With the wide variety of health treatments currently available, more and more people now have more options to choose from regarding their own health and well-being. However, the growing list of new treatments also means that there are of course plenty of new problems, chief among them health care illiteracy. Every day millions of Americans are unable to receive accurate health care due to minor yet dangerous oversights, like not being able to read a pill bottle, not being able to speak the same language as your healthcare provider, or difficulty understanding complex instructions.
One company, however, has made it their mission to change all of that by empowering patients, caregivers, and their healthcare providers by reducing the number of obstacles to clear communication: SpeechMED.
Founded by Susan Perry, who is also the company’s CEO, SpeechMED has made it their mission to make patient’s medical information understandable to them regardless of their age, vision, language preference, or literacy level. SpeechMED is also a Graduate of the South Florida Founder Institute.
Perry was inspired to launch the company after caregiving for her mother and mother-in-law, as well as a visit to the VA hospital. What she discovered was that patients, even after discharge from a hospital, can still have trouble comprehending basic medical instructions, especially when they are elderly and have trouble seeing properly. This experience caused Perry to look at traditional healthcare communication in a broader way, wondering how patients and their caregivers can follow instructions when they don’t even understand them.
What makes SpeechMED so powerful is its ability to cater to a large array of patients’ needs, delivering a wide range of personalized care information and discharge instructions, as well as medications, reminders, emergency contacts, appointments, explainer videos, and spoken instructions in the patient’s own language. And, in cases in which the caregiver’s language should differ from their patients, it provides all of this information in other languages, as well.
SpeechMED’s game changing technology has not gone unnoticed in the health tech and startup world. Susan Perry of was recently honored by AARP for her innovation helping older Americans in their inaugural 50+ Innovation Leaders list, and was previously profiled by the Miami Herald for her efforts in breaking reading and language barriers for elderly patients.
Watch the video below to see Susan Perry pitch her company on a previous Founder Institute Demo Day:
