Laguna Health Adds Healthcare Technology Innovator Gil Kaminski as VP of Clinical Product

DENVER, Dec. 7, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Laguna Health, a digital-first home recovery platform, today announced that Gil Kaminski has joined as VP of Clinical Product. Kaminski brings 15 years of strategic product management and operations leadership experience creating and evaluating new technologies, products, and programs. In her new role, Kaminski is responsible for building a scalable, empathic, and personalized recovery experience for Laguna Health members by overseeing the design of Laguna's clinical engine.

Care transitions after ambulatory surgery or inpatient hospitalization are costly when mismanaged, pose a great challenge for healthcare providers, and are an overwhelming and stressful experience for patients. In the US, hospital readmissions are driving 13% of commercial spend and 17% of Medicare spend. According to Bailey et al (2019) re-admissions cost self-insured employers $80 billion annually, of which 50% are preventable. Additionally, patients recovering from a health setback are also navigating emotional, cognitive, financial, and psychological barriers to recovery while learning to adapt to their recovery at home. Nutrition, exercise, socialization, daily life activities, are all important factors for a patient's recovery. The myriad of factors and barriers to recovery aren't a one-size-fits-all recovery formula for patients, which means each individual patient has a different set of needs that affects their recuperation.

Kaminski's work is enabling Laguna to contextualize patient care, a process of identifying individual patient circumstances to determine if a patient's care plan needs to be modified to accommodate those circumstances. Contextualizing patient care is an integral part of Laguna's custom-built patient engagement model that will ensure a safer and more successful recovery process. As part of this endeavor, an exhaustive patient database is being built to architect the artificial and augmented intelligence that will amplify the role of Laguna recovery coaches to provide an elevated level of whole person care for the patient. The model will accurately and instantly inform coaches of their patient's needs and can provide guidance on treatment.

"Look all around you and you can see that healthcare systems are at a breaking point with overworked and burnt-out care providers. Integrating augmented intelligence into clinical care is the future of providing optimal patient care," said Gil Kaminski, VP of Clinical Product at Laguna Health.

"I'm thrilled to be part of an elite team of doctors, behavioral health experts, product experts, and engineers to create a model that will uplift and personalize the transitions of care."

Kaminski's career is rooted in technology R&D and clinical operations. Most recently, she worked with DaVita Kidney Care for five years where she was Operations Director. She was responsible for over 25 dialysis centers in the Greater Philadelphia area, serving 1,900 patients, and leading 500 employees. Prior to her time at DaVita, Kaminski was a consultant for various Medtech and technology companies and provided insight on entrepreneurship and innovation. Before consulting, she was an algorithm engineer for sleep clinical company, WideMed Ltd. WideMed focuses on sleep monitoring, cardiovascular diagnostics, and hospitalization prediction and Kaminski created Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and SaMD (Software as a Medical Device) products. At the beginning of Kaminski's career, she served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF)'s Naval Medical Institute in clinical operations and clinical research capacity as a Research Officer/Facility Manager. She researched medical devices, physiological signal testing, pharmaceuticals, genetic science, and occupational health.

"Gil's experience is the perfect marriage of technology development and operational management in patient care," said Yoni Shtein, CEO and co-founder of Laguna Health. "Gil is an important piece of the recovery puzzle that Laguna Health is solving. She will help bring our vision to life, provide better tools for our recovery coaches, and enable patients to recover with ease."

About Laguna Health
Laguna is a digital-first home recovery platform that leverages digital care and multi-disciplinary clinicians to reduce costly readmissions and shorten recovery time. Laguna assures successful post-hospitalization recovery by combining data, digital care tools, and proven behavioral health interventions to radically reduce negative outcomes. From employers to health plans to providers, the entire healthcare ecosystem now has the ability to ensure every patient recovers with confidence. To learn more about Laguna, visit www.lagunahealth.com

Media Contact:
Kimberly Dreisinger | 805-350-4421
Mariah Borthwick | 347-764-7819
[email protected]

SOURCE Laguna Health