A nutrition app that tailors diets to patients’ diseases and medications to avoid adverse reactions, Nutrify shared the winners’ circle spotlight with a price transparency tool, Clear Health Costs. A tie? That would never happen on Shark Tank where winners are lionized and the losers get a lesson on entrepreneurship they never forget.
Patient Shark Tank is a different world entirely. The judges for the event held within the New York eHealth Collaborative’s Digital Health Conference this week weren’t investors, after all, but patient advocates. Hard questions were asked but criticism wasn’t a high priority.
Nutrify made a great case for its app and it truly stood out considering just how many hundreds of apps have focused on the dietary and nutrition world. The diet planning tool developer, which is also part of StartUp Health‘s network, is a little different from most apps in this area in that it is used by hospitals.
Clear Health Costs breaks down core procedures on its website by displaying the highest and lowest prices in a given city and which practices offer them. To date, its tool is available in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco and four Texas cities — Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin.The company is run by journalists passionate about improving price transparency in healthcare. Jeanne Pinder, the founder and CEO, spent the majority of her career with The New York Times, according to her LinkedIn page until she volunteered for a buyout in 2009. She subsequently received grants to set up the company.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Here were some of the other teams that competed.
Trauma Ready
Powered by Google Glass, TraumaReady uses a checklist approach to trauma surgery to manage the complex sequence of events like lostics, transfusons, medications — a tool it refers to as a visual zonal reminder or VIZR for short. Dr. David Kashmer, the medial director spent the majority of his time on a service that uses Google Glass to record instructions physicians give to patients right before they leave so patients or family caregivers have an easy reference tool to recall the details. Biggest question that got raised? Why not just take a video with a smartphone? It seems like that would be a HIPAA violation, but if the patient gives consent I’m not sure if that would be a violation.
BoardRounds Weill Cornell Medical College grad Benjamin Jack is a co-founder and CEO of the company is interested in what happens to patients when they leave the emergency room. Part of its service involves matching patients with providers and services based on their needs. It also schedules services and appointments with patients and tracks them to ensure they attend their next appointment. The goal is to avoid ER readmissions and cut down on the estimated 40,000 people who die shortly after they’re discharged from the emergency department.
CanopyApps Jerrit Tan highlighted the massive need for multilingual translation devices in healthcare in a couple of succinct sentences. There are 66 million non-English healthcare encounters in the U.S. each year. Only about 15 percent of patients get interpreters. I wrote about the company and the quandry of language barriers in healthcare earlier this year.
