Innovator Health of Little Rock is struggling to meet increasing demand from health care providers for its telemedicine technology, now considered a “must-have” to expand capacity and reach patients after the pandemic.
“We’ve done everything we can to increase our inventory, but, even with that, we’re still having trouble meeting demand because there’s so much interest in what we’re doing and growth,” founder and CEO Dr. Darren Sommer told Arkansas Business.
Innovator Health’s equipment broadcasts to a patient’s bedside the physician’s virtual presence. The physician appears as a life-sized, three-dimensional video image. It requires very little bandwidth, he said.
“So the patient feels as if you’re in the room with them, and you’re talking to them as if you’re physically present,” Sommer said.
Telemedicine has been a lifeline for health care providers and patients amid the pandemic, and many states, including Arkansas, changed laws to allow its wider use. That’s opened new opportunities for companies like Innovator Health and made telemedicine more common.
“Pre-pandemic, the utilization of telemedicine was maybe about 1% of the total visits done in the United States, and we did well over a billion visits last year, as a nation … And now we’re — in 2020, 2021 — it’s closer to about 15% to 20%. So, that’s a big change,” he said.
“I would say, pre-pandemic, telemedicine was maybe like a nice-to-have. It had a little niche here and there, and a lot of health systems were dabbling in it.
“Today, I think most health systems look at telemedicine as a must-have. And most are trying to figure out how best to leverage it. They’re still learning. It’s still very much a learning process, but it’s much, much better than it ever was in the past.”
Last year, Innovator Health began offering physician services, helping hospitals increase capacity and revenue by contracting with outside physicians to see patients via telemedicine. Sommer said that a hospital using its own physicians to provide telemedicine would move capacity and revenue around instead of growing either.
“And so that’s what we do, we bring in specialty services, to health systems, based on what their needs are. And so we’re doing that in hospitals as far away as Guam,” he said. “… Now, post-pandemic, we’re providing the services to help hospitals and health systems really remain viable. The telemedicine platform has become an indispensable tool for the health systems to improve local health care capacity and quality of care for their patient population.”
‘Natural Interaction’
Sommer founded Innovator Health in Ohio in 2015 after a 15-month Army deployment to Afghanistan, a three-year stint as a physician in rural North Carolina and time at defunct telemedicine startup Optimized Care Network.
Sommer said that when he was deployed, he had limited access to certain in-person health care treatments. But he was able to access a community of physicians via telemedicine. In North Carolina, he had limited access to specialists but “didn’t have that infrastructure, people to connect with.”
“And so I really saw the value of what a telemedicine network could mean for a small rural and underserved community,” he said.
Sommer saw that the marketplace was lacking “the ability for a physician to have a really natural interaction with a patient” and decided to fill the gap.
Innovator Health moved to Jonesboro in 2018, then to its current headquarters in Little Rock in 2019. Sommer said he was recruited by Innovate Arkansas, a state-sponsored program to scale technology companies, and attracted to the state’s “good telemedicine laws,” strong markets, business incentives and supportive business climate.
The company has three full-time employees and several part-time employees, and 2021 has been its “best year ever,” he said.
Amid intense demand and supply chain delays, the company is continuing to add to its client list, including St. Bernards Medical Center in Jonesboro, hospitals in Piggott (Clay County), Wynne (Cross County) and Walnut Ridge (Lawrence County), and others in Ohio and Guam.
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