Meharry EDA is working in partnership with Serious Health to create a prototype technology that increases access to care for individuals with disabilities, particularly those who are underserved. The six-month project is funded through a $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, Phase I grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research.
Founded in 2019 by CEO Gideon Thomas, Serious Health is an agency that focuses on placing elderly and disabled clients into the personal homes of nurses to care for their daily needs. Those nurses offer patients the same care they would get from a family member, with an up to 3:1 client-to-nurse ratio.
Serious Health seek to improve the process for matching their clients with nurses and have turned to Meharry EDA for help. They seek to create a foundation for a data-driven approach to match the right patient to the right provider by using both physical and Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) data and predictive analytics.
In the project, Serious Health will define and collect the key variables that will optimize the match between patient and provider. Meharry EDA will then create a data warehouse that will store meaningful data, prepare it for analysis, and run analytics on the data to find predictors that optimize a patient-provider match.
Gideon Thomas, CEO and founder, is the primary investigator for Serious Health. Fortune Mhlanga, Ph.D., senior vice president for Enterprise Data and Analytics, and Ashutosh Singhal, Ph.D., chief data officer and associate vice president, clinical data stewardship are co-primary investigators.
