1Mby1M Deal Radar 2016: i-Human Patients, Sunnyvale, California

i-Human Patients, Inc. is a cloud-based e-learning company that is focused on rapidly developing and evaluating critical cognitive competencies in healthcare students and practitioners. Its main value proposition is that it simulates encounters with patients in order to teach users how to quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively assess and diagnose patients.

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From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 1)

Brad knows how to sell. Read how he turned that skill in to a $20M revenue business with very little formal education.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Brad Lea: I was born in Cottage Grove, Oregon in about 1969. My journey began right there.

Sramana Mitra: Did you grow up in that community?

Brad Lea: Yes, I grew up there until I was 14 years old.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that? Where did you move to and how did the journey evolve? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to be me about the state of the union as far as virtual reality games are concerned.

David Lord: It’s an interesting time. The promise of virtual reality is infinite and yet the delivery is still three to six months in. That three to six months was a little bit more exciting than I think anybody had anticipated. Now, we’re at a time when we can start to evaluate new games in an entirely new light. To take the leadership in virtual reality for education, you have to first use virtual reality to understand its capabilities.

Secondly, you have to understand that content will drive the adoption. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on some of these trends that you are talking about. Tell us a bit about what is in the horizon versus what is already active. You talked about personalized learning. Are products already in the market that are personalized learning games?

David Lord: I would call the products that we have today similar to personalized. They don’t necessarily have the ability to adapt in mid-motion like technology allows us to today. It really comes from the learnings that we’ve made as we converted our games to the cloud. The technology jumps that have been taking place have enabled us to have different views of data. That’s really what’s driven the technology capabilities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 1)

This discussion takes us into the realm of learning games and their future.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Jumpstart.

David Lord: I’m the CEO of JumpStart. JumpStart has been the leader in learning-based games for the past 25 years. JumpStart was founded by Bill Gross before Idealab. Our key brands are JumpStart Math Blaster and School of Dragons. We have been educating children, which is our mission, for the past 20 years.

Sramana Mitra: Children of what age do you focus on?

David Lord: We try and build products and subject matter that apply to children of all ages, but our core age range is kinder preparation to K-3. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That’s a good thing because your contribution is in enhancing the quality of education, so the ones who don’t have that quality of education will gain more from your technology.

Norm Wu: Right. Just like with MOOCs, you can go out and find the best educators and the best content. We’ve had a major effort to build the world’s largest database of evidence-based medicine tying symptoms and diagnosis together. You can take all that and you can make it available not only to the other 90% of the US but to all the schools around the world in a very scalable way. You need nothing more than a web browser. There’s no software to download. There are no plugins.

We simulate everything in the cloud and then we push it out through just an HTML5 web browser. We’ve got a lot of technology behind that, which is why the NSF is funding us. When we think of our mission and vision, we are thinking about how we will take the best content and the best way of delivering learning through active simulation and making that scalable to the entire world. That’s what we’re excited about. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We know quite a bit about that segment—stuff like Concordia’s huge programs in nurse practitioner training. Do you provide the content infrastructure for them?

Norm Wu: It’s very much the same model. They can either create their own cases or they can license cases that we’ve worked with outside educators on. Our move into nurse practitioners education, which now accounts for over half of our customer base, has been more recent. Our cases, by and large, have been developed by medical school educators but they’re using them anyway.

What we’d like to do is develop a whole series of cases that are developed by nurse practitioner educators and which are more targeted towards them. As you may know, with a nursing background, you tend to think more holistically about patients. When you’re asking them questions about their medical history and symptoms, you may ask about what’s going on at home that’s causing the stress that is contributing to the illness. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me actually question a few things on the more specialized learning in the medical school process. In terms of the different specializations, how much coverage have you accomplished so far? This is a very intense body of simulation and content that you need to be able to deliver.

Norm Wu: Our company is only three years old. i-Human Patients was formed in November of 2012 but we actually absorbed the technology from a predecessor company that our founders had which made standalone clinical and physiological simulators. What we did was integrate all of these standalone simulators together into a complete interactive multimedia-intensive patient encounter. Then we overlaid on top of that an authoring system.

We don’t have nearly as many cases as we would like to have eventually, but we have way more than anybody else out there with any sort of virtual patient program. We have approximately 350 different case scenarios and about 200 different programmable avatars. We have three or four configurations of each case scenario. >>>