lionstar32 wrote: I asked Lisa about Vivify last October. Here is her respons.
There are a lot of health tech ventures that sound similar based on their websites but actually all do very different things. Bear in mind that the Community Care space is currently worth well over $25 Billion and is rapidly growing, so there is more than enough room for a whole ecosystem of companies to do very well in this space.
With respect to Vivify specifically, that company has a very complex system that's primary value is in their deep integration with hospital EMRs. They are a much more expensive solution than ours and hospitals need to make substantial up front investments of time and money before they can deploy the Vivify platform. The hospital market is large, but the sales cycle is long and the after-sales support requirements are high. Reliq is focused primarily on the opposite end of the market - home care agencies, primary care physician practices, Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and assisted living facilities. If you visit Vivify's website you'll notice that the vast majority of their customers are large, extremely well funded hospitals and healthcare networks. Their system is simply cost-prohibitive in other settings. Reliq can (and does, both in Texas and in Northwestern Ontario) work with communities that are low income and have very limited infrastructure (no internet, no phone lines, no smartphones). Our two way interactive voice works without a tablet or smartphone and both it and the monitoring devices we use can operate over the cellular network to reach under-served and truly remote communities. Home care agencies, assisted living facilities and family practices that deploy our solution will receive new incremental revenue and profits using existing Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance billing codes, even with the cost of our system. The same cannot be said of Vivify's platform. Vivify works by extending the hospital/healthcare organization's EMR to provide the capabilities of the remote system. Our system is stand-alone which makes it accessible to home care agencies, assisted living facilities and family practices which do not (and cannot) use hospital EMRs (e.g. Cerner, EPIC, McKesson, GC, Meditech).
Vivify's apps with their giant buttons look very shiny and nice, but our system uses automated voice as the exclusive user interface for patients, which means patients with visual acuity issues, cognitive impairments, and non-English speakers can use the system (our voice technology is automatically available in 133 languages) without any outside support. Our system provides ongoing coaching throughout a patient's typical day, reminding them to feed their cat and turn off the burner on the stove as well as take their medications and collect their vitals. Vivify uses a library of established care plans to provide specific clinical instructions to patients, but it isn't flexible enough to support, for example, dementia and brain injury patients or even healthy adults aging in place like Reliq's platform can. Our sensors placed throughout the home allow us to detect falls and summon emergency services if needed, and they allow family members to log on and see that, while Grandma says she's feeling fine she actually hasn't left her bedroom in 24hrs, hasn't opened the fridge in 2 days and hasn't left her apartment in 3 days, so she probably isn't fine and needs someone to go over and check on her. Vivify doesn't have a sensor product to track movement and identify falls and other unexpected emergencies in the home.
This may all be far more detail than you wanted, but the short(er) answer is that Vivify's target client is the large, profitable hospital that possesses the significant human resources and budget required to install a technically complex system that will require significant ongoing technical support, whereas Reliq's target clients are the front line community care providers (home care agencies, family practices and assisted living facilities), most of whom couldn't possibly afford to implement a platform like Vivify's, and whose patients wouldn't have the infrastructure or capability to use Vivify's products. These customers also have very limited IT infrastructure and need a system like ours that doesn't require intensive technical support and constant updates every time the hospital EMR goes through a version update. Essentially there's a spectrum of care providers and patients in the community care space and Vivify serves a different section of that spectrum than we do. Fortunately for our shareholders the sales cycles at our end of the spectrum are much shorter, the profit margins are much higher and the after-sales support required is much lower. Vivify's end has a lot of the "sexier" customers - children's hospitals and big brand name healthcare organizations, but their capital requirements are much higher than Reliq's. Perhaps most telling is the fact that they've raised close to $25 Million USD and been in the market for 8 years and they're still not profitable. Reliq will be cashflow positive early next year and expects to achieve profit margins of 85% by the end of 2018. We're also publicly traded, meaning that our shareholders can get liquidity whenever they choose.
Reliq is also unique in that we collect and anonymize the patient health data we handle, which will ultimately be a significant revenue driver for us as we license that unqiue, complex anonymized data to pharma companies, governments and research institutions.
In answer to your other question, we were selected by the NHS, the Ontario Ministry of Health (for the Sioux Lookout pilot in NW Ontario), the Feldman Institute and the customers in Texas along with the other new customers in our pipeline through competitive processes. We were chosen by these clients, despite our small size/early stage and non-US/UK origin, because they felt our solution was truly unique in the market due to our ability to:
- Serve remote and rural communities even in the absence of typical urban infrastructure like internet service
- Be truly cost-saving, right from day one
- Implement rapidly with little to no support required from the client's IT team and minimal training requirements
- Provide coaching, education and reminders in 133 languages and entirely though voice and video, so patients don't need to be able to read or learn how to use an app/tablet/smartphone, and clients do not have to purchase tablets or smartphones for their patients
- Offer emergency intervention support similar to Lifeline but without requiring that the patient wear a necklace or other device
- Provide a flexible, comprehensive solution for everyone from young athletes recovering from orthopedic surgery to healthy seniors aging in place to high risk, complex chronic disease patients
- Fit within the budgets of countries with socialized medicine like the UK, Canada, France, Norway, Sweden, etc., etc. You'll note that Vivify has not gained traction in any socialized medicine countries, due to the high cost involved in implementing and supporting their system.
I'll stop myself there before you regret emailing me, although perhaps I'm already too late! I hope this info helps.