After listening to all the issues and ideas brought forth by a diverse team of stakeholders in the ideation sessions, the team came back together again to refine all the input into nineteen opportunity areas and were then scored on three criteria: an urgent, unmet need, the ability to solve the problem and the size of the potential. Based on the final scores of all opportunities, two important themes emerged.
- The first theme focuses on changing the way OUD patients are treated. When a person seeks medical attention for a heart attack or stroke, providers understand the time-sensitivity of the condition and the patient is immediately triaged by clinicians who follow prescribed treatment protocols. When an individual with OUD seeks treatment, the patient’s condition should be treated with the same time-sensitive response from medical providers. Unfortunately, the stigma of OUD, lack of provider education, inconsistent diagnosis and care protocols are all barriers that prevent the same seamless entry into treatment. However, if treatment options are easily accessible and proven medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) like buprenorphine become more widely available, it is more likely that the OUD patient enters care and starts down the path of recovery. Data from MAHEC shows that 68% of these patients stay in recovery long term once they enter care. The team is now looking at eight areas of start-up opportunities based on the theme.
- The second theme is centered on empowering patients to continue care and pursue recovery. Like the obstacles experienced in entering treatment, OUD patients must also deal with barriers like lack of resources and access to prescriptions once they have established treatment. Due to major gaps in the care continuum, a patient’s treatment journey is one of handoffs between providers and resources. In an October Pew Charitable Trust brief on OUD, a study of at-risk OUD individuals showed only 33% of those patients who initiated treatment made it to recovery. As such, there is a lot of room to intervene and enable continued care. The team identified eleven opportunities for a potential start-up business.
Now, the work of honing the opportunity concepts, market and competition due diligence and economic feasibility begins in earnest. Dieterle and team will have identified the strongest venture concepts by February 7, which begins the High Alpha Innovation Sprint Week. Sprint Week is a three-and-a-half-day, all-hands-on-deck experience during which a team of entrepreneurial experts will team up with the Asheville coalition of partners to transform the most attractive and feasible venture concepts that came out of this structured ideation process into digital health startups that are well positioned for the market. Each concept will produce a professional pitch deck and then present to the First in Venture Studio Investment Committee (FVSIC). The FVSIC will then determine if they want to invest and launch any of the concepts as startups.
As the opioid crisis is impacting the state in so many ways, Dieterle and his colleague, Roy Zwahlen, chief strategy officer at Eshelman Innovation, recognized the opportunity to identify other channels for ideas that may not be venture backable concepts. “Eshelman [Innovation] is about patient impact,” observed Zwahlen. “As not all solutions discovered will be fast-growing startups, our strategy incorporates launching synergistic social enterprises to ensure we have as much impact as possible.” Zwahlen has partnered with Melissa Carrier, director of the Office of Social Innovation at Innovate Carolina, to build and scale community programs, public-private partnerships, non-profits, or social enterprises/B corps built from UNC-Chapel Hill and MAHEC expertise.
