Hospitals, Startups

Predictive analytics startup wins Mayo Clinic’s Think Big Challenge

A predictive analytics company takes the top prize at the Mayo Clinic Think Big Challenge, part of Mayo's Transform annual conference, and with it the right to commercialize a Mayo technology.

Vintage engraving showing a Communion Chalice from the twelfth century

Vintage engraving showing a Communion Chalice from the twelfth century

Shantanu Nigam wasn’t afraid to admit that his company’s efforts had not succeeded. For three years, Nigam tried and failed to get Jvion’s patient-level predictive clinical analytics technology to work as well in hospitals as it did in the company’s laboratory.

But after tweaking its AI-assisted technology, RevEgis, which is designed to predict the risk of illness in patients before symptoms occur, the technology is now in about 300 hospitals nationwide. The system helps providers target low-cost, non-invasive, and easy-to-apply measures to prevent illnesses.

That record of failures and the problem-solving that has begun to yield success impressed the judges of the Mayo Clinic Think Big Challenge, who awarded Jvion $50,000 on Thursday to bring a Mayo technology to market. The Think Big Challenge is part of Mayo’s Transform 2016, an annual conference in Rochester, Minnesota, that exhorts attendees to eschew old ways of thinking about problem-solving to improve public health and healthcare.

“We loved how (Nigam) opened (the presentation) about learning from failure, and it’s clear that he had a very strong go-to-market (strategy),”said Timmeko Love, a contest judge who works in business development in the technology transfer office of Mayo Clinic Ventures in Arizona, in an interview after the contest. “It incorporated all of those learnings that he had starting out in the business those first three years to clarify what’s the value proposition for providers.”

Another judge echoed Love.

“They were going to be able to know the most about what it would take to get Mayo’s technology into the market, and they have a channel for it, so it was a really fortuitous unfair advantage,” said Rob Faulkner, managing director of San Francisco investment advisory firm Redmile Group, of the initial stumbles of Jvion, in an interview.

Shantanu Nigam, winner of Mayo Clinic Think Big Challenge

Shantanu Nigam, winner of Mayo Clinic Think Big Challenge

The Mayo technology that Jvion will commercialize is Bedside Patient Rescue, which alerts providers to subtle changes in the conditions of patients who don’t exhibit obvious indications of decline until it’s too late to save them.

Mayo has deployed Bedside Patient Rescue in a series of in-house pilot demonstration projects, and offered it as one of five projects for entrepreneurs and established companies to consider taking on through the contest.

Another factor that swayed the judges is Jvion’s experience with data. The company includes people who wrote the algorithms for Excite, a search engine and Internet portal that dates to the dawn of the Internet.

The fact that Jvion already has relationships with a broad array of providers, including some in rural communities made the company the perfect vessel for commercializing Beside Patient Rescue. Seeing Mayo technology affect patients’ lives in those communities is an exciting opportunity, Love said.

Nigam likewise believes that Bedside Patient Rescue has potential to save many patient lives, and will achieve real success when it is put to work in small and rural hospitals that struggle with data issues.

Jvion’s leaders have been aware of Bedside Patient Rescue for about seven years and consider it complementary to what they do, Nigam said in an interview. He predicted it would take three months to integrate the software into Jvion’s system and introduce it to the company’s existing clients, which include large and small hospitals. The smaller ones will take priority.

“Johns Hopkins and Mayo and Cleveland Clinics already have so many things which are well done inside,” Nigam said. “It’s the community hospitals which need more help with technology like this. So we want to focus there more so.”

More information about the other contestants and judges can be found here.

Photo: Nancy Crotti and  Duncan Walker, Getty Images

 

 

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