JHU student startup aims to address overlooked health factors

Doctors can better treat their patients if they know more about them—not just their family medical history or whether they smoke, but how much stress they are under, or whether they have enough money to pay their energy bills.

Collecting this type of information—about factors that play a role in everyday health but might not come up during a routine visit—via short, electronic questionnaire and providing it to doctors is the aim of Healthify, a startup recently launched by two Johns Hopkins University graduates and two JHU students. The company hopes to give clinics that serve low-income populations a way to gather and use information about social and environmental health determinants.

Healthify, selected to be part of a showcase of innovative startups at the TEDMED conference in Washington last week, was recently profiled by The Baltimore Sun.

From The Sun:

Healthify proposes that giving health care providers a richer picture of a patient's health risks and connecting the patient with the resources to address those gaps could help — particularly when the number of low-income Americans with access to health care jumps in 2014, under federal health reform.

"What we're doing holistically is to take clinics that cater to low-income Medicaid patients and make them more efficient and effective when dealing with these populations," said Eric Connor, Healthify's chief operating officer.