CED Tech Venture profile: Tiba Health, combining behavioral health, analytics in wearables

Tiba Health, a Durham-based startup, combines behavioral medicine and analytics in a wearable device with the goal of improving patient compliance and outcomes.

Tiba is one of the presenting companies at the CED Tech Venture conference, which is set for Tuesday and Wednesday in Raleigh.

This Q&A is part of a series published by WRAL TechWire in partnership with the CED.

The Q&A:

What is the focus of your business?

Tiba Health is a behavioral medicine and analytics platform that uses a wearable to improve patient compliance and ultimately, patient outcomes in physical therapy.

Our platform combines behavioral change methods such as corrective, real-time feedback on patients’ exercises with analytics that enable providers to use data to personalize patient care—providing a two-fold approach to improving patient outcomes.

Currently, we are focusing on knee-related injuries in aging populations.

What is the top pain point/business application you are seeking to address?

Tiba Health aims to address patient outcomes and compliance in physical therapy (PT). As athletes who have been through PT many times, we knew that uncertainty and discouragement from lack of visible progress were common—leading to attrition and non-adherence. This can result in increased hospital re-admission and re-injury rates, and ultimately, a lower quality of life.

Of the 15 million PT patients each year, only 35% adhere to their exercise regimen, and only 30% use all PT visits covered by insurance—leading to an annual loss of $250,000 in potential revenue per clinic—$31 billion per year for the industry.

Though providers are attempting to use tools such as text messages and exercise videos to engage patients, these solutions haven’t shown improved clinical outcomes, and physical therapists still lack patient data for use in monitoring, encouraging, and giving feedback to patients.

What makes it unique?

Firstly, our wearable is small and portable, allowing patients to comfortably wear it in different positions on their legs to track exercise motion. As each patient is different, our data analytics will give physical therapists greater insights into patient recovery to allow care plan personalization.

Our platform will also use behavioral change methods to increase correct adherence to exercise plans and in turn, reduce patient attrition, re-injury, and hospital readmission.

Why should investors be interested in your firm?

The physical therapy and rehabilitation is a largely untapped market, valued at over $29 billion. Furthermore, there is high potential for Tiba’s platform to expand into other types of injuries and clinics—use of similar platforms in competitive athletic teams, preventative care, and other forms of movement related rehab and neuromuscular illnesses, present a multitude of future applications for our platform.

More importantly, the rise of value-based payments and bundled care creates an open path for solutions like Tiba Health that support and facilitate outcome-based reimbursement to be adopted, and succeed.

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