Four new health technology companies covering areas from Big Data to telemedicine to therapeutics made their pitches to investors and media at the StartX demo day on Thursday.
StartX is Stanford University’s nonprofit student startup accelerator, operated independently from the university. Its fifth class of startups from the fall of 2011 includes four new companies devoted to healthcare technology. Below are quick summaries and videos from their presentations.
AgeTak Inc.
AgeTak Inc. has developed an IT platform to privacy protect Big Data for healthcare so that providers and payers can gain valuable insights on the cost and outcomes of care in a timely manner. It’s middleware technology that pulls in data scattered across hospitals and insurance companies while maintaining patient privacy.
The company brought in $3.7 million in revenue last year from customers like UnitedHealthcare, founder Pratik Verma said.
Breakthrough
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.
Breakthrough addresses the fact that counseling for mental health is expensive, hard to access, stigmatizing and hard to find a good provider for. It’s a tele-counseling system that enables secure, high-definition, one-on-one and group video sessions without geographical or time constraints.
For providers, it expands their billable hours and allows them to set up a profile, online co-payment system and appointment system. Breakthrough also partners with health insurers to ensure that care is covered under existing health plans.
Tip Top Med
With more consumers signing onto high-deductible insurance plans, Tip Top Med thinks it can help healthcare consumers make better decisions by providing an online marketplace that enables them to get clear, up-front pricing from providers in their area. Tip Top contains information and reviews on providers and handles the payment up front. For physicians, it exposes them to new patients and facilitates direct and timely payments.
The company is launching its private beta at the end of February and is currently raising seed money.
Bell Biosystems
Bell Biosystems has developed a technology that creates “a heritable magnetic signature in therapeutic cells,” with implications for diagnostics, regenerative medicine and cancer. Its noninvasive, in-vivo cell tracking and imaging system also allows for a triggered kill switch, in case the treatment were to go awry.
