How Breathment closes the care gap after hospital discharge

After discharge from hospital, patients with respiratory diseases often have difficulties receiving adequate rehabilitation treatment. The startup Breathment offers a solution in the form of a digital therapy app based on AI-based technology and telemonitoring. In the following interview, CEO and Co-Founder Elçin Can Çavuşoğlu explains what motivates the startup, how Breathment's solution works and what benefits it offers.

How would you explain your solution in three sentences to a professional colleague from the health sector? 

Breathment is digitizing pulmonary rehabilitation to close the care gap after hospital discharge for patients suffering from respiratory diseases, saving significant costs for the healthcare institutions. Our solution combines an AI-based therapy app with telemonitoring; offering an AI-based breathing pattern and motion detection technology for patients to ensure correct exercise performance, as well as personalized and data-based treatment optimizations for the health professionals.

What problem motivated you to start the company?

Patients suffering from respiratory diseases are prescribed pulmonary rehabilitation treatment after hospital discharge, which they can’t access for up to 3 months because of capacity issues. Long waiting periods for rehabilitation after hospital discharge lead to 20% rate of rehospitalization within the first month and 61% within one year. Rehospitalization of COPD patients alone because of this care gap costs more than 720 million euros per year for the German healthcare system.
We, as Breathment Team, gathered around a mutual purpose which is not only to transform our experience into a helping hand for people in need, but also to create a sustainable solution for upcoming generations. 

How do you convince a pharmaceutical company, a health insurance company or another potential client to set up a pilot project with you? 

Instead of offering a one-fits-all solution, Breathment enables an adaptive treatment and continuous communication between the health professionals and patients by combining different functionalities such as patient onboarding & management, individual exercise programming, and data-driven performance and well-being tracking.

One of the biggest advantages of Breathment is its AI-based motion and breathing detection technology, enabling effective movement and breathing exercise training without the presence of a health professional or any additional hardware, but using only a mobile device with a camera.

Using artificial intelligence, Breathment guides the patients during their physical and breathing exercises while monitoring them through the camera of their electronic device and providing feedback in real-time whether they are performing the exercise correctly or not. With this approach, Breathment lowers the burden of getting professional rehabilitative training, enables a data driven performance tracking system and efficient therapy processes.

Who are your current customer (groups) and who do you want your potential customers to be?

Breathment’s target customers are the health insurance companies. Our digital pulmonary rehabilitation program to close the care gap after hospital discharge aims to reduce rehospitalization rates and save 230 million euros per year for the health insurance companies in COPD case alone.
In addition, using Breathment’s telemonitoring software, health institutions such as hospitals and rehabilitation centers can provide digital or hybrid treatments to their patients, thus increase their capacity and treatment quality. Therefore, it is also planned to address these health institutions as customers by providing Breathment to them as a SaaS.

Where do you see yourself in 3 years and how can 5-HT support you?

We will finalize the CE Certification process in May 2023, and then launch Breathment into the market initially for the self paying patients and pilot customers. After growing in the German market and expand within Europe, our goal is to penetrate into the US market in 3 years. 
5-HT has been supporting us in expanding our network, gaining valuable insights and connections to direct stakeholders throughout many events such as Insuring Digital Health and eHealth Symposium.