#OnCall presenting at startup weekend @healthphl pic.twitter.com/aPfGwi2021
— Tom Austin (@austinstom) March 30, 2014
The idea that you can develop a concept for a company and launch it within 48 hours is at the heart of Startup Weekend. When you add healthcare to the mix it becomes a lot more challenging but no less interesting. Philadelphia hosted its third Startup Weekend for healthcare at Venturef0rth over the weekend.
Elliot Menschik, who was one of the judges to review the 12 team pitches, heads up shared workspace Venturef0rth and is a managing partner for healthcare with DreamIt Health, DreamIt Ventures’ health IT accelerator. He said it’s the longest running StartUp Weekend for healthcare in the country. About 14 cities have since hosted their own version of the event. Duke University is planning to host one in August.
The top team this time around was OnCall. The group of young physicians and developers think patients who value in-person visits would be willing to pay extra for doctors, physical therapists, or counselors to come by their homes.
It’s interesting because healthcare seems to be going in the opposite direction of this sort of personal touch. Some companies provide online access to a group of physicians to seek responses to non emergency patient queries such as West Coast startup HealthTap. Others use telemedicine to provide access to healthcare professionals to make virtual visits through online videoconferencing. 1 DocWay focuses on telepsychiatry.
Billing their service as an Uber for healthcare, The mobile health group OnCall proposed developing an app and charging people $100 for a visit — a fee that would be split between the medical professional and the company. The judges said they liked it because it responds to the consumer demand for more services and its offering is pitched at a sizeable market with a lot of supply and demand. As top prize winners, the team gets an accelerated application for DreamIt Health Philadelphia, though the application for the health IT accelerator is still subject to approval.
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.
Among the other runners up was a company called RegDesk that bills itself as a way for small medical device companies and eventually biotech businesses to crowdsource regulatory guidance. The idea is to help respond to regulatory queries at a smaller cost than consultants would typically charge so companies can avoid inadvertently incurring costly fines. Its business model involves charging 12.5 percent for every transaction on its website.
Another group, Housekeeping, posed a solution to the inefficiency of patient transport to and from scans and procedures that involved QR codes and text alerts.
A few teams that formed at StartUp Weekend Health in Philly have gone on to become companies such as remote monitoring and telehealth startup AirCare, QuickSeeMD — a scheduling tool to locate in-network physicians, and medical team communication tool Seratis, which snagged second place in Verizon’s Powerful Answers competition earlier this year.
