Probari Receives New NINR Small Business Grant

30 Sep Probari Receives New NINR Small Business Grant

Kathleen Unroe, MD, MHA, MS; Joshua Vest, PhD, MPH; and Probari, Inc. Systems have received a phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research.

More than 28 million patients are discharged to nursing homes each year and adverse events soon after admission are common. Miscommunications at the time of transfer contribute to reduced quality of care and adverse events such as re-hospitalization. The overall goal of this SBIR is to develop a nursing home facing software application to provide key information such as non-transfer related patient orders to nursing home providers at the time of admission. By ensuring that this information makes its hands to facility teams, nursing homes can avoid potential complications of transfers.

The aims of the project are to establish the information and design requirements for a transfer application in a nursing home setting, implement end-user design requirements, build the prototype, and establish the usability of the prototype. This prototype will help further Probari’s mission of empowering nursing home facilities to treat patients in the comfort of their facilities.

SBIRs are grants from the National Institutes of Health designed for small businesses, who can work in partnership with research institutions on projects. After a successful Phase 1 SBIR, the company can lead an application for a larger, Phase 2 award. In this case, after demonstrating overall feasibility and usability among nursing home end users for a software prototype, a Phase 2 award could focus on deploying a minimally viable product into clinical workflow and evaluate impact. 

Probari, founded in 2018 by Kathleen Unroe and Russ Evans, is an Indiana-based small business dedicated to improving the quality of nursing home care through supportive clinical solutions. The work of the OPTIMISTIC clinical demonstration project, led by Drs. Greg Sachs and Kathleen Unroe, spurred the founding and mission of Probari. Currently, the Probari RN team (which includes many OPTIMISTIC alumnae as well as other experienced nursing home nurses) is working with several Indiana facilities to provide virtual clinical quality reviews of admissions and infections.