Michael O`Neil was in the hospital, battling cancer and feeling cut off

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As seen in the
January/February 2014 issue of
A Patient with
Connections
Michael O’Neil was in the hospital, battling cancer and feeling
cut off from the world. That’s when the Bethesda resident had
his ‘aha’ moment.
By Rita Rubin | Photography by Erick Gibson
242 January/February 2014 | Bethesda Magazine HEALTH
© 2014 Bethesda Magazine. All rights reserved.
As seen in the January/February 2014 issue of Bethesda Magazine
“A lot of the soul of innovation comes from
the most mundane experiences,” says
Michael O’Neil, whose GetWellNetwork
now serves 200 hospitals nationwide.
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As seen in the January/February 2014 issue of Bethesda Magazine
a patient with connections
As he lay in bed in one of the world’s
top hospitals, surrounded by the latest
in medical technology, newly diagnosed
cancer patient Michael O’Neil couldn’t
get over how low-tech his room’s television was.
At 9 a.m. every day, “a kid would
come in my room and ask for $7 to turn
on the TV,” O’Neil recalls. The problem
was, O’Neil had been told to leave his
wallet at home.
After he obtained the necessary cash,
he wondered whether that television set
was worth $7 a day. “When you turned it
on, there were about nine staticky channels on it.”
Worst of all was when he asked a
nurse one morning for information
about his chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “Oh, we have an education channel,” she said brightly, directing
him to the TV and yet another disappointment: Instead of information about
chemotherapy, O’Neil found a breastfeeding video.
1998. At first, Georgetown’s student
health center blamed his pain on bulging discs from playing intramural flag
football or maybe “law school ulcers”
brought on by stress. But “my pain over
a number of months began to kind of
move and spread,” O’Neil says. “I had
terrible night sweats, often waking in a
pool of sweat.”
He sought answers at Georgetown
University Medical Center. An endoscopy in April 1999 revealed a tumor the
size of a tangerine in his stomach. “This
could be stomach cancer, or it could be
benign, but we need to find out quickly,”
doctors told him.
O’Neil underwent surgery to remove
the tumor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore. A week into what ended up
being a nine-day hospital stay there, the
pathology report on his tumor came
back from the lab. The mass was neither stomach cancer nor benign. O’Neil
had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph tissue, which is found
“I literally was drawing up the idea
for this company while lying in my
[hospital] bed,” O’Neil says.
That’s when he came up with the idea
for GetWellNetwork, a Bethesda-based
company that provides interactive educational and entertainment resources
through televisions in patients’ hospital
rooms.
“A lot of the soul of innovation comes
from the most mundane experiences,”
O’Neil says.
O’Neil was 28 and a student in the
joint law and business degree program
at Georgetown University when his back
started bothering him in the spring of
throughout the body. The American
Cancer Society estimates that about
70,000 Americans were diagnosed with
the disease last year, and about 19,000
died from it.
O’Neil’s main source of information
about non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and
its treatment came from the printouts
that his fiancée, Wendy—a “104-pound
Armenian firestorm,” as he describes
her—would bring from her office in
Tysons Corner in Virginia.
“When you’re back in your real
world—at home, at school, at work—
244 January/February 2014 | Bethesda Magazine HEALTH
you have access to all this amazing technology,” O’Neil says. But in the hospital,
“when you have to make all these critical
decisions, you happen to have the least.”
He felt uninformed, out of control,
helpless. And scared. But he also felt
inspired. “I literally was drawing up the
idea for this company while lying in my
[hospital] bed,” O’Neil says.
After surgeons removed the tumor,
O’Neil underwent four rounds of
aggressive chemotherapy over the
spring and summer. He’d then go to his
fiancée’s Georgetown apartment (with
three roommates, his was too noisy), eat
a plain Domino’s pizza and then sleep
for 14 hours. To this day, O’Neil thinks
Domino’s pizza smells like chemo.
After his first round of chemotherapy,
his parents held an engagement party
for him and Wendy. His hair was starting to fall out, so the day after the party
he shaved his entire head. He returned
to grad school in September 1999, bald
and 10 pounds lighter, but passionate
about his plan for a company that would
prevent patients from feeling as powerless as he had in the hospital.
“My professors were phenomenally
supportive,” O’Neil says. “While back in
school, I was doing research and writing the business plan, leveraging many
of my law and MBA classes.”
He incorporated GetWellNetwork in
August 2000, nearly two years before he
would graduate from Georgetown. He
sketched out his ideas on a whiteboard,
and then the two software engineers
he hired translated them into code. In
search of clients, “we went to…local
hospitals and some hospitals up in New
England,” O’Neil says.
GetWellNetwork’s premise was that
engaging patients in their own care
would make them more motivated to get
better and stay that way. When patients
are engaged in their own care, hospitals
see patient care improve and the cost of
© 2014 Bethesda Magazine. All rights reserved.
As seen in the January/February 2014 issue of Bethesda Magazine
Calla, Wendy, Ava and Michael O’Neil enjoy a
moment together at their Bethesda home.
providing that care decline, according to
GetWellNetwork, which provides hospitals with the tools to measure progress.
By 2003, the company had 20 employees and a handful of client hospitals.
As his business
was taking off,
O’Neil and his wife faced another “lifedefining moment,” as he calls it—the
devastating loss of one of their infant
twin daughters.
Before Macey and Ava were born
in 2005, doctors detected on a sonogram what they thought was a congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation
(CCAM), an overgrowth of abnormal
lung tissue, in Macey. In most cases,
a baby with CCAM does fine. But at
birth, “Macey was not breathing,” O’Neil
recalls. “She was rather blue. Of course,
they took her away right away. About an
hour later, the pediatric surgeon came
in. [He said] ‘Macey is very sick.’ ”
Macey did not have CCAM. She had a
birth defect called a diaphragmatic hernia, which occurs in as many as one in
2,200 live births. Her intestines, stomach
and other abdominal organs had pushed
through a hole in her diaphragm and into
her chest, preventing her heart and lungs
from growing normally. She would need
to have surgery to push her organs back
in place and repair the hernia.
Macey was airlifted from Inova Fairfax Hospital, where she was born, to
Children’s National Medical Center in
Washington, D.C., for the operation. But
she was never well enough to undergo
surgery, and she died 19 days after birth.
Despite what he had learned as a cancer patient and in creating his company,
“I still felt like I was on the outside looking in,” O’Neil says of the experience.
It made him realize “how important
the family is in our health journey. The
patients are often so helpless during this
period of time.”
GetWellNetwork had begun to work
with Children’s by the time Macey was
a patient, but it was not yet available in
the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
O’Neil’s experience as the father of a
patient “woke us up to really expanding
the company’s focus,” he says. “It should
be family- and patient-centered care, not
just patient-centered care.” Even if their
loved ones are too young or too sick to
interact with GetWellNetwork, the caregivers can. Today, he says, the network is
available in Children’s NICU.
O’Neil’s insight has helped GetWellNetwork flourish. By 2009, it was recognized by Deloitte as one of the 500 fastest
growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America. Today
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As seen in the January/February 2014 issue of Bethesda Magazine
a patient with connections
Last year, O’Neil says about 2
million patients interacted with
GetWellNetwork.
it employs about 230 people, including
about 50 software engineers. It serves 200
hospitals around the country—26 children’s hospitals and 25 Veterans Affairs
and military hospitals among them—
covering 40,000 to 50,000 beds.
In September, GetWellNetwork
moved from Norfolk Avenue into larger
headquarters on Old Georgetown Road.
At 42 and healthy, O’Neil is the company’s CEO. Originally from New York,
he lives with Wendy, 46, and daughters
Calla, 10, and Ava, 8, in Bethesda. His
sister, Shannon O’Neil, who lives two
blocks from him and his family, serves
the company as vice president, user
experience. She’s responsible for figuring
out how the software should look, feel
and behave for the people who use it.
Last year, O’Neil says about 2 million
patients interacted with GetWellNetwork. Some hospital rooms have new
touch-screen monitors at the bedside,
while others have kept their old wallmounted televisions, which have been
modified with a new remote and keyboard to work with the network.
Besides watching cable channels or
on-demand movies, patients can access
test results and post questions for and
get answers from doctors on the network’s interactive whiteboard. Instead
of buzzing the nurse, they can contact
dietary services directly if a meal isn’t
satisfactory, or housekeeping if their
bathroom needs to be cleaned.
“We’re doing a lot of streamlining
of clinical and nonclinical functions,”
O’Neil says. That frees up nurses to focus
on patient care. Nurses and doctors can
select appropriate educational videos for
patients that cover a wide range of conditions, medications, tests and treatments. “We’re working alongside doctors and nurses all the time,” he says.
G e t Wel l Ne t work’s “O utc ome s
Achievement Plan Dashboard” enables
hospitals to track improvements seen as
a result of implementing the system. For
example, O’Neil says, at Florida Hospital Celebration Health, in Celebration, Fla., GetWellNetwork helped cut
the percentage of heart failure patients
who had to be readmitted within 30
days of discharge from about 16 percent
to 8 percent. At Inova Fair Oaks Hospital in Fairfax, Va., he says, the percentage of patients dissatisfied with the noise
level at night dropped from 50 percent
in 2012 to 40 percent this past year. And,
O’Neil says, patients are leaving Sharp
Memorial Hospital in San Diego a little
bit sooner, as the average length of stay
has fallen from 5.2 days to 4.9 days.
Last March, GetWellNetwork
launched in Georgetown University
Hospital, the closest client to the company’s headquarters. For now, GetWellNetwork is only in Georgetown’s pediatrics unit.
“I really thought it would make a
huge difference with our patients,” says
Georgetown child life specialist Linda
Kim, who learned about GetWellNetwork at a conference. “The entertainment aspect of it alone sold me, but then
I found out it could do so much more.”
“GetWellTown,” the pediatric version
of GetWellNetwork, is particularly kid-
246 January/February 2014 | Bethesda Magazine HEALTH
friendly, Kim says. “The kids actually
figure it out faster than the adults. They
get to go online. They can check their
emails, keep in touch with their teachers.” And they can watch movies, listen to music, create art and play games.
Parental controls can be used to block
sites such as Facebook, she says.
“It’s definitely awesome,” 16-yearold Grace Mitchell says from her bed at
Georgetown. Grace, who lives on Capitol Hill, was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder in 2007. She’s one of
3,000 to 5,000 Americans with juvenile
dermatomyositis (JDM), which causes
skin rashes and muscle inflammation
but is treatable.
Grace spends a weekend at Georgetown every month to receive intravenous immunoglobulin, and she loves
being able to watch movies and tune in
to hulu.com on GetWellTown to catch
up on episodes of Project Runway and
Modern Family. She uses her own laptop
to do homework, but she likes to surf
the Internet on GetWellTown, which is
faster than the hospital’s Wi-Fi.
In the children’s hospitals where
GetWellTown has been implemented,
virtually every patient watches movies
or plays games on it, O’Neil says. Before
they can access the fun stuff, though,
they must do their homework—which
means watching the educational videos that their doctors or nurses have
recommended.
“They gain so much strength by staying active and being engaged in their care,”
O’Neil says. And they frequently become a
source of strength for their families.
© 2014 Bethesda Magazine. All rights reserved.
As seen in the January/February 2014 issue of Bethesda Magazine
At the Birmingham VA Medical Center in Alabama, where GetWellNetwork
went live in 2011, most of the patients
are over 60, and “we’ve seen a lot of benefits,” says Jeff Hester, director of public
affairs. Educational videos teach patients
and their families about procedures they
must undergo and the diet they’ll have
to follow at home. They press the nurse
call button less often and instead turn to
GetWellNetwork to contact housekeeping about cleaning their room. Hospital
executives no longer wonder “is this just
a big entertainment system?” as they did
when they first heard about GetWellNetwork, Hester says.
In August, the Birmingham hospital
integrated its electronic medical records
system with GetWellNetwork. Now,
when patients watch an educational
video selected by a nurse or doctor,
GetWellNetwork automatically notes
that in the medical record. Previously,
Hester says, nurses had to document it
by hand.
At GetWellNetwork client hospitals,
patients and their families can access
discharge instructions on the system, so
the logical next step for O’Neil’s company was myGetWellNetwork, which
delivers personalized information to
patients outside the hospital via secure
Internet access anywhere they can open
a browser window.
Throug h myG etWel lNet work,
patients use their home computers, tablets and smartphones to track their progress in a personal health journal, watch
educational videos and receive daily tips
and reminders to help them manage
chronic conditions. MyGetWellNetwork
is available through a growing number
of doctors’ offices, O’Neil says. “We call
it ‘get well anywhere.’ ” n
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A former medical writer for USA Today,
Rita Rubin lives in Bethesda and frequently writes for the magazine. To comment on this story, email comments@
bethesdamagazine.com.
© 2014
Bethesda
Magazine. All rights
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2014
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