More than 40 seed and early stage companies took to the showroom floor at this year’s mHealth Summit in Washington D.C., which ended Wednesday. Many were sponsored by incubators including StartUp Health and Rock Health. This is one of a series of posts I’m publishing that includes elevator pitches from 10 of the companies I liked.
Beyond Lucid Technologies
Beyond Lucid Technologies, based in Walnut Creek, California, has developed a software platform called MediView for emergency medical technicians that tackles the problem of hospitals needing information in the critical minutes that the patient is picked up and delivered to them.
Last year, the company, which was started in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by co-founders Jonathon Feit and Christian Witt, received a $165,000 Therapeutic Discovery Grant from the National Institutes of Health. It has also received investment from friends and family.
The company’s directors spent one year traveling the country learning about the dynamics that underscore the operations of emergency medical technicians and hospitals, and what their needs are. There is little time for EMTs to gather critical information between treating patients and getting them to a hospital. In a study cited by the company, many EMTs do not have access to technology and write information about the patient’s condition where they can — on their hands or scraps of paper. In about one month, the company plans to launch an online portal so hospitals can get information from MediView in real time.
“We also provide additional features on top of the data being captured that allows the use of pictures, media to be attached in HIPPA-compliant fashion to that particular record,” said Witt, the chief technology officer. “This allows EMTs to be more productive and to help avoid the loss of data during a transfer of care between the ambulance and the hospital. Right now, about half of all the data that is critical for the treatment of the patient is lost during the transfer of care.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Read about the other nine startups: Above Stress, HealthTap, Meddik, ScriptPad, Force Therapeutics, OrganizedWisdom, Ayogo,EnHatch and CareSpeak Communications.
