8 Innovative Health IT Startups
Investors keep pouring money into health IT startups, and that's good news for patients set to benefit from time- and life-saving inventions.
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Startup companies are reinventing healthcare with new products that tap into breakthroughs in chemistry, manufacturing, biology, and other sciences to improve the quality and length of life. Investors regularly gather around the country to review and fund many of these startups' dreams.
Technology hubs such as Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York, as well as budding regions including Philadelphia, Central Florida, and Dallas, host conferences for venture capitalists and hopeful health IT inventors. The goal: Enough money to fund the next round of development, to enter pilot phase, seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or market their solutions. And quite often, these budding health IT businesspeople walk away with checks in hand.
By mid-year 2014, investment in health technology companies grew to $2.3 billion, up 176% from 2013, health-tech funding firm Rock Health reported. In that period, 146 digital health companies each raised more than $2 million, Rock Health said. Most health IT startups fall into one of six categories: payer administration, which raised $211 million in the first half of 2014; digital medical devices, generating $206 million; analytics and big data, raising $196 million; healthcare consumer engagement, which reaped $193 million; population health management, raising $162 million; and personalized medicine, which garnered $150 million, Rock Health said.
In addition to deep-pocketed investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Qualcomm Ventures, YCombinator, and Google Ventures, and acquisitive businesses such as General Electric, Intel, and Medtronic, crowdsourcing remains a popular source of funding. Indiegogo generated $2.3 million for health IT startups, while Kickstarter generated almost $300,000 in the first half of 2014. AARP and UnitedHealthcare partnered on The Longevity Network, which includes HealthTech conferences and Life@50+ events, where digital health entrepreneurs vie for a spot as a top 10 finalist, said Jody Holtzman, who heads AARP's Thought Leadership Group, in an interview. These startups also earn a booth at AARP's conference, where they interact with members and get valuable feedback on their product or service, he said.
"The whole idea is to bring the consumer and entrepreneurs and areas of innovation together so that, at the end of the day, these products, services, and technologies are better able to work and use," said Holtzman.
In some cases, entrepreneurs began their innovations at school, then saw an opportunity to turn a university project into a business. Danny Cabrera, CEO of BioBots, wrote papers about building 3D blood vessels and built the first prototype in his dorm room while a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Peter Bacas, CEO of Drop Diagnostics, began working on the company's disease-diagnostic system as his senior thesis while studying bioengineering at UPenn.
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"Many diseases that we suffer from are very time sensitive, meaning we can't or don't want to wait for the typical three- to four-day turnaround a central lab takes to return the results from critical blood tests. We could save lives by providing physicians with the information they need to treat a patient as soon as they need it," Bacas told InformationWeek. "Doctors will become more effective, patients will receive treatments sooner, and new models of testing will emerge using our platform. Even farther out, our device has the technical capabilities to be used at home; however, the regulatory bodies are not ready for such a move."
In other cases, entrepreneurs are using earlier successes to finance new ideas. That's true for Jonathan Rothberg, who told MIT Review he raised $100 million for his latest venture after prior successes at combining semiconductor technology with biology. Rothberg formed 4Combinator, which funds startups that combine medical sensors with deep-learning artificial intelligence.
Click through our slideshow to find out more about Rothberg's handheld real-time 3D imaging device and seven other health IT inventions poised to change healthcare.
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Manufacturing and biology collide at BioBots, a startup that "uses 3D printers to engineer biology," CEO Danny Cabrera told InformationWeek. The company developed an extrusion process that it said overcomes previous technical hurdles of 3D bioprinting, plus a biomaterials cartridge system that allows untrained people to use the system.
BioBots "bioprinted" an ear, part of a demo presented at DreamIt Health Philly. Although it's sometimes challenging to explain the value to prospective clients and change longtime workflows, the startup already has signed on beta testers such as Dr. Dan Huh's lab at the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Kara Spiller's lab at Drexel University, and Dr. Kevin Costa's lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the company said.
Targeting the patient engagement challenge, OhMD allows doctors and patients to securely text each other and integrate those messages into an organization's electronic health record (EHR), the company said. OhMD participated in Blueprint Health Demo Days.
Because it uses a format similar to standard texting, there's no learning curve, OhMD said, and because it's a secure system, health organizations avoid HIPAA risks.
Startup Drop Diagnostics wants to replace many of today's painful, time-consuming blood tests with a simple fingertip prick in a doctor's office. The company's handheld device and sensor delivers results in seconds, according to Drop Diagnostics, allowing physicians to more speedily diagnose and treat the flu, the first condition it's targeting.
"Our device is based on carbon nanotubes, a new and novel nanotechnology that is just beginning to attract commercial attention," said Peter Bacas, CEO, in an email. "This material allows us to design devices as small as one square millimeter, capable of performing diagnostics that typically require a full bench-top system. By incorporating this material into paper, we create a self-contained fluid processing and analysis device the size of a glucose test strip."
Butterfly Network, sponsored by 4Combinator, is developing an inexpensive handheld medical imaging device that will create 3D images in real-time. The scanner, which uses a newly developed ultrasound chip and is meant to replace expensive and time-consuming MRIs and ultrasounds, could eventually use heat to kill cancer cells or send information to brain cells, MIT Technology Review reported.
The device should become available in 18 months, said company founder Jonathan Rothberg. It will connect to a cellphone and cost only a few hundred dollars, he said.
During a hospital stay, RistCall CEO and founder Srinath Vaddepally reached for the nurse call button -- and fell. That led to the idea behind RistCall, a wireless wristband that allows patients to safely call for help, track the type of assistance they need, provide basic point-of-care feedback, and gather analytics.
"Research shows that nursing caregivers walk typically two to four miles per shift. In addition, reducing response time not only improves patient safety, but also patient experience scores such as HCAHPS and job satisfaction," Vaddepally told InformationWeek.
Startups Tissue Analytics and Healogram each have developed a mobile app to monitor wound care. Chronic wounds affected 6.5 million US patients and cost $25 billion in 2009, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Vida, which received $5 million in venture capital funds, recently unveiled its life coaching iPhone app. For $15 per week, consumers connect to dieticians, nutritionists, physicians, diabetes specialists, and other health and wellness experts to help them get and stay fit, detox, lose weight, lower cholesterol, feel better, reduce stress, cut blood pressure, and prevent diabetes. Although currently sold only directly to consumers, Vida hopes to work with employers and providers who want to improve patient engagement and reduce readmissions, company CEO and founder Stephanie Tilenius told MobiHealthNews.
Omicia is moving patients and clinicians closer to personalized medicine through a genome interpretation platform designed for disease research; diagnostic testing; clinical trials; and drug reporting.
The platform, called Phevor, uses an algorithmic approach that's much faster than today's genomic analysis methods, Charlene Son Rigby, Omicia's VP of products, told InformationWeek.
"A typical person has 3 million mutations in his or her genome. Most are harmless, so it is a significant challenge to find the one or few mutations causing a disease," Son Rigby said. "Once a patient's genome is sequenced, the Phevor algorithm can be run in a couple of minutes." Phevor is delivered as software-as-a-service, which saves customers money over purchasing server hardware, she said.
Omicia is moving patients and clinicians closer to personalized medicine through a genome interpretation platform designed for disease research; diagnostic testing; clinical trials; and drug reporting.
The platform, called Phevor, uses an algorithmic approach that's much faster than today's genomic analysis methods, Charlene Son Rigby, Omicia's VP of products, told InformationWeek.
"A typical person has 3 million mutations in his or her genome. Most are harmless, so it is a significant challenge to find the one or few mutations causing a disease," Son Rigby said. "Once a patient's genome is sequenced, the Phevor algorithm can be run in a couple of minutes." Phevor is delivered as software-as-a-service, which saves customers money over purchasing server hardware, she said.
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