As a pediatric emergency room doctor at Children’s National Medical Center in Northwest D.C., David Mathison sees firsthand the gap in health education with patients and it’s a problem he wants to solve. So Dr. Mathison, along with fellow physicians Christina Johns and Moh Saidinejad, came up with the idea for HealthEWorks, a video service that customizes and improves health education for patients who are in urgent-care and emergency situations, and one that will help them better understand their illnesses.
HealthEWorks is not just a great idea, it’s an award-winning one. Dr. Mathison and his team recently won the $20,000 first-place prize at the GW Business Plan Competition. Held earlier this month, the competition was part of the GW Summit on Entrepreneurship and was sponsored by GW’s School of Business and its Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence.
“I am elated that we won. The competition was so diverse, we felt like a bunch of nerdy doctors,” says Dr. Mathison “I have been studying entrepreneurship for two years so I was excited to apply the concepts I learned into a feasible project.”
He explains that when patients are discharged from emergency care, they are given papers that outline their medical condition, treatment and follow-up care. These papers are often ignored, lost or thrown away. In addition, he says, patients who speak a first language other than English may not be able to understand the instructions. “I know that there is a better way to communicate health education in the emergency department,” he says.
Dr. Mathison says HealthEWorks will provide customized health education videos e-mailed to patients directly after their discharge. “The videos will improve patient care by allowing patients the opportunity to better understand their illnesses, how to care for them at home, and the signs to return to an emergency department or a health care provider urgently,” he says. “We live in an increasingly digital and visual era, and I’m hoping to reinvent the way we educate patients about their conditions.”
Dr. Mathison says he and his team are moving at “light speed” to get HealthEWorks up and running. Their next steps include partnering with companies in the health information technology sector and receiving additional funding “to build our company into something that could really change emergency education for patients and patient families.”
As for balancing a medical career with MBA classes, Dr. Mathison admits it’s not easy and says he often will go straight to the emergency room after class. “But I save time because I’m the only one at the grocery store and the dry cleaner at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning,” he says, “and it allows me to be around during the day to have meetings and build projects like HealthEWorks!”
The GW Business Plan Competition, funded by donors Richard and Annette Scott, awards $30,000 in cash prizes to GW teams presenting great ideas for a new product or service to a panel of distinguished entrepreneurs affiliated with the University. The Scotts’ daughter, Allison Scott Guimard, graduated from GW’s Business School in 2005.
“The GW Business Plan Competition is an amazing opportunity for GW students across campus to turn their entrepreneurial dreams into a reality,” says local entrepreneur John Rollins, who founded AZTECH Software Corporation and served for 30 years as its CEO and chairman and subsequently founded StreamCenter. “The quality of products and services presented by this year’s contestants was outstanding,” says Mr. Rollins, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at the GW School of Business.
The competition finalists survived three rounds of competition over a two-month period, and were selected from an original pool of more than 100 entries. During the final round on April 16, each team presented business plans to a panel of entrepreneurs and business leaders in a real-world presentation format modeled after venture capital presentations.
In addition to the $20,000 awarded to Dr. Mathison’s team $10,000 was divided among the three teams of runners-up to help launch their start-up businesses.