NextUp: Tridiuum’s Digital Health Platform Is Strengthening Patient-Provider Connections
The company wants to eradicate suicide by creating technologies that improve the bond between mental health patients and their providers.
Mark Redlus is the CEO of Tridiuum. / Courtesy
“NextUp” is a weekly NextHealth PHL feature that highlights the local leaders, organizations and research shaping the Greater Philadelphia region’s life sciences ecosystem. Email qmuse@phillymag.com with pitches for NextUp.
Who: Tridiuum was originally founded in 1997. The company, then known as Polaris Health Directions, spent its early years functioning as a research think tank. Over the next 14 years, the company’s team of behavioral medicine experts published more than 45 peer-reviewed publications and conducted nearly two dozen phase I and phase II randomized controlled clinical trials all aimed at developing technology to support behavioral health providers.
In 2017, the company officially changed its name to Tridiuum and welcomed Mark Redlus, a seasoned product development executive, as its chief executive officer. Since then, the company has developed several research-informed technologies for behavioral health treatment and assessment.
What: Tridiuum’s core product is a platform called Tridiuum One. The platform includes proprietary digital behavioral health assessments and metrics that enable providers to determine the severity of a patient’s behavioral health issue. The technology can be integrated with most electronic health records and health IT software. According to Redlus, the Tridiuum One platform supported nearly two million unique patient visits in 2019 and is currently supporting roughly 10,500 patients and more than 1,600 clinical facilities that use the TridiuumOne platform daily.
“Our product supports the interaction between the patient and the provider and, in a way, supercharges it by scoring and identifying risk areas for the patient and the provider to work on in sessions,” Redlus explained. “It also keeps score on how they’re progressing through sessions and helps providers to calibrate treatments as they’re working with that patient along the way.”
The company’s second product, Tridiuum Connect, is a digital platform aimed at reducing the time it takes for a patient and a provider to see each other.
Without Tridiuum, it takes roughly 30 days and more than 12 emails or phone calls through call centers for a patient to secure an appointment with a behavioral health provider. According to Redlus, Tridiuum Connect reduces the time for a patient to see a provider face-to-face from nearly 30 days to less than six days and allows the patient to connect with a provider with only one outreach through the platform.
“Our products improve that bond from the first interaction and that significantly enhances the success of that therapeutic intervention over time. With our product, patients are getting better twice as fast as when our product is not involved, and that’s why it’s being adopted by some very large health systems,” Redlus said.
When: In December 2018, Tridiuum secured $9.5 million in Series B financing, including investment from Sopris Capital, Fresenius Medical Care Ventures, and the region’s largest tech investor, Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania. The company used the funds to further develop its technologies and grow its marketing and engineering teams. Tridiuum now has 50 employees. By the second quarter of 2020, Tridiuum expects to release a third product that will allow patients to access the company’s services through their mobile devices with support for Android and IOS.
Why: There is one death by suicide in the U.S. every 12 minutes; Tridiuum wants to bring that number down to zero.
“It’s a narrative that we hear recurring among health system partners that we work with around the country. We’re all in support of the idea that people need to be seen when they need to be seen,” Redlus said. “So, all our products are pushing, not only toward access but also toward improving outcomes. The demand for behavioral healthcare is far outpacing the capacity right now. Our product is oriented toward optimizing that capacity and being effective at delivering better outcomes.”
What It Means: Tridiuum is one of several local companies leading the effort to develop technologies that can reduce wait times for mental health appointments, improve behavioral health and suicide risk evaluation, and improve patient outcomes.
