Spotlight-AQ Is Improving Diabetes Care by Mapping the Psychosocial Needs of Patients

Founder Katharine Barnard, PhD, designed — and clinically validated — a new way for patients to communicate their needs to physicians. The result is an assessment tool that helps patients feel heard and doctors feel empowered to care.

Challenge

Earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said this about the rise in burnout among healthcare workers: “Burnout is not only about long hours. It’s about the fundamental disconnect between health workers and the mission to serve that motivates them.”

Between administrative burdens, escalating workloads, and staffing shortages, medical providers get less time with patients to really hear and understand what they need to improve their health. At the same time, there’s a growing wealth of research to say that the psychological and social landscape of a patient’s life is the key to better health outcomes. A doctor needs to discern the unique health needs of each patient to create a map to the right kind of support. And so this fundamental disconnect — between what a healthcare provider requires to truly care for a patient and the kind of care they have the time and resources to deliver — grows.

Take, for example, a person living with Type 1 diabetes. Despite major advances in how we monitor and deliver insulin, health outcomes for diabetes patients have not shifted in the last 20 years. This is because when a patient comes in to talk to their provider about their diabetes, the only thing discussed is their glycemic numbers. There’s no time to figure out how to achieve behavioral changes or what support a patient needs to access and understand new diabetes technology or how family dynamics might hinder compliance to recommendations. There’s no time for a doctor to fulfill their mission to improve the health of their patients.

Origin Story

“Hear me: that’s what’s broken about the healthcare system,” says Katharine Barnard, PhD. “The patient is not heard.”

Barnard knows better than most how hard it is for patients and healthcare personnel to communicate within the constraints of the healthcare system. For her master’s thesis, she studied the conversations between patients and healthcare personnel at a diabetes center. What she found was that half of the time, patients and physicians recalled different things being said at the appointments and that doctors tended to remember making more decisions than were actually made.

“The lack of accurate recall, of writing things in patient notes that weren’t actually said, about not coming to an agreement on a course of action for a patient, all contributed to negative outcomes,” she explains.

Barnard followed her master’s work with a PhD in health psychology, specializing in the psychosocial impact and management of illness and long-term conditions. Her goal was to find ways to help healthcare professionals do a better job without adding to their burden. To that end, she developed The Kaleidoscope Model of Care, a cohesive, holistic model, tailored to individual needs to support optimum diabetes outcomes.

“I had three rules when making this model. It had to work for any healthcare professional, with any patient, in any length of consultation. It needed to fit into existing healthcare delivery modes.”

Barnard began building a platform to support this model of care, one that took into account the driving forces behind behavior to create real impact on their ability to manage their diabetes. She co-designed it with patients, creating a pre-appointment survey tool that zeroes in on what a patient’s current issues are with their diabetes management through a short and simple series of questions.

The effect was immediate. In a pilot study across three different diabetes care centers, they found that the questionnaire improved health outcomes for patients while also shortening the length of consultations by 11–21%. The providers used the survey results to get to the heart of what patients needed to improve their health, no longer having to “magic up the answers” with half the information they needed, as Barnard puts it. And the patients finally felt seen and understood.

“When the patients get presented with their survey results, they often cry. The focus is so often on their therapies that they don’t realize what their real challenges actually are in managing their care — the social and environmental factors that impact their health.”

Under the Hood

Spotlight-AQ is a pre-clinical assessment platform that identifies what a patient and healthcare provider need to focus on for better management of chronic diseases such as diabetes. It helps doctors provide the right care to their patients through immediately available psychosocial resources mapped to the unique needs of each patient — precision medicine — and helps them provide it within the current constraints of medical practice, reducing the burden of care for providers while improving patient results.

“Our goal,” Barnard explains, “is to focus the consultation so that healthcare providers can deliver the care that needs to be delivered.”

Now that they’ve proven their methods for diabetes care, Spotlight-AQ is looking to expand into other chronic disease areas, using their systematic, evidence-based approach to identify the psycho-social factors that impact patient behaviors. They are also wrapping up a randomized controlled trial focused on children and young people in the US, which will help them expand their reach to a younger demographic.

Spotlight-AQ is currently fundraising to build out their team and platform to improve the user experience and get themselves ready for some partnerships coming down the pipeline. “Now that we have the science right, it’s time to move ahead.” They plan to launch in the US in 2023 and are joining forces with large diabetes tech companies like Dexcom to help fund a direct-to-patient version of the platform.

With diabetes rates estimated to grow as much as 54% by 2030 in the US alone, the timing couldn’t be better or more urgent for patients to receive the kind of proven, precise care that Spotlight-AQ offers, especially considering the burden of care these numbers represent to healthcare workers. As much as the platform helps to reduce costs for patients and insurers by streamlining care and increasing adherence to treatment plans, the team always has its eye on that fundamental disconnect between healthcare workers and their mission described by SG Murthy.

“At the end of the day, we want healthcare providers to be happy in their role knowing they are delivering the healthcare they went to medical school to do,” emphasizes Barnard.

Why We’re Proud to Invest

StartUp Health gladly backs the mission of Spotlight-AQ because of its simple, evidence-based solution that transforms patient care for chronic illnesses, particularly diabetes. It’s a rare healthtech company that lands on the scene with their premise proven out and the research to back their claims. Thanks to the academic work of Dr. Katherine Barnard at the core of what they offer, Spotlight-AQ is uniquely situated to quickly and effectively integrate into existing healthcare delivery models and change patient health outcomes for the better.

Not only is Barnard the only (yes, only) person to hold an FDA approval for a psychosocial measure in diabetes, she also has lived experience navigating diabetes care for her child. What started as an academic focus while pursuing her master’s degree, became a highly personalized mission during her PhD years. Her research tells her how to best scaffold questions to get to the heart of complex patient behaviors and motivation. Her family reminds her of why it matters.

Chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancers are the leading causes of death and disability in America and the leading drivers of healthcare costs. As people live longer, these numbers and associated costs only continue to rise. The Kaleidoscope Model of Care that Spotlight-AQ deploys is adaptable to suit any condition, setting the company up for rapid growth as they integrate themselves into other medical focus areas.

Join us in welcoming Spotlight-AQ into the StartUp Health family!

→ Learn more and connect with the Spotlight-AQ team.

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Spotlight-AQ Is Improving Diabetes Care by Mapping the Psychosocial Needs of Patients was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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