Healthcare IT · Patient navigation
Medumo
A Boston company that texted patients through the hours before a colonoscopy or a surgery. Philips bought it in July 2019 and renamed it Philips Patient Management. The price was never disclosed.
Three in the afternoon
Patients at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital endoscopy center are told to take Dulcolax at three o’clock the day before a colonoscopy. Most get that instruction days earlier, on paper, alongside a dozen others.
“Patients are told to take Dulcolax at 3 p.m. the day prior to their colonoscopy. So patients get a message at 3 p.m. saying it’s time to take your Dulcolax,” Jennifer Nayor, the gastroenterologist who ran the pilot, told WCVB in 2018.
That is the whole product. Not an app, not a portal, not a login. A message that arrives at the hour it is needed.
An eleven percent failure rate
Before the pilot, 11.5 percent of endoscopy center patients at the Brigham arrived with inadequate bowel preparation, by the hospital’s own count. A poor prep is usually not visible until after the patient is sedated and the scope is in. Then the procedure is aborted, and the patient starts over.
The Brigham team costed it out for a funding application: one badly prepared patient costs the hospital over $1,000 in idle labor, re-education, rescheduling and forgone revenue, and eight percent of annual cancellations traced to bad preparation. A colonoscopy that does not happen is also a cancer screening that does not happen.
Physicians who had watched it fail
Medumo was founded in 2013 by physicians. Adeel Yang, MD, was chief executive. Omar Badri, MD, then a fifth-year resident in internal medicine and dermatology at the Brigham, was a co-founder, according to the hospital’s digital innovation hub. The 2019 team page lists Robert Stavert, MD, who holds an MD and MBA from Yale, as head of clinical affairs and Jacob Cohen as chief operating officer. Yang and Cohen are the two officers named on the SEC filing.
“When the patients forget to do critical tasks before a procedure or surgery, they have to be canceled last-minute, which costs a hospital lots of money or they have to get rescheduled or delay the process,” Yang said in an interview quoted by Observer.
One endoscopy unit to thirty hospitals
The company went through the inaugural 2017 cohort of PULSE@MassChallenge and was matched with Massachusetts General Hospital, then Brigham Health. It won the second Boston Scientific Connected Patient Challenge in 2017 and grew from 4 to 14 employees in a year. In June 2018 it announced an enterprise collaboration with Partners HealthCare. In January 2019 Boston Children’s Hospital signed a strategic collaboration and gave Medumo an exclusive license to DisCo, its post-discharge application.
By then the company claimed more than five million patient interactions across more than 25 hospitals. Trade coverage at the acquisition put it above 30, naming UCSF, UPMC and University of Chicago Medicine alongside the Boston institutions.
Inside Philips
CNBC broke the acquisition on July 17, 2019, from an internal Philips memo. Philips confirmed it the next day. Neither side has given a number since.
The product did not disappear. Renamed Philips Patient Management, it carried a text-based contactless check-in through the 2020 pandemic at Boston Medical Center, Yale New Haven Health and Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, saving about 11 minutes per patient on Philips internal data.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Acquisition | Philips announced it Jul 18, 2019; CNBC reported it Jul 17 from an internal memo. Terms not disclosed by either party or in any filing found. | Public record |
| Form D, Jan 12, 2018 | CIK 0001727981. First sale Dec 29, 2017. $2,183,676 offered, $1,966,044 sold, 36 accredited investors, no commissions. Signed by Adeel Yang as President. | Public record |
| Brigham, bowel prep | J Clin Gastroenterol, 2019. 1,497 patients. Adequate preparation 88.5% to 96.2% (P<0.0001); cancellations 6.1% to 4.3% (P=0.02). The paper names only “an automated time-released HIPAA-compliant software platform.” The hospital newsroom names Medumo. | Peer reviewed |
| MGH, no-shows | Telemedicine and e-Health, 2020. 756 patients against 2,103 controls. No-show and same-day cancellation 10.40% to 6.08% (p<0.001). Prep quality not significantly different (p=0.23). | Peer reviewed |
| Mount Sinai, sinus surgery | Int Forum Allergy Rhinol, 2019. Double-blinded randomized trial, 121 patients. “Patients were randomized by MEDUMO software.” 95.7% versus 74.1% said the materials helped them understand their condition (p = 0.011). | Peer reviewed |
| Brigham, scheduling | Gastroenterology Nursing, 2021. Colonoscopies scheduled within 30 days of order 73.6% to 90.0% (p<.0001). Calls to staff down about 10%. | Peer reviewed |
| Prep quality claim | Philips cites a 67.0% reduction in poor preparation, sourced to the Brigham abstract. That program also switched patients to a split-dose preparation at the same time, so messaging is not isolated. MGH, testing messaging alone, found no change in prep quality. | Claim exceeds the isolated evidence |
| Company metrics | A 31% drop in late cancellations and no-shows, doubled portal activation, 52% fewer post-operative nursing calls. Not independently audited. | Company-stated |
| FDA and registries | No 510(k), PMA, registered trial, or NIH or NSF award found under the company name. | Not found |
Read plainly: the operational claims hold up better than the clinical ones. Four peer reviewed studies at three academic centers show fewer missed appointments and faster scheduling, and that effect is consistent. The claim that timed messages clean out a colon is weaker: the one site that isolated messaging from the preparation regimen found no difference in prep quality at all.
What to watch
- Whether the product still exists. As of September 23, 2026 medumo.com does not resolve, and the Philips address that once carried the Medumo landing page serves generic monitoring content. No retirement notice was found.
- Whether anyone runs a randomized trial of timed messaging alone against prep quality, holding the regimen constant.
- Whether the DisCo pediatric license went beyond the three Boston Children’s departments named in 2019.
- What the category did next. Luma Health, on the same problem, raised a $130 million Series C in November 2021 and claimed more than 550 health systems.
In their words
“Colonoscopy preps are not the easiest thing to do, even with instructions.”
Jennifer Nayor, MD, Brigham Bulletin, 2018 · Clinician
“Our rates of inadequate preparation dropped from 11 percent down to 4 percent and our rates of cancelled procedures dropped from 6 percent down to 4 percent.”
Jennifer Nayor, MD, to WCVB, September 2018 · Independent
“All I had to do was read the texts, I wasn’t second-guessing myself, because the reminders came right when I needed them.”
Patient, in a segment written by Brigham Health, June 2018 · Partner-stated
“When the patients forget to do critical tasks before a procedure or surgery, they have to be canceled last-minute, which costs a hospital lots of money or they have to get rescheduled or delay the process.”
Adeel Yang, MD, co-founder and CEO, quoted in Observer, July 2019 · Interview
“Efficient digital health services for a superb patient experience and enhanced productivity are becoming critical differentiators for our healthcare provider customers.”
Matt Bierbaum, Philips Precision Diagnosis Ventures, July 2019 · Acquirer release
“Together, we will build on the many years of great work and services of Medumo and create new possibilities for patient management.”
Adeel Yang, MD, Philips acquisition release, July 18, 2019 · Company release
“We’re not asking them to download an application. We’re not asking them to go through a whole set of hoops like having to remember a login and password. It’s all very simple.”
Hersh Goel, MD, Philips Patient Management, Twilio customer story · Partner-stated
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Medumo, Inc., CIK 0001727981
- Peer reviewedImpact of Automated Time-released Reminders on Colonoscopy Preparedness
- Peer reviewedA Digital Preprocedure Instruction Program for Outpatient Colonoscopy
- Peer reviewedRandomized trial of a multimedia surgical care tour after sinus surgery
- Peer reviewedAutomated Time-Released Reminders Improve Patient Access to Colonoscopy
- IndependentPhilips acquires Boston start-up Medumo
- IndependentPhilips acquires Boston-based patient navigation startup Medumo
- IndependentPhilips acquires Boston patient management startup Medumo
- IndependentPhilips Aims to Enhance Patient-Doctor Communication
- IndependentBoston hospital prepares patients for colonoscopy with online support
- IndependentLuma Health picks up $130M
- AcquirerPhilips expands patient management with the acquisition of Medumo
- AcquirerPhilips Patient Management Solution during COVID-19
- PartnerAutomated Texting Tool Improves Patient Preparedness for Colonoscopy
- PartnerEndoscopy Center Sees Success with Text Message Reminders
- CompanyBoston Children’s Hospital and Medumo strategic collaboration
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
