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Better Patient Understanding.
Better Outcomes.

Accessible patient education that patients can revisit and care teams can monitor. PemaSun helps healthcare organizations deliver clinician-curated education in an accessible audio format, reinforce guidance after the visit, and understand how patients engage with the information they receive.

Accessible for patients.  Efficient for clinicians.  Measurable for healthcare organizations.
Explore Our Platform
The Problem

Patient education often ends
when the visit does.

Patients are frequently expected to understand and remember complex health information during brief, stressful clinical encounters. Written instructions may be difficult to read, easy to misplace, or hard to interpret without additional support.

At the same time, clinicians spend valuable time repeating common instructions, answering similar follow-up questions, and working with limited visibility into whether patients accessed or revisited the education they received.

Information Overload

Patients may receive more information during a visit than they can reasonably process or remember. Studies show that patients tend to forget or not understand 40–80% of the information provided in clinical consultations.

Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2020

Limited Accessibility

Dense written instructions may not meet the needs of patients with limited reading ability, low vision, or difficulty processing information during stressful encounters.

Poor Treatment Adherence

Patients with poor health literacy use preventative health services less, are less adherent to prescribed medications, and are less likely to play an active role in their treatment decisions.

Journal of Environmental Health Sciences, 2020

High-Volume, Low-Quality Care

Clinicians and staff often repeat the same explanations while balancing competing care responsibilities. Patients without answers end up having ER visits and hospital stays that are preventable — costing the system billions.

BMJ Open, 2025
Our Solution

Extend patient education beyond
the clinical encounter.

PemaSun enables care teams to assign clinician-curated educational materials in a clear, digestible audio format. Patients can listen from their phone, replay information at their own pace, and return to trusted guidance after the visit.

Healthcare organizations and providers can view engagement signals that help them understand whether educational materials were accessed, completed, or replayed — and identify opportunities for additional follow-up.

How PemaSun helps
Listen anytime, anywherePatients access audio education from their phone — at home, during recovery, or whenever they need it.
Clinician-curated contentCare teams control what patients receive, ensuring accuracy and clinical relevance.
Engagement visibilityProviders see whether content was accessed, completed, or replayed — with no guesswork.
Reinforce after the visitEducation continues beyond the appointment, reducing confusion and unnecessary follow-up calls.
Our Platform

A multifaceted web and mobile platform.

PemaSun provides a multifaceted web and mobile-based platform that enables clinicians to curate a base of evidence-based sources to develop distinct, digestible, podcast-like audio education.

Patient-Facing

Mobile Application

A privacy-focused mobile app that allows patients to listen to educational audio files assigned by a healthcare provider.

  • Listen to educational audio files wherever, whenever
  • A new medium for a wide range of educational content, including follow-up instructions and disease-specific treatment information
  • Replay content at the patient's own pace and convenience
Provider & Research-Facing

Research Dashboard

A web portal that allows researchers and clinicians to manage participants, upload educational content, and monitor patient adherence data.

  • Visualizations and raw forms of adherence data
  • Interfaces for managing data and enrolling participants
  • Identify trends in engagement across patient populations
Current Use Cases

Designed for real clinical workflows.

PemaSun can support education at multiple points in the patient journey, from appointment preparation to treatment, discharge, and recovery.

Behavioral Health

  • Treatment program orientation
  • Mindfulness / Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques
  • Medication education
  • Safety plan reinforcement
  • Discharge and follow-up guidance

Ophthalmology

  • Procedure preparation
  • Preoperative instructions
  • Postoperative care
  • Medication schedules
  • Activity restrictions
  • Warning signs for treatment complications
  • Follow-up expectations

Future Applications

Chronic Disease Management Preventive Care Hospital Discharge Medication Education Rehabilitation Maternal Health Caregiver Education
Quality Improvement & Research

Potential Uses for Quality
Improvement and Research

Patient education is often delivered without a clear way to evaluate whether it reached patients or how patients interacted with it.

PemaSun's platform provides engagement information that healthcare organizations may use to evaluate education workflows, identify issues in patient education and outcomes.

Our platform has the potential to support your organization's quality improvement and research activities.

Research Disclaimer

Engagement data should not be treated as proof of comprehension, treatment adherence, or clinical effectiveness without additional evaluation.

Platform Capabilities

Evaluate Education Workflows

Understand how and when patients interact with assigned educational content throughout the care journey.

Identify Education Gaps

Surface patterns where patients may benefit from additional outreach or follow-up based on engagement signals.

Support QI Activities

Generate engagement reports that can inform internal quality improvement initiatives and care process review.

Research-Ready Data

Access structured adherence data in both visual and raw formats to support formal research protocols.

About Us

Clinician-Designed. Patient-Centered.

Our interdisciplinary team is comprised of clinicians and technology experts who have developed a patient-centered, clinician-designed platform.

Dr. Justinna Dixon
Dr. Justinna Dixon
Ph.D., RN
Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Justinna Dixon (She/her) is a PhD-prepared registered nurse with clinical and research expertise in psychiatric and mental healthcare. She has provided nursing care for patients with a variety of mental health conditions within inpatient and outpatient settings. She has published over 8 peer-reviewed articles related to healthcare provision and has presented her research at regional, national, and international conferences. She holds positions on national advisory boards for organizations such as AcademyHealth. She received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Rutgers University, honored as the 2025 Rising Star Alumni, and completed her doctoral degree (PhD) in Nursing from Columbia University.

Jesse Stover
Jesse Stover
 
Chief Technology Officer

Jess is a full-stack engineer who specializes in building scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant cloud-native applications. She served as Lead Full Stack Engineer for the Penn Ditti project at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, supporting regular insomnia care for 80+ patients. At PemaSun, she leads the deployment of secure cloud architecture to support PemaSun's agentic workflows. Jess has contributed to research-oriented open-source projects including the FaaSr project at Oregon State University, supporting serverless workflows for ecological monitoring and agricultural water supply analysis. She was a finalist for the Fulbright program in South Korea, where she led a qualitative study on the English learning experiences of North Korean refugees.

Dr. Nalaka Gooneratne
Dr. Nalaka Gooneratne
M.D., M.Sc.
Chief Scientific Officer

Dr. Nalaka Gooneratne is a physician-scientist, entrepreneur, and educator with expertise in sleep medicine, behavioral health, and healthcare innovation. He serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board, helping lead the development of AI-augmented platforms designed to improve patient engagement, health literacy, and adherence through personalized educational content. As an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he has led numerous NIH-funded research and educational programs focused on improving health outcomes through technology and behavior change. His work bridges clinical medicine, translational research, and artificial intelligence to address real-world healthcare challenges.

PemaSun provides educational tools and does not replace individualized medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or direct communication with a qualified healthcare professional.