Company Profile:
Noora Health
Noora Health trains patients and their families with high-impact health skills to improve outcomes and save lives. By reimagining the way patients and families are engaged within the healthcare environment, they take a highly compassionate, untapped resource – the family member – and train them to be active members of the recovery team. Through interactive, skill-based learning, Noora makes sure that patient families really have everything they need to succeed after a major diagnosis, surgery or childbirth - replacing anxiety with competency and easing the transition from the hospital to the home. To date, Noora Health has trained over 16,000 families in India and is seeing improved outcomes through a significant reduction in hospital readmission rates, reduction in post-surgical complications and sustained behavior change.
Q: What's the most inventive, innovative, or disruptive aspect of your initiative?
A: The health system is failing globally, as a select few are able to access and afford the modern status quo of healthcare. We believe that the largest untapped potential in healthcare lies with patients and family themselves. Currently, patients and their families are given home-care instructions in a rushed discharge synopsis, often not in their native language. Most in-hospital education programs are focused on the patient and very few exist in the developing world because they are seen as expensive, time consuming and do not address the perceived more “acute” or pressing bedside issues. Our approach places emphasis on leveraging family caregivers as part of the care provider team and integrating them into the formal healthcare system. We take complicated and disjointed medical information and repackage it in such a way that it is interesting, engaging and the lessons stick. Part of our innovation’s beauty lies in its simplicity - it begs the question, why isn't this the status quo?
Q: What historical breakthrough do you think is most underappreciated or misunderstood?
A: Hand soap! At the end of the day, even with medical and pharmaceutical advances, it is washing hands that keeps even our critically ill patients from experiencing devastating complications. Never mind diarrheal disease and the impact on under five mortality!
Q: I am #BreakingThrough...
A: I am #breakingthrough traditional healthcare delivery hierarchies to get health skills training into the hands of the frontline users that need them the most.
Q: What single word or phrase best describes the culture of your startup and why?
A: Compassion. Our users are compassionate family members that are caring for an ailing loved one. We design tools for these users by getting to know them and using empathetic design principles to place the tools in their hands, that will help them the most.
Q: Please tell us how your business idea was conceived. Was there an "aha" moment or did it evolve gradually?
A: The idea behind Noora Health evolved gradually with our users. The Noora Health founding team was trained at the Stanford d.school and created the intervention using the principles of human centered design. As a result, the solution grew, over time, by and for Noora Health’s primary user group - disenfranchised patient families. It was in response to our user’s needs that we realized the power of turning hospital hallways and waiting rooms into classrooms.
Q: What advancement has made the work you're doing possible?
A: The focus on and respect for human centered design. It has emerged as an innovative methodology for problem solving and it helped us find our mission and execute each step along our path. Design thinking is core to everything we do.
Q: If you had a theme song, what would it be and why?
A: Noora's theme song would absolutely be Mr. Rogers "Won't you be my Neighbor." We are helping people that effectively never really ask for help and trying to make something as scary and technical as a hospital feel more like a compassionate neighborhood full of kind, empowered superhero helpers. I think we could all agree that the world could inherently use a little more of the Mr. Rogers "would you be my neighbor" spirit.