Alumnus Darin Patmon Launches Start-up to Streamline Care After Patients Leave the Hospital
April 29, 2025
While helping manage a medical practice that cares for geriatric patients after they’ve left the hospital, Darin Patmon saw gaps in information sharing. “Often we wouldn’t know for weeks after the fact when patients were re-admitted to the hospital. In one case, we learned that a client was discharged to a different nursing home, and they had to call around to figure out where she was sent,” he said.
Patmon, two-time Spartan alum (MD ‘23 and MBA ‘23), knew that timely follow-up would lead to better patient outcomes and medication adherence, as well as help the practice generate revenue.
Optimizing Transitional Care Management for better patient outcomes
“Medicare has done a lot of research, and they found that the most vulnerable time for a patient after a hospitalization is within 30 days of discharge from an inpatient setting,” Patmon explained. “That’s when patients are at the highest risk for complications.”
To reduce complications and readmissions, Medicare developed Transitional Care Management services that require medical providers to perform three tasks within a certain period. The first is to contact the patient (or their loved one or power of attorney) within two days of hospital discharge. Tasks two and three, a medication reconciliation and a face-to-face visit, need to be done within 7-14 days.
“Medicare knows that doing these tasks mitigates a bunch of complications and readmissions back into the hospital, so it incentivizes medical practices to provide TCM. Even though this protocol started over a decade ago only 20% of patients who are eligible for this service actually receive it,” said Patmon.
Patmon’s aha moment came when he realized an app could close the gaps in information sharing between providers, help more patients get complete TCM and ensure proper billing. He and his brother, Derric Patmon, talked through the idea and together they co-founded Elite Care Technology.
The power of the app
For medical practitioners, Elite Care Technologies is powerful technology for ensuring that TCM is completed any time a patient leaves the hospital and goes anywhere but home. It also saves a tremendous amount of time by automating medication reconciliation.
“One client currently utilizing our platform has a nurse practitioner who performs medication reconciliations for about 400 patients. Before using the app, she’d manually retrieve records from the hospital — up to 150 pages for one patient. She’d have to find the medications, manually enter them into her system, and then check what medications are new and which ones were continued. Depending on the size of the medication list, it could take her anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more. With Elite Care Technologies, the time for a medication reconciliation decreases to about five minutes.”
Patients and their loved ones can also use the app. “If a patient decided to give access to their children or to their spouse (or whoever they choose), they could also get alerts in real time. For example, they might get a message that says, ‘Hey, Grandma was sent to the hospital. She fell down and broke her hip. She's currently at Corewell Butterworth Hospital.’ And then they know to go check on Grandma.”
Building a team for success
As they developed the app, Patmon realized that he and his brother needed to bring in folks with expertise they didn’t have.
“We a recruited my old roommate from medical school, David Reid, [a dual-degree medical student at the MSU College of Human Medicine] to be our Chief Operating Officer,” Patmon said. “He's currently a senior and is taking a gap year to run the company full time.
“I also reached out on LinkedIn and asked, ‘Does anyone know of anyone who might be interested in helping us run a startup from a technical standpoint?’ That's how I got connected with Diego Calvo. He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan and he joined our team as Chief Technology Officer.”
In addition to gaining needed expertise, having a cross-functional team in place gives Patmon the ability to focus on his full-time residency in plastic surgery at Corewell Health in Grand Rapids, as well as his family which includes his wife, Cheyenne Jaggers — another two-time Spartan alum (BS ‘20 and MS ’23) — and two children, ages 1½ and 4.
Growing with Conquer Accelerator
The start-up team of four — Darin, Derric, David and Diego — honed the app and began seeking seed money from investors. However, they had one weakness. “No one on our team has significant experience in sales, marketing, and go-to-market strategy,” Patmon said.
Darin and David viewed the project from a physician’s perspective. Derric’s education is in pharmacy and business. And Diego handled the technical side. To fill their gap in sales and marketing know-how, the team applied to and was accepted to the Michigan State University Research Foundation’s Conquer Accelerator Program for start-up companies.
“Conquer Accelerator really helped us,” Patmon said. “They challenged us on what our ideal customer looked like. Before doing the 10-week program we thought we had this solution, and we knew exactly who our end customer was going to be. But we just kind of kept banging our head against the wall and weren’t getting great feedback.
The accelerator program paired the Elite Care Technologies team with executives from the Innovation Department at Henry Ford Health. By talking through challenges with seasoned health care professionals, the team pinpointed how to provide the most value — not only to patients — but also health care systems to ensure that patients get very close follow up after their hospitalizations.
“The program helped us find out who was going to be our internal champion. Who's going to be the end user? Who's going to be the decision maker? Who's going to be the person who probably blocks? Identifying these key parties helped us fine tune our sales strategy, something none of us had experience with before.”
Crucially, the Conquer Accelerator helped Patmon and the team get past a hurdle that could have kept the business from getting off the ground.
“We were having a very hard time getting other physicians to buy in,” Patmon explained. “What we realized is that the physicians are probably not going be the actual end user. It's going to be the care manager who’s coordinating the care. For a smaller practice, it's the office manager, an LPN or nurse practitioner. Once we realized who our end user is, we started getting a lot more positive feedback. People were saying, ‘Yes, this is exactly what we've been looking for within our organization!’”
While working the Conquer Accelerator program, Patmon and his team raised half of the $400,000 they need in pre-seed funding so they can go to market. He anticipates they’ll attain full funding by May. Their next step? “We're looking to find MVP beta testers to give us feedback as to how we can further improve,” he said.
By Maureen Perideaux