A digital health accelerator co-founded by a serial entrepreneur has made its first set of investments in five companies. Launchpad Digital Health’s portfolio spans patient engagement tools using avatars, price transparency and mobile health app developer tools, among other areas.
Fred Toney, the CEO, has worked in medtech and digital health. He was a co-founder of RxList, acquired by WebMD in 2004; led HealthCentral (part of Remedy Health Media) and was CFO of C8 MediSensors, which came very close to commercializing painless, continuous glucose monitors for diabetic patients. Ted Ridgway, co-founder, is the chief investment officer.
The company invests $200,000 to $400,000 in digital health businesses as part of a year-long program. It has begun accepting applications for its next class. Although there are a few law firm and investment groups listed as mentors and partners on the website, it’s a bit surprising that there didn’t appear to be any mention of healthcare providers. Several accelerators have partnered with providers to give entrepreneurs a better sense of how their tools would (or would not) fit into their workflows.
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Entrepreneurs are required to work out of The Hatch in San Francisco. Toney and Ridgway will use 5 percent of their profits from the accelerator to fund micro lending to small healthcare businesses around the world, according to its website.
Here’s a summary of the companies that received investments from Launchpad:
Sense.ly uses avatars as a way to work with patients and check recovery progress, particularly those with an addiction problem. In an interview with MedCity News last year, Sense.ly co-founder Ivana Schnur said the company was in the process of developing facial recognition and speech recognition software to assess the emotional state of patients at any given time to help providers improve their effectiveness.
Medable has a platform to support mobile health app developers with care delivery, communication, and data dashboards, as well as HIPAA compliance.
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Lyfechannel produced a price transparency tool, Smart Health Hero , which won CodeaPalooa earlier this year. It uses data sets from CMS to outline what physicians charge Medicare for certain procedures. It also highlights physicians who charge the least within a 20-mile radius of the user.
QueueDr takes a page from the hospitality industry trend in healthcare. It wants to solve the problem of cancellations for physician practices by filling them with patients prepared to submit to a waiting list. When a cancellation occurs, patients on the waiting list receive an alert and the first one who can text back to the service gets the appointment.
Addapp developed a mobile health app to help users create and track health goals such as sleeping more, increasing the distance they run, making themselves happier. And it would monitor these goals by connecting data sets from the different wearable tools and apps used by its customers.
