Three West Coast investors picked three East Coast healthcare startups to move on to the final round of the SxSW health accelerator in Austin on Monday.
NeuroTrack, Docphin and Careport Health beat out five other healthcare startups. It was a standing room only crowd as the entrepreneurs pitched to three judges from the Bay Area. Stacy Feld of Physic Ventures, Nina Kjellson of Interwest and Lisa Suennen of Psilos asked about working with payers, getting reimbursed, and expansion opportunities.
Careport Health modernizes the process of finding care for patients leaving the hospital.
“Hospitals have paper lists of providers and they have to call and see if the facilities can take new patients,” CEO and co-founder Lissy Hu said. “All of this back and forth can take up to 20 hours.”
Careport allows a nurse at a hospital to enter a patient’s insurance information and then search for a facility. When she finds one that fits the right criteria, she can make a bed reservation immediately.
Hu and her co-founder Gretchen Fuller launched the first pilot at Mass General Hospital in January. There were 2,000 beds in the reservation system then. It has now grown to 4,000.
Right now the idea is to focus on post-acute care and get hospitals to pay to use the service. Hu said the longer term plan is to be the one-stop shop for all patient transitions, including reserving durable medical equipment.
Patients and caregivers can also search the provider listings and look for facilities with particular services or certain neighborhoods.
Hu said the company closed a seed round of $900,000 on Friday.
Careport has been part of TechStars and Mass Challenge, while Neurotrack and Docphin are both RockHealth graduates. Docphin is also one of StartUp Health’s healthcare transformers.
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.
Neurotrack has developed a test to identify people at risk for developing Alzheimer’s. A study tracked 92 people between 53 and 67 with no symptoms over 5 years. People who scored below 50 developed Alzheimer’s within 3 – 4 years. People who scored above 67 did not. CEO Elli Kaplan said that she is building a team, raising money, and preparing for the regulatory approval process.
Docphin is designed to help doctors manage information, particularly journal subscriptions. The platform makes it easier for doctors to keep up to date with evidence-based research. Doctors can select the topics they are most interested and read the research through Docphin’s platform instead of logging on to individual journal web sites. Dr. Mitesh Patel, Sanchin Nanavati and Dr. Derek Juang started the company. More than 100 healthcare systems are now using the service, including Harvard, Hopkins, Penn and Stanford.
The other two most interesting companies in the group were TedCas from Spain and Spot on Science.
TedCas has designed a box that can be connected to a hospital’s medical records system and turn images and other data into 3D images. Scans and x-rays can be manipulated with gestures instead of a computer keyboard. The idea is to reduce the need for the doctor to scrub in and out in order to look at a patient’s records during surgery.
Spot on Science has designed a matchbook-sized box to collect blood. HemaSpot is designed to make it possible to collect blood samples anywhere and any time without a trip to a clinic or doctor’s office. The paper that collects the blood is surrounded by a desiccant and the whole thing is enclosed in a blue plastic box. Drying the blood makes it stable at room temperature which means the sample can be mailed to a lab. The company is preparing to submit the kit for FDA approval.
The winner will receive $4,000 and lots of exposure. This is the fifth year that companies building tech businesses in news, social, mobile, web, entertainment and health have competed during the interactive event. Event organizer Chris Valentine said that startups that have pitched in previous competitions have raised more than $500 million and 10% have been acquired.
My pick is Careport Health, but the judges may find the idea of a reliable test for Alzheimer’s more compelling.
