Health IT, Startups

Which 10 health tech startups made the cut for the Cedars-Sinai accelerator?

Whittled down from roughly 600 applicants, the goals of the 10 companies in the third cohort include improving the patient experience, offering more personalized care plans for cancer treatment, triaging patients faster and making blood sample collection less painful.

The Cedars-Sinai accelerator, managed by Techstars, kicked off its third class of healthcare startups this month. some of which are more mature than previous cohorts with a seed stage round behind them. Whittled down from roughly 600 applicants, the 10 companies are seeking to improve the patient experience, offer more personalized care plans for cancer treatment, triage faster and make blood sample collection less painful. Their technologies span artificial intelligence, voice recognition, microfluidics, and natural language processing.

Omkar Kulkarni, who serves as the director of the accelerator program for Cedars-Sinai, said in a call with reporters that the hospital continues to work with between 50 percent and 60 percent of the 18 companies from the first two cohorts both on a commercial and research basis, according to a transcript of the event.

Here’s a look at the 10 businesses taking part in the three-month program.

Aiva Healthcare, led by founder and CEO Aiva Sumeet Bhatia, developed a voice assistant for patients at the bedside by harnessing Amazon Alexa devices. It is designed to connect patients with their care team, asking their nurse for help to go to the bathroom or seeking the most appropriate staffer to respond when patients experience pain.

Cancer Aid is an Australian business that provides individualized cancer therapy information. Through its app, patients work with providers to get personalized cancer information, a journey organizer, and a community allowing patients to connect with others going through similar experiences. It also makes use of telemedicine, according to Dr. Nikhil Pooviah, the founder and CEO.

Choice Map collaborative decisionmaking software personalizes recommendations based on each patient’s clinical condition and personal preferences. When providers advise patients on preference-sensitive decisions, the company’s software helps them find the option that’s most likely to match the patient’s needs, according to Jonathan Jackson, Choice Map’s founder and CEO.

GYANT uses text messaging or voice-enabled technology to connect with patients, ask about symptoms in a chat setting and give them advice. Users sign in via Facebook It’s far from clear how comfortable hospitals would be deploying a tool like this, even if it does have machine learning baked into it. Although the company’s website claims that information from users is “just between us” the user has no idea who is behind the “us”. But the German company has grown its business in Europe and sees opportunities for expansion in the U.S., using San Francisco as its headquaters. Cofounder Pascal Zuta claimed on the media call that the company had 250,000 active users in August.

Invio developed software to support clinical trial documents and make it easier to manage drug trials from multiple sites and reduce the reliance on paper documents in these trials. J. Dema Poppa, the CEO for the Seattle-based business, previously worked as a clinical operations manager at Olympus.

Lumeon developed an automated care pathway to help patients get appropriate follow-up care based on the advice they’ve received and procedures they’ve had. Its app for clinical teams is designed to help them share and collect the information they need to monitor treatment status for their patients. The goal is to reduce unnecessary visits to the emergency room. Robbie Hughes, founder and CEO of the UK business, said on the media call that it helps payers and risk-bearing providers eliminate care variation by automating key processes such as follow-up, triage and coordinating care team engagement. He added that the business has demonstrated 80 percent cost reduction for clients.

Narrative Dx collects comments about the patient experience from social media, internal focus groups, CAHPS Surveys, discharge surveys, and doctor review sites, analyzes them and looks for common themes. It uses insights from patient comments to help hospital leadership improve patient experiences, increase referrals and improve staff satisfaction. Cofounder and CEO Kyle Robertson claimed on the media call that the company’s clients received $50 million in increased referral volume in addition to rapid increases in patient experience.

Seremedi  Kim Bond Evans, the founder of Seremedi, said the company is working with MD Anderson and Houston Methodist for its CareScriptions to get the right balance of inserting digital into the delivery of care. “We are looking forward to really further validating how we strike the right balance with making sure patients feel connected and cared for and care teams are not overworked. There’s not an overuse of emergency services, (room) services and making sure that both the care teams and the patients can work together to have the right outcomes.”

Sway Health developed a screening business to help primary care physicians identify unhealthy behaviors and guide patients into appropriate programs to address them such as smoking cessation, weight management, and depression. Its product involves digitizing screening, treatment planning, documentation, and billing so that healthcare providers can share recommendations during the check-up and do follow-ups after the patient has left the office.

Tasso is simplifying blood sampling and revolutionizing medical diagnostics through its HemoLink product. It sounds a bit like Theranos, but Ben Moga, a cofounder, said on the media call that the company is keen on clinical validation. He noted that the business is finishing up multi-site clinical trials and is projecting [510k] clearance to be the second quarter of next year.

“In the meantime, we can actively sell to different segments within the markets that have the right certifications whether they be CLIA or FDA and to researchers. So we are entering into what we consider our beta launch phase which started in August and is going to be an 18-month phase and Cedars Sinai is a strong clinical component of demonstrating what we consider to be very important which is clinical relevance.”

Seemingly in a nod to Theranos, Moga said some test results that have been challenged in the space of micro-sampling and that his company is strongly committed to demonstrating results that are clinically relevant. “And to have a strong clinical partner like Cedars Sinai as well as to have funding (funds) multiple government agencies or the science behind our blood draw, we hope inspires a lot of confidence in that statement.”

 

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