As we near the final days of our crowdfunding effort, which coincides with us beginning a new fiscal year at the I-PASS Patient Safety Institute, I reflect on 2017 which was the I-PASS Institute’s first full year of our existence. I am overall very pleased with the progress that we made in 2017, and am excited for the many opportunities ahead of us in 2018.  

From a service offering and product perspective, our initial focus has been to standardize handoff communications between medical staff in an inpatient setting.  We launched the first versions of our suite of software based products in March 2017, anchored by our Virtual Immersive Learning (VIL) and Observational Measurement (OM) products, and have enhanced partnerships with selected electronic health record (EHR) integration vendors.  As we look into 2018 and beyond, we will continue to enhance and improve those initial products, but will also be working to expand our service and product offerings into the “Family & Patient” and “Ambulatory” settings, where the I-PASS Study Group (continuing to be led by our Company’s founders) continue their research and development of those programs through continued grant funding and the efforts of over 100 supporting physician and nurse researchers.  Those ongoing research efforts of the I-PASS Study Group, which continue to be grant funded, are at the heart of our future product expansion and are accessible to the Company through our trademark license of “I-PASS” from Boston Children’s Hospital.

Shortly after we launched our products in March 2017 we began to see customer sales materialize.  We see great excitement for our products and service offering by those who are most focused on ensuring patient safety within a hospital. Our challenge in closing sales is usually not on the brand awareness of I-PASS, or the need and benefits of adopting I-PASS, but rather on navigating the many necessary approval levels required at each hospital, along with finding the appropriate budget within a hospital to pay for the implementation and sustainment.  Those approval and related budget appropriations have caused certain of our sales in 2017 to take longer to close.  Additionally, we have refined our approach to the market in the later part of 2017 to focus on broader and larger deployments, opting to spend less of our sales and marketing time and budget on smaller opportunities that are less likely to lead to larger I-PASS adoptions, as we believe those customers are where we will best realize our long-term growth and success.  We are very happy with where our current customer prospects and pipeline are today, and are excited about partner relationships we have fostered in 2017. 

One of those partner relationships that we have been working in is with CRICO Strategies.  We are very excited to announce today that we entered into a partnership with CRICO Strategies in January 2018.  CRICO Strategies is a division of CRICO, the medical malpractice carrier for the Harvard Hospitals.  CRICO Strategies’ patient safety mission is the dissemination of products and services designed to reduce medical error and malpractice exposure. CRICO Strategies has a long history that aligns with our mission of patient safety, and we believe that our partnership will help each other continue to support and expand our joint mission related to patient safety, and anticipate that this relationship will be a nice complement to our existing sales and marketing efforts.

I, and the entire team at the I-PASS Institute are very excited as we head into 2018.  We are working hard to realize the success and growth that we anticipate.  Through our everyday interactions we routinely are reminded of past and present communication failures that could be prevented, and are energized to help reduce and someday hopefully eliminate these errors. 
The founders and management team of I-PASS Patient Safety Institute thank you for your interest and support of our mission.
Thank you,

Bill