8 Healthcare Startups Catch Fire
Here's a look at some of the most innovative healthcare startups and health apps featured at the NYeC Digital Health Conference and the Connected Health Symposium.
![](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt69509c9116440be8/bltedd3f8c109040a8e/64cb57501451aecef701c4bf/omada_health_prevent_program_screenshot_02-1.png?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Medicine has always been a conservative profession that tends to shy away from bold, risky ventures. In some respects, that makes sense: Jumping on the latest surgical innovation or the most promising blockbuster drug too quickly has too often disappointed both clinicians and patients -- or worse, resulted in needless deaths and expensive lawsuits.
But while conservatism can help protect the public from unrealistic solutions to complex problems, it can also thwart genuine cost-effective breakthroughs. And the healthcare industry desperately needs these breakthroughs to free itself from the financial debacle it's now in.
Several accelerator programs have popped up in recent years to help fund health-related startups with the potential to transform patient care, including Blueprint Health, Startup Health, and Rock Health.
Similarly, several IT organizations have helped promising startups establish a firmer footing by featuring them during conferences. A case in point: During the 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium in Boston, an event sponsored by Partners Healthcare, Ethan Fener from InterSystems moderated "The Innovators: 10 Demos of Products and Services to Engage Patients."
The challenge kicked off with a presentation by AuthentiDate, a care coordination company that concentrates on telemedicine, hospital discharge planning, and referral management.
That was followed by Vtrim's demo, which featured an expert-led weight loss program geared toward employers and patients.
Steven Jackson from Vocera spoke about the tools it has designed to "improve the human experience of care." Its patient platform addresses a critical issue in healthcare -- specifically, the inability of patients to retain all the medical information thrown at them during a typical inpatient or outpatient encounter.
Omada Health demoed an online system to help prevent Type 2 diabetes. The Prevent system, which takes its cue from the NIH-sponsored Diabetes Prevention Program, makes use of digital tracking tools and coaching to reduce the threat of this national epidemic.
Reflexion Health's demo offered one of the most practical clinical tools at the Innovator's Challenge. It makes use of Microsoft's Kinect technology to teach patients who require physical therapy to perform the exercises correctly.
The 2013 New York eHealth Collaborative's Digital Health Conference also highlighted several forward-thinking startups worth a closer look, including SaferMd, RightCareSolutions, and Aver. Take a walk through the following slides to learn more about the Connected Health and NYeC startups mentioned above.
If you've ever been discharged from the hospital after major surgery or visited an ED, you know how hard it is to concentrate on what the nurse is telling you about taking your meds or properly redressing your surgical wound. In fact, nine out of ten Americans cannot reiterate the basic patient education they've been provided, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Vocera offers a simple solution to the problem: A discharge communication platform that records the live discharge instructions given by clinicians at the point of care. The recording is then made available to patients and their families to review using any phone, mobile device, or computer. Vocera's "Good to Go" system also can create and send appointment reminders, tasks, and care messages to patients via text or email.
Like Vtrim, Omada puts a great deal of emphasis on weight loss, but its focus is somewhat different, concentrating on a proven protocol that can lower the risk of Type 2 diabetes. There are about 87 million Americans with pre-diabetes, putting them at risk for full-blown disease. Omada's Prevent platform takes aim at this population, which has elevated blood glucose that is not quite high enough to be labeled diabetic.
The platform is modeled on the federally funded Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), which significantly reduced the risk of disease -- in part by helping overweight patients shed the extra pounds. Prevent takes groups of 12 patients with pre-diabetes, providing them with a digital body weight scale that automatically transmits their weight by means of an embedded computer chip that works over the cellular network. Each group is paired with a health coach to walk them through the DPP protocol, after which they are graduated into a weight maintenance program.
Groups of patients are created based on specific criteria, including location, age, and body mass index, and a 7% weight loss goal is set up for the 16-week program.
This demo featured AuthentiDate's telehealth platform, which aims to improve clinical outcomes and reduce hospital readmissions by helping clinicians monitor congestive health failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and other chronic disorders. The platform includes a tablet application, a kiosk that can be used in group homes, and an interactive voice response service that uses voice recognition software to let patients ask questions and submit vital signs verbally or with a keypad from a touch-tone phone.
The tablet app, called InscrybeMD -- basically a remote patient monitoring system -- is divided into several sections that let patients submit blood pressure readings, pulse oximetry, body weight, spirometry readings, and body temperature via Bluetooth or a wired device. It also offers video-based patient education on a variety of relevant topics, and even has a section in which the patient can take a photo of a lesion, for instance, to send to the clinician monitoring the program. Patients can also send an email or SMS to the provider, or request a phone call response.
On their end, clinicians using the app see a dashboard of vital signs and patients' questions and are able to triage their patient panel and review clinical trends and other analytics. Sunil Hararay, chief commercial offer at AuthentiDate, claims that the app has been used to reduce 30-day hospital readmission rates, which have been a major pain point for providers since the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services imposed financial penalties on hospitals that allow this rate to climb too high.
Weight loss plans are a dime a dozen, and most have very little science to support them. Vtrim's online program started as a NIH-funded research program at the University of Vermont, which gives it scientific credibility. The online program boasts nine published studies suggesting that its approach is comparable to what patients can achieve by attending an in-person, expert-led weight loss program.
Patients sign up for a 12- or 20-week program, followed by a weight maintenance component. Patients are able to correspond directly with a dietitian online; they also have access to a lessons section, which is essentially a behavior modification curriculum. Patients answer "self-reflection" questions at the end of each week and receive personalized responses from the dietitian. There's also a goal-setting component, along with food and exercise diaries and text-based online meetings to simulate in-person group sessions where patients can get peer support.
To date, about 3,000 participants have used the program, with an average weight loss of 24 pounds in 24 weeks. The program has received recognition from the National Diabetes Education Program and the National Cancer Institute, and it just signed a contract with the VA Administration -- all of which shows this service is the real deal.
Physical therapy is often prescribed for patients as a less drastic alternative to surgery, but performing the exercises correctly can be challenging, and the printed handouts dispensed by physical therapists rarely explain how to do the exercises at home in adequate detail.
Enter Reflexion Health, a startup that has married entertainment technology to clinical medicine. Its platform uses the patient's own TV and Microsoft's Kinect system to track his adherence to a prescribed rehab plan. With the help of a camera, the TV, and the Kinect software, a patient can see how he is positioning his body during each exercise and compare it to the correct positioning (which his PT has previously entered into the system). The system tracks the patient's joints, measuring angle and velocity. It also offers visual feedback to tell him whether or not he is doing the exercises correctly.
The company has about 40-50 exercises programmed into the system and is doing clinical trials, pending marketing clearance by the FDA.
Patient safety can be a hospital's biggest challenge. Catching the many things that can go wrong during a typical medical encounter consumes a huge amount of time and resources. SaferMD was designed to make one of those challenges -- reporting test results to clinicians and patients -- a non-issue.
The NYeC Digital Health Conference program explained the benefits of the startup's technology succinctly: "SaferMD saves hospitals millions annually by reducing medical malpractice costs for both hospitals and practices, while optimizing patient safety." The reduction in legal costs is accompanied by smaller Medicare compliance penalties and shorter lengths of stay, according to SaferMD. All this is accomplished by delivering diagnostic test results promptly.
SaferMD lets hospitals patch into its test reporting system to ensure that clinicians are notified of updates and that they comply with hospital policy. For example, SaferMD generates monthly reports for Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, letting management know when doctors pick up their test results. Tracking clinicians' timeliness can be critical for test results that require immediate clinical action.
Several national malpractice insurers offer significant discounts to providers who use SaferMD, according to company founder Brian Gale, MD. "For a medium-sized hospital, it's generally over a million dollars," he added.
Aver Informatics, selected by Startup Health from among more than 450 applicants, provides an analytics platform to crunch big data. The goal is to help healthcare providers use that data to design episodic payment bundles.
As the US healthcare system looks for more cost-effective ways to provide care, it is slowly moving away from fee-for-service, an approach in which providers are paid for each individual service they perform. Payment bundling, in contrast, offers payment for an entire episode of care -- for example, a knee replacement and all the associated follow-up care. The hope is that this approach will force providers to become more efficient in delivering care and encourage care coordination.
The "magic" of creating these payment bundles, according to an Aver spokesperson, is that the "system generates algorithms and does search queries on the fly without the need for highly technical people." Aver starts with a client's claims data, clinical data, genomics information, and so forth. It then allows physician leaders to manipulate various building blocks to package this information into episodes of care. With the help of Aver's algorithms, managers can then estimate the cost of that care.
If the bundled payment approach to medicine catches on, Kurt Brenkus, Aver's CEO, says most reimbursements can be narrowed down to 48 bundles, which would cover 70% of medical spending. That would certainly make patient care simpler than when the ICD-10 system kicks in with tens of thousands of line items.
Patrick Higgins, from the Penn Medicine Innovation Center, spoke at the NYeC Conference about working with RightCare Solutions to develop new care delivery models. According to Higgins, the startup has improved clinical outcomes in the Penn patient population through the use of the "D2S2 software platform." The system creates a risk score, which helps the hospital pinpoint high-risk patients who will likely need specific post-acute care interventions.
RightCare's website explains: "By accessing D2S2 via their Electronic Health Record (EHR) or Case Management system, care managers leverage workflow tools that help prioritize their time and optimize their staffing needs. Personalized care plans can be developed for each patient based on individual risk factors, and electronic referrals can be transmitted to the right agency ..."
Eric Heil from RightCare pointed out that about $30 billion is spent annually on potentially preventable hospital readmissions. RightCare's technology is designed to identify major gaps in care transition from hospital to post-acute care setting, using algorithms that identify at-risk patients at admission. Heil explained that the company's digital tools "help prioritize clinicians' caseloads, time, resources, and energy" to concentrate on those patients who need the most attention.
How effective are these tools? "In a controlled clinical study across three hospitals at the University of Pennsylvania, we have been able to... show a 29% reduction in all patients for all causes at day 30," Heil said.
Patrick Higgins, from the Penn Medicine Innovation Center, spoke at the NYeC Conference about working with RightCare Solutions to develop new care delivery models. According to Higgins, the startup has improved clinical outcomes in the Penn patient population through the use of the "D2S2 software platform." The system creates a risk score, which helps the hospital pinpoint high-risk patients who will likely need specific post-acute care interventions.
RightCare's website explains: "By accessing D2S2 via their Electronic Health Record (EHR) or Case Management system, care managers leverage workflow tools that help prioritize their time and optimize their staffing needs. Personalized care plans can be developed for each patient based on individual risk factors, and electronic referrals can be transmitted to the right agency ..."
Eric Heil from RightCare pointed out that about $30 billion is spent annually on potentially preventable hospital readmissions. RightCare's technology is designed to identify major gaps in care transition from hospital to post-acute care setting, using algorithms that identify at-risk patients at admission. Heil explained that the company's digital tools "help prioritize clinicians' caseloads, time, resources, and energy" to concentrate on those patients who need the most attention.
How effective are these tools? "In a controlled clinical study across three hospitals at the University of Pennsylvania, we have been able to... show a 29% reduction in all patients for all causes at day 30," Heil said.
-
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like