Once again a personal frustration with the healthcare system sparked an entrepreneurial idea and a new business.
Travis Triplett is currently going through physical therapy and noticed that during his session, he heard the same thing over and over, “Did you do your exercises? You need to do your exercises.”
He went to Startup Weekend in Louisville, Kentucky with the idea of developing a way for therapists to conveniently touch base with patients at home.
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The Physical Therapy Pal team launched an alpha site over the weekend, built an app and is planning to keep building the idea.
“We are less focused on video appointments and more focused on patient accountability,” he said. “We want people checking in and checking off on the exercises that they have completed for the day.”
The platform also could include messaging and incentives via a reward system.
“It’s not new tech, but it’s an underserved market,” he said.
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Triplett said the PT Pal team had just the right combination of people to develop the idea including a designer, a Web developer and an app developer. Triplett is responsible for strategy and writing the business plan.
Bob Saunders, an investor and former managing director of Chrysalis Ventures, was one of the judges. He spoke at the recent SBIT/STTR conference in Louisville on a panel about how to get funding and makes it a point to mentor startup entrepreneurs. (Disclosure: Saunders is an investor in MedCity News.)
“There were three real business startup opportunities that I saw at the event,” he said. “PT Pal was one of those.”
The weekend started with 15 pitches on Friday night, six teams went to work Saturday morning and five groups pitched their ideas Sunday evening.
One of the event organizers Nick Huhn was on the sixth team, and said that the group discussed several good ideas, but kept pivoting into a wall.
“In my pitch to the judges, I said, “I”ll tell you about our idea, but first tell you about our first three ideas,” he said. “This is what I call turd polishing and we should talk about why it’s a turd and what we learned.”
Huhn said the strength of the event was that everyone was in the room with no agenda.
“It sets the model for the way things should be,” he said. “We want to make serial innovation part of our culture.”
Huhn said there was plenty of interest in another Startup Weekend, and that there may be another one in the spring.
There was lots of Twitter activity around #swlou and a member of the winning team described her experience as the only woman in the room. The PT Pal team is first up in the video recap of the weekend.
[Image from from twitter user @AaronMarshall]
