Spry Labs at Cintrifuse

Project: Tracking community benefits with new technology
Grantee: Spry Labs at Cintrifuse
Investment: $45,000
Year: 2017

Nonprofit health systems initiate “community benefit” activities such as charity care or services such as free mobile clinics to enhance the overall health of the regions they serve. Tracking these important community benefits across large health care systems is difficult and current technology doesn’t include the features needed for complete and efficient data collection.

With the $45,000 bi3 grant award, Spry Labs, in collaboration with TriHealth, created a benefit tracker designed for mobile applications. This solution will allow health system employees a quick, intuitive and convenient way to track time and activities related to delivering community benefit programs. The tracker also will better enable healthcare systems to more easily measure their potential scale and impact.

In January 2018, the organizations began piloting Benny – a first-of-its-kind digital health solution – at Bethesda Butler Hospital. As a result, 11 new community benefit projects were recorded for the first time, with an estimated $650,000 of net new annual community benefits reported.

In phase two of the pilot, TriHealth’s Community Benefit Operations team will test Benny. Feedback from the testing phase will be used to enhance Benny with the goal to release the platform to all of TriHealth in 2019. Spry Labs also hopes to export Benny for use by other health systems in Cincinnati and across the country.