Health IT, Startups

Here’s a look at StartUp Health’s latest additions from treating chronic pain to teledermatology

CNS Therapy, a University of North Carolina spin-off, provides an electrical stimulation treatment for chronic pain patients called Systolic Extinction Training.

startup health cafeStartUp Health used a pop-up space in San Francisco to temporarily serve as a showcase for its health tech companies. The StartUp Cafe was a hub of networking entrepreneurs, investors and healthcare leaders and served as the stage for its StartUp Health Festival. Through its venue it highlighted entrepreneurs seeking to solve healthcare pain points — real and figurative. Here’s a look at the newest companies to join the network covering areas from medical tourism to behavioral health.

Avicennas is a medical tourism business that’s trying to crack what it sees as a $100 billion medical tourism market. It is targeted to people specifically traveling abroad for medical care. Its co-founders include Ato Kasymov, Manu Kurbonali and Peter Hlinka. It has a presence in countries such as Singapore, Turkey, India, Poland and Costa Rica. It generates revenue from clinics through commissions.

CNS Therapy, a University of North Carolina spin-off, provides an electrical stimulation treatment for chronic pain patients called Systolic Extinction Training. The company’s technology is designed to address perceived pain, which shows up in scans even without tissue damage. It seeks to reset the autonomic nervous system. Its target customers are chronic pain therapists. The co-founders are CEO Marc Mathys, Chief Scientist Kati Thieme and COO Dieter Klein.

dermio app screen568x568Dermio provides a platform for dermatology practices to do direct-to-consumer, online dermatology consults. Similar to other companies in this area, patients snap a picture of their rash or skin discoloration and transmit and posts it for a dermatologist to review. The patients get asked questions in a video interface or by email. They reach a diagnosis and may even prescribe medication. So far it has a presence in five states. The co-founders are Dr. David Soleymani and Jim Richards.

Ecofusion is developing a disease prevention management app called NewMe. Its founder and chairman is Oren Fuerst, Abe Carmeli is the CEO and Steven Kaplan is the CMO. The Israeli company claims it has 21,000 customers to date with and is in the process of carrying out four pilot studies of its technology.

EmPower Cleantech entrepreneur Ronald Weidner is the founder of this consumer wellness company that’s developing an app to reward healthy behavior. Weodner also founded the Greenprint Foundation, which helps companies in 50 countries track carbon emissions. Its Director of Health is Daniel Cohen, who has served as Chief Medical Officer and Executive Medical Director for the U.S. Department of Defense’s health plan.

FitBliss is targeting the employer wellness space. One of its partners is Salesforce and is part of its app marketplace. The idea is to track how much exercise employees are doing so companies know how fit their workforce is. The company is led by Navid Rastegar, who previously worked for Salesforce where he managed software partner relationships.

Holiadvice provides the technology for physician practices to set up online clinics with video, communication, appointment booking and billing technology.

Konnarock healthcare developed a risk management assessment tool that is geared to nurses and their patients. It is designed to provide early warning on deteriorating conditions that could lead to costlier care. The app shows each nurse the patients in their unit. sign in to access patients on their unit. Nurses can highlight things like changing pain levels. In particular it is designed to function as a care coordination tool to improve handoffs during shift changes, a time when many adverse events can occur.

Uncle Care developed Heartizi for cardiology and cardiac surgery centers. It is designed to support remote patient monitoring for anticoagulation therapy by having patients respond to a series of questions through the app. The goal is to improve adherence through better communication between providers and patients. It claims that its approach adds more context to the device data that patients submit compared with its competitors.

Valera Health is a company that I profiled last year. Led by the former CMO of Merck subsidiary Healthcare Services and Solutions, the company takes data sets from providers and payers and uses them to identify patients with chronic conditions with a propensity towards behavioral health problems. It assesses how patients feel in a simplified questionnaire through its app and evaluates how active they are, how much they’ve read and slept partly through the use of their smartphone. It also enlists behavioral health coaches who communicate with patients and the rest of the care team. Its co-founders, who are all trained as doctors, include CEO Thomas Tsang, Ofer Sharon, the president and David Mou, the medical director.

Photo: StartUp Health

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