Cohealo’s Collaborative Consumption of Ideas
Upon first impression, Cohealo’s office in the heart of downtown Boston has all the trappings of a modern startup. Exposed brick and ample archways form the backdrop for the rows of desks (some standing, naturally) topped with shiny monitors and sparkling MacBook Pros. Employees sip from glass mason jars and take breaks to chat over games of hacky sack. There is no paper in sight, save for post-it notes stuck to the wall that detail projects on deck, in progress, and completed. And — okay — the occasional sixpack (or two) can be found in the fridge.
It may come as a surprise, then, that Cohealo’s core business strategy focuses squarely upon the often old-fashioned healthcare industry. Cohealo is an eminently modern company — it was named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies List in 2015 — offering technology-based solutions in an industry where antiquated systems can often result in inefficiencies and increased costs. The company is a pioneer in leveraging the collaborative consumption trend, often applied in B2C industries, with complex healthcare systems.
It’s been hailed as the “Uber for medical equipment,” and in many ways, the comparison is apt: Cohealo’s system facilitates equipment-sharing, offering an easy-to-use cloud-based platform to enhance the user experience and promote cost savings. And like Uber, Cohealo has the potential to dramatically change an established, expansive industry. American healthcare systems spend more than $100B annually on medical assets, which they then often under-utilize. Expensive equipment becomes outdated, so hospitals spend more money on replacement and rental. In this unwieldy system, everyone loses: hospitals that hemorrhage money on procedures and expensive equipment while patients are frustrated by inefficiencies and large medical bills.
That’s where Cohealo comes in, leveraging technology to provide the most efficient, simplest, and smartest platform to support clinicians in providing top-of-the-line patient care.
How do the employees of Cohealo produce this smart platform? Through intense focus, close collaboration, and a constant emphasis on improvement. Workdays begins with a “morning standup,” in which each team member shares the progress s/he made the prior day. Everyone, from data analyst to CTO, walks the team through his plans for the day ahead and is accountable to the team for the work s/he has done.
“Cohealo is bringing collaborative consumption to healthcare,” says CEO Brett Reed. “But we are not stopping there — we are applying algorithms and machine learning concepts to enable data-driven collaboration. We believe that in order to do so, we need to live and breathe that internally. From the tools and technology we use to the way we communicate, we are fostering a culture that models that efficiency.”
By constantly sharing small victories and discussing difficulties, Cohealo creates an internal sharing economy of its own, pooling employees’ brainpower to tackle challenges that arise. Its close-knit culture extends past the morning meeting: team members often break for lunch together, chatting and playing cribbage around a communal table. A visitor to the office gets the sense that employees are united in being “all in” on Cohealo’s vision of creating access to the best equipment for hospital systems and patients, and, moreover, that they genuinely care about improving an outdated healthcare industry. They embody the very best of collaborative consumption, sharing resources and ideas to create the best possible technology for their customers.
Cohealo, the “Uber for medical equipment,” may not be a company with which every Twitter user, Instagrammer, or Uber rider will interact every day. But its focused diligence and collaboration is quietly transforming the healthcare industry one health system at a time. Over a game of hacky sack or a shared lunch, we’re excited to see what they’ll do next.
