The winner of George Washington University’s business plan competition aims to cut the number of emergency room visits in D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods.

Dr. Freya Spielberg, a professor at GW, said she set out to demonstrate that “it’s possible to improve health outcomes for the most vulnerable populations while also lowering healthcare costs.”

Urgent Wellness was awarded more than $25,000 at this year’s New Venture Competition and took home the $15,000 first place prize.

Since the programs she’s headed have faltered in the past due to grant limitations, “it’s necessary to start a social enterprise to be able to bring together those effective interventions, scale it up, and get it to those people who most benefit,” Dr. Spielberg said.

This social enterprise is Urgent Wellness, a startup focused on improving health outcomes through preventative care. The project is focusing on D.C. where people often only go to the emergency room for their care.

“It makes sense for them. It’s easy, it’s convenient. It’s very difficult to navigate our healthcare system, for anyone,” Dr. Spielberg said.

However, emergency room care doesn’t properly care for citizens’ preventative care and chronic disease management and puts undue stress on the ER.

“That results in $17 billion of preventable healthcare costs for hospitalizations, and another $4 billion for preventable ER visits,” she said.

By creating convenient, immediate access telemedicine kiosks in places like homeless shelters and housing projects, Urgent Wellness is taking stress off of these emergency rooms, improving health while also lowering costs.

“Most importantly, when they come to the center… they’ll get signed up so that they will get preventive healthcare recommendations, chronic disease management support,” said Dr. Spielberg, all built on an IT platform integrated with the Health Information Exchange in D.C.

The physician said the transition from grant-seeker to investment-seeker was rough.

“Jumping into the business side, I knew that learning how to raise funds would be one of the challenges for me,” she said. One of the skills she’s had to develop, Dr. Spielberg told What’s Working in Washington, is persistence.

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Since entrepreneurs usually run into multiple failures before succeeding at a business, Spielberg has found the university research and study model isn’t “necessarily the best way to innovate,” she said. “You really need to constantly change,” she said.

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