The Pitch Perfect competition will arguably be the most exciting part of the MedCity INVEST conference scheduled for May 22-24 at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Chicago. During the competition, healthcare startups will be challenged to present their businesses to a team of investor judges and explain how they are solving unmet or inadequately met needs in healthcare—all within their allotted time.
To view the full agenda and to register, click here.
The finalists for the two health tech tracks have been selected. One will focus on tech geared for payers and hospitals. Another will focus on health tech for consumers and employers.
The judges for the health tech for payers and providers track, which will be held on Tuesday May 22 from 11:30 am to 12:35 pm CT include:
- Raffi Boyajian, Principal, Cigna Ventures
- Kelsey Maguire, Managing Director, Blue Venture Fund
- Jay Rughani, Investment Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
The judges for health tech track aimed at consumers and employers, which will be held on Wednesday May 24 from 1 pm to 2:05 pm CT include:
- Shawn Ellis, Managing Partner, Distributed Ventures
- Prateesh Maheshwari, Managing Director, Maverick Ventures
- Marissa Moore, Investor, OMERS Ventures
Here’s a look at the companies:
Health tech: Payer/Provider
AccessVR applies virtual reality to medical education. The company works with colleges and university clients to provide role playing exercises through standardized patients for medical scenarios, 360 video production services, and support for curriculum development and immersive instruction. Its goal is to build a library of foundational knowledge that can be shared and customized by educators across academic disciplines. Among the applications are counseling families with end-of-life decision making and practicing protocols for surgical procedures.
Hucu.ai helps teams within and across organizations stay aligned with real-time, manageable notifications activated through algorithms and workflow automation. Collaborating healthcare professionals for a given patient can be added and removed on the fly to support care coordination across settings of care and situations. Family members are kept in the loop with separate secure communication.
KeyCare is a telehealth company that offers health systems access to a virtual care workforce on Epic. It does this by partnering with high-quality virtual medical groups who work on the optimized Epic instance and use Epic’s interoperability features to make them available to others.
LUMINARE is a healthcare technology solution that helps detect sepsis in patients, a potentially life-threatening condition that requires prompt treatment. It provides real-time alerts to clinicians of patient deterioration and integrates with existing sepsis protocols. The tool uses information from the patient’s chart to quickly identify sepsis and facilitate communication between nurses and other healthcare providers, enabling faster treatment by multidisciplinary teams.
OmniLife Health’s FlowHawk is a communication-centric provider-to-provider clinical workflow automation platform focused on complex care with initial focus on organ transplant, organ failure care, and complex cancers.
Repaytient simplifies the billing process and provides increased cash flow and increased patient satisfaction — by offering patients modern, flexible digital-first billing and payment solutions, including interest free payment plans that provide budget-friendly payment options to patients. It provides patients the flexibility to make payments conveniently and over time, which allows patients to access essential and elective medical care.
Health Tech Consumer/Employer
Digbi Health uses AI to harness clinical, genetic, gut microbiome, food, and behavioral signals to target the root cause of illness. It delivers tailored whole-person care, including: remote monitoring, CGM monitoring, food-as-medicine treatment, GLP intervention for obesity with pharma reduction and titration, behavioral coaching support, and care coordination through an interdisciplinary virtual care platform.
InView Analytics and consumer-facing InStockRx platform are designed to quickly find medicines in short supply or generic alternatives that may be sitting on pharmacy shelves, connecting siloed healthcare systems to a centralized inventory hub and enabling pharmacists to manage drug shortages better proactively.
Juli is an AI-powered chronic condition management platform that engages patients to power their health while offering healthcare providers insights from sub-episodic health data.
MediKarma offers a personal visualization avatar, a unique health score, and a virtual healthcare assistant to give people access, ownership, and activation of their own health.
Partum Health offers online and offline specialty care for women and families. Patient engagement takes place on its platform through HIPAA compliant messaging, digital care programs and evidence-based resource sharing, telehealth visits as well as in person care, both in home and in office.
Photo: AdrianHillman, Getty Images