Meet C3LX, Where Patient Engagement & Remote Medicine Fuel Clinical Care
The patient engagement platform that superpowers care teams
At StartUp Health, we’re drawn to health moonshot thinkers, people who are willing to throw out the old business models and create something completely new in order to push radical change in health. This quarter, that meant investing in Andrew Richburg and his team at C3LX, who have built a platform that supercharges primary care teams and extends the critical patient-provider relationship and care delivery outside of the four walls of the clinic.
Challenge
In spite of the increased adoption of telemedicine and remote monitoring solutions, most primary care providers are still locked into an episodic care paradigm. What that means is that when a patient comes in to see their doctor, perhaps for an annual check-up, or a sick care visit, they might capture a few health metrics and talk about a health goal or two, but the minute they leave the office, care teams have no insight into their patient’s progress or lack thereof. Even if the provider spends significantly more time with the patient discussing the areas he/she needs to focus on, the patient has little in the way of accountability, support, or guidance; and the care team has practically no way to track the health journey. Not surprisingly, the result is that patients struggle to make important changes, healthcare providers are frustrated with the lack of compliance/adherence, and their work can feel ineffective and inefficient.
Part of the issue stems from a business model problem. We still live in a “fee-for-service” world where healthcare is structured around clinical events that are reimbursable. As a result, the primary care workflow is oriented around billable events like doctor's visits, labs, and imaging — even if these aren’t the activities that keep the patient healthy. In order to manage their business, care teams have learned to focus their efforts and technology around the actions and behaviors that pay.
More and more healthcare providers and care organizations are pushing back against the fee-for-service model, embracing a value-based approach to care where we pay for outcomes rather than for services. But to date, these organizations have often had to patch together multiple disparate systems, everything from the electronic medical record to some form of a patient engagement tool to the remote monitoring program, and the list goes on. For these folks, the desire to focus on outcomes over billable events might be present, but the inefficient or ineffective technology has held them back.
Into that gap stepped Andrew Richburg, CEO and founder and his team at C3LX. His vision was to build a tech platform that could bridge patient engagement and remote patient monitoring with clinical care management in a way that enables value-based care teams to function effectively and efficiently in a value-based model, as well as to guide patients along the path to improving their health for the better.
Origin Story
Andrew Richburg has been in the healthcare industry for 20 years and spent the majority of that time working in marketing and strategy for big healthcare systems. For a long time, that meant having a heavy emphasis on growth and maximizing profits.
“For a while, my job was to make sure our surgical suites were full, our beds were full and our specialists were backed-up for 90 days,” Richburg recalls. He liked the company and it was growing like crazy, but something about it didn’t sit right with him. At the time the national conversation was increasingly more focused on moving the needle on health, disrupting the current system, and reforming payment models. Even as a not-for-profit, “I was part of the machine that was taking advantage of the existing model and optimizing everything to get the best reimbursement.”
Richburg can remember the exact moment when his mindset shifted. He was leading a strategic planning retreat in San Diego and during a break, he walked outside and looked out over the waves. As he scanned the horizon, the vague sense of dissatisfaction that he’d been carrying around became something real and undeniable. He had to make a change.
“My passion wasn’t for filling up surgery suites. My passion was for understanding and engaging patients in a way that would actually transform the underlying system.”
At first, Richburg worked on a patient-centered healthcare platform in partnership with a large software services firm. But after two years, it was clear he needed to strike out on his own and have the freedom to build it his way, with the right team. Thus, C3LX was born. The name, which spells out 360 in Roman numerals, represents the idea of providing a patient with 360 degrees of holistic healthcare in their daily lives — the opposite of episodic care.
C3LX was put into a new gear in 2020 when they made their biggest client acquisition to date, a large healthcare system in Ireland. That critical partnership helped C3LX grow and develop their product in the real world, and in the Summer of 2021, they inked another major deal, this time a full product integration with AthenaHealth.
Under the Hood
Imagine you’re a patient seeing your doctor for an annual check-up. You’ve gained 10 pounds, as people are inclined to do. Your doctor suggests that you really pay attention to your weight and if possible lose some pounds in order to stay healthy or reduce risk.
In the old paradigm, the patient then leaves the office, has practically zero contact with the doctor, unless sick, and a year later comes back with an additional 10 pounds around their waist. The patient is less healthy, higher risk, and everyone is frustrated.
On the C3LX platform, called XIAhealth®, this situation would go very differently. When the healthcare provider realizes there is a rising risk or a health goal worth working towards, they introduce and invite the patient to the platform and discuss concrete health goals that can be actively and remotely monitored over time. This could be losing 10 pounds, reducing alcohol consumption, improving sleep, monitoring blood pressure, increasing activity, and focusing on mental health.
“The critical part, I believe, is engaging and facilitating the relationship between the patient and their physician in the process of setting health goals, which can happen within the safe and trusted environment of your care team through XIAhealth®,” says Richburg. “When you just get a notice from your insurance company telling you to get on some health or wellness platform, usually for a reward, something just doesn’t feel right about it.”
At home, the patient receives an invitation from their physician, downloads the XIAhealth mobile app, and completes an onboarding process that creates a comprehensive patient profile. This helps the care team understand each patient’s core values and priorities, what motivates them, barriers that stand in their way, and confirms priority health goals. That includes important social determinants of health (SDOH) factors like safe places to be active, food insecurity, or access to healthy food options.
When the patient opens up the app each day they’re presented with a simple yet engaging dashboard of their goals, their progress, challenges, and a dynamic “get it done” checklist for that day’s action items, their care plan for the day — anything from taking medication to measuring blood pressure, to hopping on a scale.
The patient is in control of how much data they supply to the platform. C3LX seamlessly integrates with hundreds of remote monitoring devices through Apple Health and individual Fitbit devices. Patients can manually enter their metrics as well. However the data is captured, each patient sees their progress visualized. They can engage in challenges, receive automated recognition, get motivational and targeted educational messages from their care team, can elevate their care to a live chat whenever needed, and more.
While we’ve seen some patient engagement platforms that make it fun and visual to track progress towards a health goal, for C3LX, that’s just one side of the coin. The other critical piece is the provider application, connecting actionable and contextual patient-generated health data to clinical care.
When a provider logs into the system, their Care Team dashboard has patients sorted by priority, milestones, and messages, not just reimbursable events. The psychographic segmentation and SDOH data allows care teams to quickly review and triage patients based on their needs and communicate according to their core value propositions. Who is facing the biggest barriers today? Who is having trouble engaging with their path to better health?
“Because of smart intuitive dashboards, you’re able to focus on the patients who really need it,” says Richburg. Gone are the days of scanning down a registry or working an excel spreadsheet.
The platform also has a powerful content manager, with over 3000 pieces of micro-content, that allows providers to easily find and distribute helpful messages to individuals or groups, securely and seamlessly within the platform. Whether a patient is trying to lose weight, increase activity, manage stress, improve sleep… a care team member can search micro-motivational or educational content, modify it, and distribute it effortlessly to the appropriate individuals or groups.
Each care team member has their own dashboard, but they’re working on the same master panel of patients, which makes it easy to delegate work on the clinical side and make sure everyone stays on the same page.
“We take one clinician and magnify them to the strength of 3 or 4,” says Richburg, because they’re more efficient in their interactions, and are powered by real-time, smart data.
Why We’re Proud to Invest
The idea of value-based care — that paying for outcomes is ultimately better for patients than paying for services — has been a dream for a long time. But we’ve always known that it was going to take smart, full-stack tech solutions to make it a reality. The old fee-for-service business models were just too entrenched for a quick switch. Platforms like XIAhealth® are making good on that promise and have the ability to usher in a whole new way of providing healthcare. It’s a radical 360-degree approach that, at scale, could be life-changing for millions of people.
Importantly, C3LX is putting a huge premium on engagement. It’s not enough to offer a service — if no one uses it, it’s a waste of space. To that end, Richburg and his team created a unique “health engagement score.” This number helps providers know in real time whether a particular patient is actively engaged in managing their own healthcare. That number is normalized and modeled longitudinally, so the provider can see how the patient’s engagement has changed over time. Keeping a careful eye on engagement improves the patient’s chances of success while also making the provider’s job more satisfying.
Finally, we’re also bullish on C3LX because they’re rooted in a global mindset. Value-based care is a big conversation in the United States and has been for more than a decade, but it is frankly behind most of Western Europe in developing the infrastructure to support it. By inking a big partnership in Ireland and entertaining regular inquiries outside the United States, C3LX is in a position to capitalize on cross-border learnings and leapfrog opportunities.
With the recent announcement of its integration with athenahealth, C3LX is moving quickly to make its mark on the industry. Join us in welcoming Andrew and his team into the StartUp Health family; we can’t wait to see how they shape health in years to come.
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