
Kouper's early work with health systems validated its approach.
The startup uses genAI to provide a personalized transition experience for every patient leaving the hospital. Kouper says it's revamping how healthcare organizations manage patient care transitions by directly integrating with health systems to use real-time, contextual data across the care continuum. Its AI-powered data platform unifies fragmented, siloed information to deliver a longitudinal view of the patient journey—especially following hospital-based events, the company said.
"It's a connector in the most critical area after a patient leaves the hospital," Ali said.
The company will use the $10 million in fresh funding to continue developing its product and grow its operations and engineering teams. It will also invest in resources to support its R&D.
"With generative AI, the evolution of the product, the market's moving incredibly fast, and we're excited to support not just our existing customers, but also new customers that we will be bringing on," Ali said.
The name, Kouper (pronounced like the name "Cooper") was inspired by the Latin word for recovery, "recuperatio," Ali said.
"The concept around this is, if we do our job, there's about 35 million discharges in a given year, and we should be able to make sure every single one of those patient journeys is phenomenal," he noted.
Among its health system partners, the solution has driven over a 50% increase in patient engagement and more than a 60% improvement in post-discharge and emergency department follow-up appointments, the company claims.
Kouper can deploy in less than 30 days, the company said, with the aim to offer rapid time-to-value.
"The current state is when a patient is in a hospital, you'll have lot of information to process and digest, and you'll have to coordinate with several different elements of the journey. What we do is we take all that information in context, we boil up the most relevant things that you need from a follow-up perspective, and then we integrate with different providers that can support you on the journey of care," Ali said.
"When a patient leaves the ER, if you're on the provider side, you'll receive a barrage of information--different alerts from the hospital, insurance companies, various different sources, pharmacy, and it can be difficult to sort through the noise," he said, noting that the key to improving transitions of care is to act on that information in a timely manner.
"The benefit of using AI components here is that you can really create that personalized patient engagement engine that facilitates follow-up and coordinates that on behalf of what you could be doing if you have all of the time in the world," Ali noted.
Kouper fills a critical, nonclinical, administrative gap in the market, Ali said.
"I first met Salman and his team a couple of years ago while working to launch one of our hospitals in Texas. Since then, they have demonstrated a systems-level approach to building a market-leading transitions-of-care offering. We’ve been excited to expand our partnership with Kouper across several of our hospitals," said Chris Frost, M.D., senior vice president, chief medical and quality officer at Lifepoint Health.
Kouper also is working with Henry Ford Health and Ascension, with other health system partnerships in the works.
"As the leader of one of the largest clinically integrated networks in the country, serving over 550,000 aligned lives, I know that transitions of care are critical to our success. We are excited to partner with Kouper to equip our Care Hub teams with cutting-edge analytics and AI-enabled support, empowering our staff to deliver even better care," said Courtland Keteyian, M.D., interim president and CEO of Mosaic Clinically Integrated Network at Henry Ford Health.