Physician entrepreneurs are in nearly half of StartUp Health's latest class of early stage companies

What compels physicians to start their own companies? A list of the 16 companies joining StartUp Health Academy’s class offers some hints. Nearly half of its new members have a co-founder trained as a physician. Care management, improving healthcare literacy, patient navigation and personalized medicine are among the targeted areas.

These latest healthcare startups add up to 63 in StartUp Health’s portfolio. BASIS Science, which was a member of StartUp Health Academy’s first class, was recently acquired by Intel. Its founder, Nadeem Kassam, will join StartUp Health as its first “Healthcare Transformer in Residence.” Part of his role involves looking out for new startups.

Here’s a more detailed look at the physician entrepreneur businesses in the class.

Mobile Health One Communication
Founders: David Crane and Dr. John Abrahams. A serial entrepreneur and partner in the neurological practice Brain and Spine Surgeons of New York, Abrahams also founded Endomedix, a biomedical device company developing sealant technology. He also founded AsiloMedix Inc. which developed a prosthetic device for spine surgery. He recently started CranioMedix Inc.

Location: New York, NY

What’s it about: Secure messaging for physicians. This has been an increasing area of interest as hospitals try to balance the BYOD trend with HIPAA compliance and patient safety. Seratis, Curatr and Voalte are a few of the companies that have been active in this area.

RxREVU

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Founders: Carm Huntress, Dr. Kevin O’Brien, Dan Caron, Peregrin Marshall. Its team includes primary care physicians.

Location: Denver

What it’s about: Helping patients make more informed decisions about medication using data analytics.

Shift Health

Founders: Dr. Sandy Whitehouse and Daniel Penn. Whitehouse has served as medical director of the ER at BC Children’s Hospital and is a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia.

Location: Toronto

What it’s about: It does interactive patient surveys through a platform called TickIt. It reminds me a bit of Tonic Health. The idea is to provide patients with customized feedback based on their responses with information specific to them including statistics, comparison graphs and lifestyle tips before patients have their doctor’s appointment to make the interaction more meaningful.

SmartRx Healthcare

Founders: Anil Kumar, Dr. Vishesh Rohatgi, Vijayakumar Kannan

Location: Bangalore, India

What it’s about: It has three different product areas covering patient engagement, mobile health and “outreach” which covers marketing and patient education. It’s patient engagement tool includes modules on what patients need to know for an upcoming procedure or how to care for themselves when they’re discharged. Healthcare providers can choose multiple channels to transmit this information. It also transmits reminders for upcoming appointments and alerts about test results.

Tute Genomics
Founders: Dr. Reid Robison and Kai Wang

Location: Salt Lake City

What it’s about: It has developed a genome interpretation and discovery platform. Its team is led by Kai Wang who developed ANNOVAR, a genome annotation and interpretation platform that’s been used frequently in gene discovery studies. It can be used to prioritize the identification of disease genes in a family or population.

Here are the other companies in the new class:

Care management

PHmHealth

Founders: Dirk Rassloff and Michael Mittelman

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Punctil

Founders: Ben Picard and Denis Abrams, PhD

Location: New York, NY

Vheda Health

Founders: Shameet Luhar and Philip Rub

Location: Columbia, MD

Patient engagement