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Healthcare ed tech group sees steady growth

Shadow Health, which has plans to launch its sixth interactive nursing teaching product next year, keeps adding staffers and outgrowing its offices.

Daniel Smithson Staff writer
Jesse Arnold, a programer and product owner of Shadow Health, a company that makes an interactive nursing learning software, is shown at the company's headquarters in downtown Gainesville on Nov. 3.  [Brad McClenny/Staff photographer]

Tucked away in a second-floor downtown Gainesville office space on Southeast 2nd Avenue, a fast-growing software developer continues to stretch its cocoon.

Shadow Health, which produces healthcare education technology, has plans to launch its sixth interactive nursing teaching product next year, said Rob Kade, chief marketing officer for Shadow Health.

Kade said the new product aims to help nurse-practitioner-level students practice advanced pharmacology through interactions with virtual patients, with the goal of improving clinical reasoning and diagnostic skills. It also will teach them to prescribe patients the most appropriate medications.

Nursing students enrolled in the more-than-1,500 programs in North America that have adopted Shadow Health’s educational technology products log in to a module where they are given general information about their virtual patient. After entering the module, they see one of Shadow Health’s 20 avatar patients sitting in an examination room. The nursing students are required to greet the patient by typing an appropriate greeting into a chat box.

The technology allows the avatar to formulate a unique response and tell the student — their nurse — what their health issues are.

From there, the students can decide whether to empathize with the patient, provide more information to the patient about their particular health issue or choose to ask more questions.

The avatars have the ability to respond to more than 300,000 questions with 3,500 to 4,000 unique responses.

Just five years ago, its first avatar, named “Tina Jones,” could respond to just under 20,000 questions.

Shadow Health’s embedded technology deducts points from students end-of-module score if they choose a less-appropriate response, Kade said.

“When the students learn information like a patient's father died within the last year, do they decide to empathize or do they move on to their next question like a sociopath?” he said. “We’re able to not only flag those moments but we also provide real-time feedback afterwards to say ‘Hey, here was an opportunity to be empathetic with this person ... and you either caught it and were empathetic or you ran right over them.’”

To help launch its newest product, the company plans to add 25 new positions next year, with most of those for engineers and structural designers.

When Shadow Health moved into its first corporate office at the Innovation Hub at the University of Florida in 2012, it had three employees, its founders David Massias, Ben Lok and Aaron Kotranza.

Adding 25 additional employees will put the count at around 100 in 2018.

Kade said Shadow Health was founded after The University of Florida Office of Technology Licensing introduced Massias to a project in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering lab of Lok, who is a professor at UF’s College of Engineering.

The project trained medical students how to conduct examinations using a computerized, animated virtual patient. Massias’ idea was to take the technology from the lab, where it required large screens and head-mounted goggles, and move it to the laptop for wider use. He licensed the technology from UF to form Shadow Health and hired Kotranza, who was Lok’s graduate assistant.

In less than a year, Shadow Health outgrew the UF Innovation Hub and moved into the former home of downtown’s Rice Hardware, at 15 SW 1st Ave., which also once housed American Apparel.

After more company growth, it moved into its current space at Union Street Station downtown, Kade said.

“We outgrew (the former office),” he said. “And now we’re about to outgrow this place.”

Jesse Arnold, a programmer and product owner at Shadow Health, said the software development team meets with professionals within the healthcare industry to help inspire new products.

“These products are designed to emulate abnormalities that couldn’t be simulated in a typical lab setting,” he said. “Like, an irregular heartbeat. We can simulate that very easily in a virtual environment. And when (nursing students) talk to these virtual patients, they're a lot calmer and it puts them in the right mindset to think clearly and learn.”

Arnold said everything from the virtual patients to stethoscopes are designed individually by software developers.

After they develop one item, they don't have to do so again, which speeds up new-product development.

Kade said he believes the company hiring more team members will help it quickly reach its goal of taking over the virtual education market.

“We’re not only teaching nurses to be better providers,” Kade said, “but we’re also teaching them where humanity is.”