Goldfinch Health, a pioneer in surgical recovery and pain management, has significantly enhanced its credibility through a rigorous validation by the Validation Institute. This validation underscores the effectiveness of their innovative Nurse Navigator program and surgical pathways, confirming their impact on reducing recovery times and healthcare costs. The endorsement by the Validation Institute enables Goldfinch Health to further demonstrate its commitment to improving patient outcomes and operational efficiencies.
Key Takeaways from Goldfinch Health’s Validation and Impact
- Validation Institute’s Role: The Validation Institute rigorously assesses healthcare companies to ensure their performance claims are accurate, providing a trustworthy benchmark for companies like Goldfinch Health. This validation boosts client confidence and supports market credibility.
- Goldfinch Health’s Innovative Services: Goldfinch optimizes the surgical experience through its Nurse Navigator program, which significantly shortens recovery times and reduces corporate health expenses. These services are enhanced by personal stories that demonstrate a deep commitment to patient care.
- Tangible Products and Opioid Reduction: Goldfinch offers a ‘Prepared for Surgery Toolkit’ that includes practical items to aid recovery and a unique opioid disposal kit to prevent medication misuse. This approach directly supports opioid reduction strategies, crucial for patient safety and community health.
- Future Projects and Expansion: Goldfinch is expanding its impact by engaging in projects that aim to reduce the total cost of care and improve surgery outcomes through validated, evidence-based pathways. These initiatives are particularly focused on rural healthcare improvements and opioid prevention, showing Goldfinch’s commitment to broader healthcare challenges.
Introduction
Validation Institute:
I am joined today by Brad Newlin, the CEO and co-founder of Goldfinch Health. Hi Brad.
Brad Newlin:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Enhancing Healthcare Outcomes with Goldfinch Health’s Innovative Solutions
Validation Institute:
Great to have you here. At Validation Institute, we vet and validate the performance claims of healthcare companies, especially around savings and outcomes.
We put companies through a rigorous process of understanding what the company does, their methodology for measuring outcomes and savings, and we look at the underlying data to make sure companies like Goldfinch are doing what they tell their customers they can come to enjoy about working with amazing transparent companies like yours.
One great part about working with Goldfinch is that by optimizing the surgery experience combined with your Nurse Navigator program, you are able to get people back to work faster, saving companies money. Can you explain a little bit more about Goldfinch’s offering and what inspires your work at Goldfinch?
Brad Newlin:
Thanks for the introduction, and I’d love to talk about what inspires our work and get a little bit into the details of how we do that.
We’re inspired by personal experience and by experiences of our family around surgery and the recovery after that.
A couple of years ago, my mother went through a cancer diagnosis that led to a series of surgeries. Although she’s a 30-year RN, registered nurse, and comes from a family of nurses, I saw what it looks like when you’re the patient, an expert going into what can be a scary time in your life, and the screen went blank even though she had provided help to others at trying times in their life journey and in their healthcare journey.
She needed a navigator when she was the person in the center of that. I’ve also seen a grandfather go through surgery; unfortunately, many of us have probably had this experience where somebody in your family goes through surgery and they’re never quite the same, and that was his experience.
My co-founder, John, unfortunately lost an uncle to a hospital-borne infection after a hip replacement. He also has a family member who’s in long-term recovery from opioid addiction.
So these are the things that inspire us on a day-to-day basis. Surgery is scary, and it can be done in an amazing fashion in the year 2022 heading into 2023, but a little assistance goes a long way.
So what we do at Goldfinch Health is nurse navigation empowered by technology through what are called enhanced surgical pathways.
These are clinically validated, evidence-supported pathways that have been around for 20 years that reduce the stress on the patient through the surgery before, during, and after.
When you can do that, the results can be miraculous in terms of recovery time, return to your normal life, return to work, your dependence on heavy-duty painkillers like opioids, all of those things can be greatly improved.
The problem is, it’s just not as implemented as we wish it was, and that is really what we set out to try to change when we launched Goldfinch several years ago.
So that’s the work that we do; really, we’re in the business of helping companies save money on surgery without restricting provider choice.
The Importance of Third-Party Validation for Goldfinch Health
Validation Institute:
Well, that’s amazing, and you know from personal experience, rises great companies, and it sounds like you’ve done that there. And I kind of wanted to understand when you pursued the validation, why was that important to you?
Brad Newlin:
Well, we know that this is an area that perhaps you’ve never heard about, that you’ve never thought about the idea of a different way through pain management or a different way through surgery and never heard about enhanced recovery after surgery, these enhanced surgical pathways.
How would you, as the typical person going about your life, you’re an expert in construction, an expert in accounting, or an expert in sales but not an expert in surgery, so how would you even know that this exists? So as we’re sinking our teeth into this and going out, we sell our program to self-insured employers and labor unions and managed care and insurance companies.
They may have never heard of this or thought about it, and so having an expert third-party review, a third-party stamp of approval, so to speak, from an entity like Validation Institute that’s got a long-developed reputation in the market, that’s worth its weight in gold and that has proven to be the case since we announced our validation just a few months ago.
Expanding Impact Through Validation and Strategic Initiatives at Goldfinch Health
Validation Institute:
And you know, moving forward with validation, how does the project fit into your strategy, and do you see any other areas of validation coming from this validation and moving forward into other areas?
Brad Newlin:
Certainly. The first Validation Institute project that we did together was around save days and recovery time, which you mentioned.
So this was around how much sooner can we help someone get back to their life, back to work after a surgery. We compared the experience of a Goldfinch supported member with a national database with over 17 million claims, and what we found was almost 32 days saved per case, 32 days saved per case, so over a month faster recovery time, a 770 to 1 ROI, 7.70 cents to one ROI.
That was what was found in that first project, and so that’s dramatic, that’s compelling. The next phase for us and sort of the next areas where we’re developing, one is around total cost of care, that’s on everybody’s mind, how can you better manage total cost of care, avoid high-cost claimants in your plan, and we have a story to tell there as well.
Better surgery is lower cost; these are one of these areas in healthcare where better can also be lower cost, and so we’re working towards a project on validating a reduction in total cost of care through our support of surgery and recovery.
Another area that we’re working on, this was just announced, we’re working in a program in the state of Iowa supported by Attorney General Tom Miller in the state of Iowa to work with rural hospitals around opioid prevention.
This is funded through the opioid lawsuit settlements. We are working with hospitals serving rural communities across the state of Iowa through what we call the Billion Pill Pledge to help rural hospitals reduce opioids dispensed and used after surgery by 50 percent.
That’s another outcome of the work that we’re doing; all of these things are closely related. Fewer opioids mean faster recovery means lower cost of care, all of these things are related, but we’re working specifically, supported again by these opioid settlement dollars from the lawsuits to reduce opioids in these rural communities.
That’s going to set up very nicely as a future validation as well to show, hey, this does in the real world, not just in the clinical studies that have been widely studied but in the real world, greatly reduce the use of opioid painkillers after surgery and provide better patient experiences and better pain management at the same time.
Validation Institute:
Can I just ask, did you say a billion pills?
Brad Newlin:
Yeah, great question, so why do we call it the Billion Pill Pledge? So the Billion Pill Pledge, that’s the idea that through better implementation of these enhanced surgical pathways, more conscientious opioid prescribing practices around surgery, we can reduce by 1 billion pills in our country alone those that are left over and available for diversion or use by the patient him or herself in a way that leads towards dependence. So there’s actually three billion pills left over; our goal is to reduce that by one billion.
Advancing Opioid Safety and Surgical Care with Goldfinch Health’s Innovations
Validation Institute:
Wow, that’s amazing, and it’s amazing work you’re doing with the state of Iowa, so hopefully that translates into a lot more states. What’s next for Goldfinch Health?
Brad Newlin:
It’s really about how can we dig in on this state of Iowa program, demonstrating reduction in opioid use. One of the things that we’re doing, we’ve also expanded by a bit our program, and I’ll just show something here, so our program, nurse navigator, technology empowered, enhanced surgical pathways, but this is called the Prepared for Surgery toolkit, so we’re adding something tangible to the program.
This arrives at the patient’s house and includes a number of items that are helpful to an optimal surgery experience, some pre-surgery nutrition support.
One of the other items in that toolkit is a DoTerra opioid deactivation and disposal kit, and so what that does is if you’ve got leftover pills, so hopefully you’re getting prescribed fewer because you’ll need fewer, maybe not any at all, but even if you do need a few, that’s fine, you have some left over, and what do you do with them?
It’s kind of a pain in the backside to figure out what to do with them, you know, you don’t want them in your medicine cabinet, try to keep track of your pharmacy take-back day, or maybe your police station doesn’t take back day, but what you can do with this deactivation kit, you put the leftover pills in there, you put some water, you shake it up, it’s done, you can throw it away in your garbage.
So makes that part easier as well, that’s part of the overall strategy here. This is about first dose prevention around opioids and how do we get them out of your house as soon as possible so they’re not there causing you any problems later or anybody around you any problems later as well.
Validation Institute:
That is amazing, so there’s a lot of amazing things going on and it’s convenient for your customers and getting people back to work faster, so you’ve got a lot of great things going on there, and we’re thankful to be working with you on getting the word out about it.
So thank you very much for that, and I ask everybody that’s listening to this to go to our website, validationinstitute.com, and read this validation. Again, thank you very much, Brad, for being here today, and I hope you have a great day.
