The MedCity INVEST conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Chicago March 28-30 takes a closer look at some of the topics at the heart of healthcare innovation. It also highlights startups that play a key role in healthcare transformation as part of the Pitch Perfect contest.
The Care Coordination and Value-Based Care track of the contest includes 10 companies. The areas of healthcare they seek to remedy span acute care rehabilitation, neurodegenerative diseases, and smoking, among others.
To view the full agenda, click here.
Judges for the pitch track, which is sponsored by UnityPoint Health Ventures, include:
- Austin Duke, Venture Investing Director, UnityPoint Health Ventures
- Justin Norden, MD, Partner, GSR Ventures
- Jane Rho, Investor, Venture Fund, Davita Venture Group
Here’s a look at the finalists:
FlexTogether enhances recovery for older adults following an acute health episode. The online program provides friendly health coaching, accessible health education, and joyous exercises tailored to the patient’s stage of recovery. The business was a member of the most recent cohort of the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator Program. Researchers estimate that 30%-50% of patients are non-adherent with their physical therapy home exercise programs, which increases their chances of chronic pain, loss of function, and complications. The company connects older adults with a friendly health coach online, to enhance their recovery after rehab. The goal of the company is to empower patients to be proactive in their self-care, and generate cost savings for hospitals and physician groups in value-based bundled payments.
HealthHive creates a uniquely structured digital space to allow patients and their families to meaningfully participate in their care without changing the existing workflows of the institutions involved in that care. Through sharing records, resources, and communication HealthHive gets everyone on the same page, reducing costs and increasing satisfaction.
Increased used of diagnostic imaging has increased the pressure on cardiac imagers and cardiovascular radiology workflows. There is also a shortage of cardiac imagers to visually read and interpret patient studies. Hearthealth Technologies is an AI-driven cardiovascular clinical decision support system across the siloed care-continuum. The technology seeks to significantly improve cardiac care and outcomes by providing accurate medical imaging analyses to cardiologists for better and consistent prognosis and diagnosis.
MyFormulary’s patented efficacy engine evaluates food for efficacy to treat or prevent disease. The Go/NO app replaces the existing habit/process of label reading and simplifies it, delivering vastly superior clinical results, while saving time. It delivers an instant “go or no” result with detailed gradings linked to relevant clinical studies. Consumers engage in managing food as medicine and reap financial rewards for health choices. The website enables users to shop by condition or goal. Both solutions are fully personalized to include biomarkers, genomics, likes, allergies, diets, restrictions, Rx usage, etc. Recipes and restaurant menu items are also analyzed, giving the consumer 100% control over their food. By way of example, the Go/No™ App can help the majority of the 88 million pre-diabetic Americans stave off Type 2 Diabetes
NeuroPath is a digital health platform that collects and consolidates the multitude of symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases to provide therapy and remote patient monitoring. Starting with Parkinson’s disease, NeuroPath addresses the lack of data and tools, the sporadic monitoring of patients and the absence of much needed interdisciplinary care. The current standard care path creates delays in the care path, impacts quality of life, and increases healthcare costs needlessly. NeuroPath’s proprietary tools collect patient-reported outcome measures, provide speech therapy, deploy marker-less video technology to analyze movements and measures medication response. All data points are visualized on a portal for the interdisciplinary team of clinicians. The business creates meaningful touch points and insights along the care pathway to intervene faster when disease symptoms change, lower costs by avoiding adverse events, such as a fall or hospitalization, and create a personalized care path to improve quality of life and outcomes.
PatientPattern offers a frailty-driven, risk stratified clinical decision support solution that enables prospective coding and generates focused care pathways that reduce Medical Loss Ratio (MLR). For healthcare organizations who manage risk, the current approach to coding and care planning is backwards and inefficient, which negatively affects outcomes, Risk Adjustment Factor scores, and reimbursement. Care plans are developed using retrospective (and often inaccurate) diagnoses, preventing the ability to intervene prospectively and reduce lower value care. Providers are forced to manage hundreds of frail patients using a patchwork of disparate systems causing data gaps, manual workarounds, inefficiency, and frustration. Care Coach is a clinically validated, frailty-driven solution that identifies functional and psycho-social deficits used to stratify risk and drive more effective care plans, giving providers the predictive insights needed to help patients avoid health problems and the associated costs. Additional codes presented to providers to optimally align patient risk with HCCs, reducing rework and improving RAF scores and reimbursement.
Pivotal Health is focused on making healthcare convenient, transparent, and consumer friendly. Consumers can use Pivotal Health’s mobile app to easily schedule an appointment for a highly experienced provider to come to their house, apartment, dorm room, or office at a time that works for the consumer. Pivotal Health advanced practice providers can do anything in the home that can be done in an urgent care or clinic office including point of care tests for covid, flu, strep, RSV, UTIs, and mono. We can repair lacerations, administer IVs, take blood and urine samples for labs and can even do X-rays, ultrasounds, and EKGs. Pivotal Health currently serves the Madison, WI metro area and the Milwaukee metro area.
Vincere uses 1:1 clinical counseling, remote monitoring and financial incentives to help smokers of all income levels quit smoking. It claims to be the only solution in the market that is able to put majority of its fees at risk and be accountable to objectively measured quit outcomes.
Visura Technologies will commercialize its proprietary TEECAD System in 2022 (having received FDA 510K clearance in 2018).It is the first real-time camera system that allows physicians to visualize the placement of probes during one of the over 600,000 to 630,000 transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) procedures that occur in the U.S. annually. TEE procedures are the gold standard for imaging the heart. Currently, TEE is done blind, which adds risk to these procedures and amounts to a potential per patient complication cost of $102,000 that is unreimbursed.
YourCoach is an operating system for behavior change powered by technology-augmented gig-economy of health & wellness coaches.
Picture: uzenzen, Getty Images
