Covid-19 forces a new way of thinking for Quil, Comcast’s health tech startup

When telecom giant Comcast and health insurer Independence Blue Cross teamed up to found Quil in 2018, the health tech company’s goal was clear: give people simple, step-by-step guidance to help them navigate big health events, from pregnancies to hip replacements.
But today, the joint venture finds itself in a very different place, as the coronavirus pandemic has forced physicians to put off routine appointments and postpone elective surgeries. Everyday health care is, in some ways, being put on hold — and startups like Quil are racing to adapt.
The company uses people’s laptops, phones, and home TVs as health care hubs. Users can log into the online Quil portal on any of those devices and fill in information about their upcoming health procedures. Quil creates a customized “journey” that maps out checkpoints and offers guidance sourced from clinical best practices and peer-reviewed research. Now, with so many procedures delayed, the company now working to arm people with information on the virus. Quil launched a new coronavirus-specific tool last week, pointing people to trusted data sources, providing helpful tips on how to safely grocery shop and work from home, and doling out advice on caring for at-risk loved ones and preventing the spread of the virus.

It’s a new way of thinking for Quil, which up until now has focused on well-understood and well-defined experiences in health care. But the playbook for Covid-19 is being written in real time, and Quil’s tool has to change constantly to keep up.

Quil CEO Carina Edwards Quil

STAT spoke with Carina Edwards, Quil’s CEO, to get a sense of how the company is grappling with the new reality the pandemic has imposed on its users and to learn how its coronavirus offering might help. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

You recently launched what you’re calling a Covid preparedness tool. Why did you do that?
This is something no one’s ever seen before. To take a step back, we’re focused on helping people navigate their health life, or what we see as health care journeys. Traditionally, those journeys have a start, a middle, and an end. Think about pregnancy — that’s a journey. Or a hip replacement — another journey. You start, you consider what’s coming, you prepare and make a plan, you know your plan. The information you need along the way doesn’t really change every day. For the most part, there are known care pathways, and everything is prescribed by the case manager working with you.
This is different. With Covid, over just the past 19 days, there’s been new information and there have been new innovations and new testing. But there’s been no grounding of evidence-based best practice. So for us, it’s: “Why are you in [the Quil] app today? Are you a caregiver looking for information about how to care for someone at risk? Are you someone who’s now in a child care situation [because of social distancing]? Something else?” Our tool provides an action plan for adjusting to this new life reality. This is ongoing.
How often are you updating your tool to keep pace with what’s going on? 
We got this tool up and running in five days. This is truly a breaking-news kind of scenario where you need to be mindful of constant, daily updates. At the same time, we think that in general, what’s happening with Covid is information overload. So we didn’t try to do something like reinvent the symptom checker. That tool is available on the Centers for Disease Control, and we direct people to that through our tool.
What we’ve heard is that the information in the tool is calming. You’re not getting anxiety from just reading it. The app is very much: “Here’s what you need to do, it’s OK to breathe.”
Five days is a short time to put something like this together. What motivated you?
For the team, it was a call to purpose. Our clients’ needs for the tool pivoted. They had patients going through elective surgeries, and suddenly those surgeries were cancelled. So the team thought, “We have this scale, what can we do?” They scoured all the sources and came up with this toolkit.

What do you do for the people whose elective surgeries have been postponed? What’s the plan for them now?
We’re doubling down on in-home exercises they can do before surgery to prepare, things they can do for pain mitigation that are prescribed by their doctor, so we’re keeping them engaged in those.
There’s a long tail that’s going to result from the coronavirus that we can see now. How do we think through that longer tail to make sure patients have resources they need?
How many people are using this new tool? 
We’ve seen an uptick of use. This is scaling beyond our current user base.
What kind of feedback are you getting from users?
In the early days, people were mainly trying to get information about Covid: “What is this? What do I need to know about it?” Now, we’re seeing a transition — especially of people who’ve been on the app a bit longer — where people are going to the self-care part of the app and trying to navigate just being at home.
What’s your timeline for this tool? How long will you have it up? How long will you keep updating it?
I don’t know. No one knows. We want to be relevant throughout the journey. I think we can plan for when people are allowed to go back to work and when people are allowed to travel again. So we’re focused on curating that content in the ever-evolving situation that Covid presents.

The Covid-19 pandemic forces a new way of thinking for Quil, Comcast’s health tech startup