A Note From the Founder

Whether it’s by fellow founders, friends, potential customers or investors, or even as a result of the forced “so what do you do?” at social events, I’m often asked why I decided to found Seam.

Almost as often, I’m then asked why I’ve *intentionally chosen* to build a tech startup in one of the toughest industries with the hardest problems, longest sales cycles, messiest data, slowest rate of technology adoption, and <insert your favorite uphill climb here>.

My usual answer is pretty simple: “If it was easy, it would already be solved. I founded Seam to tackle the hardest problem in healthcare I thought I could reasonably put a dent in.”

And boy, did I pick a hard one.

 

Seam’s “Not Easy” Problem

Most people are painfully aware of the big challenges in the US Healthcare industry, and I’d like to highlight the two that brought me into the fray.

Firstly, the per capita cost of care in the United States is nearly double the average across other peer nations, and over 50% higher than the next highest cost country. Source: Health System Tracker  

Spending is rampant and incredibly inefficient, in large part due to highly variable, manual, human-intensive workflows.

Secondly, our caregivers – nurses, physicians, and other care practitioners – are overwhelmed and burning out at an increasing rate. Well over 1/3 of both nurses and physicians are reporting feeling burnt out, citing staffing shortages and inefficient/unpredictable day to day workflows as key drivers. Source: Klas Research 

Widespread inefficiency directly increases costs, but has significant secondary effects on the ability to hire and retain clinicians. This increases turnover and further drives up costs to hire and retain staff. Meanwhile, staff shortages place greater strain on the staff who remain, which can have direct consequences on the quality of patient care, length of stay, and more.

I’ve felt this as a product leader building technology for clinicians, and I’ve felt it as a caregiver for a chronically ill child who has spent more than his fair share of time in the clinic. It’s created a vicious cycle, with highly variable and burdensome clinical workflows at the start of this unfortunate flywheel.

In other words, we don’t just have a workforce problem, we have a WORK problem, and healthcare organizations are not well-equipped to understand and solve this massive (and growing) problem.

 

First Stop: Nursing

While Seam has high aspirations to make an impact in many facets of healthcare operations, it became clear to us that nursing was the most important group of operators and practitioners to support first.

Nurses comprise the largest proportion of the clinical workforce, are responsible for the largest number of direct interactions with patients, and are absolutely critical to nearly every step of patient care from admission through discharge.

However despite being mission critical to patient care and clinical operations, nurses have been and continue to be woefully underserved and under-supported by technology to help improve and streamline their workflows.

As a result, we’re working to put our AI-enabled decision science platform directly into the hands of nursing leaders, operators, and informaticists to support nurse-led and data-driven nursing transformation.

But of course this “data-driven transformation” must begin with data, and involves tackling many gnarly data challenges in healthcare

Data Rich, Knowledge Poor

The thousands of documented patient observations, clinical care team actions, and system events generated for every patient during each day of care exist as as isolated, individual “threads” of activity, scattered across countless systems and databases. It’s hard to find, and even harder to make sense of.

In service of our mission to support nurses transform care, we see a massive opportunity to gather these isolated data threads, weave them together, and create a comprehensive “tapestry” of clinical workflows as a critical step in diagnosing and solving the operational problems increasingly weighing down nurses today.

I named the company “Seam” as an acknowledgement of the disparate scraps and wide-ranging patterns of data that our platform will sew together to enable enduring, data-led improvements in nursing and healthcare broadly.

We’re excited to be capturing some of the most zoomed-in, granular, and actionable views of clinical and nursing operations ever seen.

The Road Ahead

The Seam team is working hard every day to make a larger and larger dent in these operational challenges, and I’m looking forward to sharing more about our platform and progress as we continue through our journey.