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His entrepreneurial senses started tingling: This is an area of health care primed for transformation, he thought. He knew just who to talk to: Evan Jackson, a Brown senior concentrating in economics and religious studies, who was equally passionate about entrepreneurship.

Felton knew Jackson from the Brown football team. Theyd already collaborated on another venture: an idea to convert algae into biofuel that they entered in a Hult Prize competition at Brown in 2018. Felton and Jackson were excited to collaborate on a project that involved data and health care something that could potentially help people who needed it.

They connected with Samuel Prado (One of the smartest people I knew at Brown, Jackson said), who was studying public health and economics and who had a connection to the geriatric space, as well: His parents worked as clinicians at an AIDS clinic with a community family health center, and Prado used to volunteer in a nursing home.

The trio workshopped Intus Care during Summer 2019 as part of the Breakthrough Lab accelerator program run by the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship. When classes resumed, they met Alexander Rothberg, who was concentrating in computer science, who joined them to lead the technology side of the business and create the first digital product.

It was all starting to come together, Jackson said. We had the health care piece, the business piece and now the tech piece.

One puzzle piece was left, and it was shaped like a dollar sign.

In Fall 2019, the team earned a place as a finalist in the MassChallenge startup accelerator program and received $50,000 in seed money. It was a pivotal investment, Jackson said.

Intus Care presents health care data to providers in a clear, usable and actionable format.

They also teamed up with Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician, Brown professor academic leader and digital health expert, on an independent study. Over the course of a year, Ranney provided feedback on the research aspects of their work, linked them with local and national experts and provided a physicians view on other services in the same space. While there are companies working to make accessible the overwhelming amount of information from sources as disparate as electronic health records, medical imaging, genomic sequencing, pharmaceutical research, medical devices and more, Ranney talked to the students about how its rarely presented to clinicians in a useful form.

With additional long-distance advising from engineering and entrepreneurship professors Barrett Hazeltine and Thano Chaltas, Felton, Jackson and Prado moved temporarily to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to shadow Sonja Felton at Huron Valley PACE, looking for a firsthand view as part of their independent study. They put in long work weeks at the geriatric care facilities, getting to know everyone from patients to providers to administrators.

We realized we needed to go learn what geriatric care providers need as well as how we could help them, Jackson said.

A good way to think about a PACE program, Jackson said, is as a daytime care center for older adults patients are able to live in their own homes and are transported daily to the center, where care providers coordinate all of the services required, from medical to social.

Whats special about PACE is that the providers can make use of any tool in their arsenal to improve care outcomes for older adults, Jackson said.

Leveraging data becomes so important, he said. If the caregiver notices a red flag, they have the tools and the ability to do something like make an appointment, address an issue that could reverse the trend and keep the patient out of the hospital.

Through conversations with Ranney, the students thought about ways to bring their ideas to life digitally. They collaborated closely with Rothberg, who remained in Providence and took Brown courses that would turn out to be highly influential in the final design of the product including data science, taught by Ellie Pavlick, and machine learning, taught by Stephen Bach, both assistant professors of computer science. Daniel Ritchies classes on deep learning, and advice and guidance from Stefanie Tellex, an assistant professor of computer science, proved equally impactful.

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Student entrepreneurs at Intus Care harness power of data to improve health care for the elderly - Brown University