Nicolette is a digital health pioneer focused on patient education and data tools. Their first product, NicoBoard, transforms a patient’s raw health data from their electronic health record (EHR) into easy-to-use tools such as tailored education content, conversational insights, interactive visuals, and action prompts. NicoBoard’s first implementation has been in the NICU setting, helping educate and empower over 2,000 NICU families during their baby’s hospital stay.

We sat down with Phil Martie, co-founder and CEO at Nicolette, for an inspiring and thoughtful conversation on his vision for the company, its current impact and future, and the important problems Nicolette is addressing for both patients and providers.

Can you provide an overview of Nicolette and what inspired the development of your flagship product, NicoBoard?

Nicolette’s mission is to rapidly empower patients and their families to become competent peers with their medical care providers. With our technology in their hands, patients go from being helpless outsiders to competent members of their own care team on day one.

Our first product, NicoBoard, is made for NICU parents. It was inspired by my own experience having premature twins. They were extremely premature, born three and a half months early. My wife and I felt lost, powerless, and scared. We were at our most disenfranchised in the earliest days, which is also when we were tasked to make the most critical health decisions on their behalf.

As I looked around the NICU, I was thankful that so much investment had been made in the medical devices used to enable neonatal care. At the same time, my wife and I struggled because there was a total absence of investment in technology to help us navigate the NICU journey. Because of this absence, we made decisions we would do differently now, we missed opportunities to be hands-on in their care, and we signed all sorts of consent forms we didn’t understand.

Once my co-founders and I did the research, we found that this situation is the norm in the NICU as well as all other situations across the healthcare landscape. With that, we had our mission and built our first product.

What problem does NicoBoard aim to address in healthcare?

Patients do not have nearly as much impact on their own health outcomes as they should. This is the most addressable opportunity in healthcare because both health outcomes and costs are heavily impacted by empowering the patient. A relatively small spend on patient-facing technology yields outsized results.

How does NicoBoard assist and empower NICU parents in managing overwhelming amounts of medical information?

There are three pillars to the NicoBoard app:

• Data Transformation: The baby’s medical data in the electronic health record (EHR) is of little use to parents. NicoBoard mines that data and transforms it into easy-to-understand updates, insights, and interactive visuals.
• Curated Education: Parents receive evidence-based, up-to-date education specific to their baby and is fully automated based on their medical data.
• Participation Tools: Parents are provided step-by-step guides on how to provide hands-on care to their baby in the NICU. They also get to use a social tool called Diary, which lets them take photos, shoot video, and write journal entries. They can share their diary with family & friends, adding joy back to the process of being a parent even though they’re in the hospital.

In what ways does NicoBoard enhance the partnership between parents and the medical team?

NicoBoard transforms parents from disenfranchised outsiders into competent members of the baby’s care team. This is purest form of partnership because the NICU provider is gaining new teammates who are focused solely on that baby.

This partnership achieves several things good for the baby’s health, the parent’s experience, and the economics of providing care.

NicoBoard has an undeniable benefit for families during this stressful time. What is the value proposition for hospitals? Return on their investment?

By empowering parents to become competent caregivers in the NICU, NicoBoard produces several economic returns for both hospitals and payers.

• Reduced Length of Stay
• Reduced Readmission
• Reduced First Year of Life Costs
• Increased Clinical Productivity
• Increased Parent Satisfaction
• Increased Patient Retention
• The annual return on investment for these factors is over 10x.

Where is NicoBoard currently being implemented and are there plans to expand beyond the NICU setting?

The flagship implementation of NicoBoard is a CHOC Children’s Hospital in Orange, CA. CHOC has published the first study on NicoBoard’s impact, and the results are even stronger than we anticipated. We are now implementing NicoBoard in additional NICUs and expect to sign several contracts before the end of the year.

The ultimate goal is for Nicolette technology to be on every person’s phone on the planet, empowering them to be successful in their care journey, whether an acute or chronic battle. To that end, we have a our first co-development agreement verbally agreed to with a pediatric health system, which will allow us to build for new departments alongside clinicians and patients. We will add more of these partnerships in both pediatrics and adult medicine until every area of care is covered.