More than 40 seed and early stage companies took to the showroom floor at this year’s mHealth Summit in Washington D.C., which ended Wednesday. Many were sponsored by incubators including StartUp Health and Rock Health. This is one of a series of posts I’m publishing that includes elevator pitches from 10 of the companies I liked.
Ayogo
Gaming is a big trend in health IT and mobile health in particular as a way to help patients follow a health regimen and make healthier choices. Ayogo‘s gaming software targets people with chronic diseases and encourages them to share their day-to-day progress with stories.
“We use play to help people with chronic conditions, to engage their social networks, to engage their own internal play instincts, to engage them with clinical-care programs that they typically have had problems engaging in,” said Michael Ferguson, the company’s CEO.
Last month, it launched a social-gaming program, “Community Quilt,” for people with diabetes with the nonprofit Diabetes Sisters sponsored by Sanofi-Aventis. The Vancouver, British Columbia company, with offices in Philadelphia, was sponsored at the conference by StartUp Health.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Read about the other nine startups: Above Stress, HealthTap, Meddik, ScriptPad, Force Therapeutics, OrganizedWisdom, EnHatch, Beyond Lucid Technologies and CareSpeak Communications.
