SMART Charts

SMARTCharts develops software for rehabilitation care teams that converts lengthy speech, occupational and physical therapy notes into visual, structured progress information. The product is positioned as an EHR add-on that presents a single-page view covering admission through discharge, including at-a-glance progress rings indicating therapy status and discharge readiness, longitudinal tracking of rehabilitation progress, and automated therapy summaries embedded in the existing electronic health record.

The company frames the underlying problem as rehabilitation data being the leading predictor of discharge location while remaining buried in narrative documentation, which slows care coordination and contributes to payer denials. Stated intended outcomes include faster note interpretation, aligned communication among physicians, therapists and case managers, reduced length of stay, fewer denials and avoidable days, and fewer peer-to-peer reviews. In an earlier description of the solution, the company characterized SMARTCharts as a patient-facing application that automates clinician documentation and visualizes progress to help patients understand and engage with their care journey, including playful visual metaphors such as building towers and closing rings for children and adults respectively.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Corinne Vargas, an actuary who became a speech-language pathologist, cites personal and clinical exposure to rehabilitation — her mother's stroke, her own multiple knee surgeries, and her brother's traumatic brain injury — as the motivation for building tools that make therapeutic data accessible and comprehensible to patients and their care teams.

Business model

Software sold to healthcare provider organizations as an add-on that embeds therapy summaries into the customer's existing EHR workflow, serving rehabilitation care teams and hospital discharge planning functions.

Traction

Cited product results include 50% faster note interpretation, a 56% increase in physician confidence and a 100% usefulness rating by physicians. As of the October 2023 MIT Solve submission the company was at pilot stage with a small number of users, having demonstrated an MVP in 2022 and planning a beta incorporating NLP.

Latest developments

An October 2023 MIT Solve submission described the company at pilot stage with an MVP demonstrated in 2022 and a beta planned to incorporate NLP for extracting data from progress notes; the current website markets an AI-powered single-page view of therapy progression with automated insights embedded in the EHR.