Two years ago, StartUp Health collaborated with GE Ventures to invest in consumer-facing healthcare startups as part of its StartUp Health Academy.
But now, StartUp Health has tweaked that model to give more attention to business-to-business solutions covering virtual care and payment. In a phone interview, it’s co-founder Unity Stoakes talked about tweaks to the program.
The academy stands apart from its healthcare incubator and accelerator which typically last three to four months or require a monthly payment to cover rent and the use of facilities. In the latest class it will begin offering new programming every week instead of quarterly. It is one of a series of tweaks to the academy’s structure, where placements last three years .
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The idea is to invest up to $50,000 in 10 companies. It defines virtual care as “platforms that enable clinician-to-clinician engagement, specialist referral, interpretation services, second opinions, clinician-to-patient engagement, remote monitoring, e-visits and consultations, store-forward diagnosis.”
It has a broader definition of what it is looking for across payment solutions:
- Point solutions that include: e-wallets, patient eligibility verification and liability estimation, electronic receivables management, point of care consumer payment processing, e-pay or tokenized payment processing, online shopping sites.
- Claims-free economy solutions that include: subscriptions, flat-fees, shopping sites for health.
- Claims dispute management
In StartUp Health’s most recent quarterly report on digital health investment, it estimated that $1.85 billion was invested in the digital health sector in the third quarter. Although payment solutions and virtual care do not neatly fit into its subsectors for digital investment, the patient experience accounted for $1.1 billion across 62 deals. E-commerce accounted for 17 deals amounting to $409 million, but workflows saw more deals with $406 million invested across 38 deals.
GE Ventures has made nine investments in digital health startups since the start of the year.
Stoakes said it’s keen to ramp up syndicate investing. To date, it has 61 syndicate partners and wants to see members invest $300,000 per company — ultimately he hopes that will climb to $1 million per company.
He also underscored the point that the accelerator model is evolving. Rock Health shifted from an accelerator to a fund and others such as Healthbox have changed as well.
Last week, Better co-founder Chamath Palihapitiya disclosed at the Rock Health Summit that the business, designed to help people make sense of confusing medical bill and insurance statements, would shut down. Its website states that it will shut down at the end of October.
Stoakes described the implications for the shut down this way.
“I think the reality is some companies work and some startups don’t and it’s not necessarily a reflection of the market need…When you look at a category like payment solutions, it is clear there’s been little innovation [in healthcare] in the past decade. You see what happens in [other sectors] with commerce passing money around. Uber designs the payment process in delightful way.”
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