Tools to drive personalized medicine and a physician appointment scheduling app are among the digital health products under development in Spartanburg, South Carolina-based Iron Yard’s first healthcare accelerator class. Although the majority are business-to-business products, there are also some business-to-consumer companies, which pretty much reflects the venture investment trends at the moment.
Each of the companies in the three month program get $20,000 in seed capital in exchange for a 6 percent equity stake. The class started this week and culminates in a demo day at Health 2.0’s Silicon Valley Fall Conference at the end of September.
The program includes weekly workshops in fundraising, development, design, lean startup methodology, team formation and financing. Among the accelerator’s partners are JM Smith Corp., a holding company for six pharmaceutical and healthcare businesses, Mayo Clinic, AbbVie (Abbott Labs), Zebra Technologies, and BMW.
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Although the startups have to be in Spartanburg for the program’s duration, it’s a geographically diverse group with members representing India, Illinois, Texas and California along with South Carolina.
Among the members are:
3Scan, led by Todd Huffman from San Francisco, is developing automated microscopes and supporting software to do 3D analysis of cells and tissue that can illuminate, slice tissue, and image simultaneously. and for tissue analysis.
ChartSpan has a personal health record platform for families that allows users to also carry around encrypted patient data on the mobile devices such as X-rays and other medical images and choose whether or not to share them.
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FitSteps led by Darlene Rodillo of South Carolina is working on a health and wellness program for better nutrition.
Health Plotter is a wellness platform developed by Senthil Premraj in Indianapolis. It uses financial incentives to encourage users to improve their health.MyDocTime is a physician finder and appointment scheduler business founded by Jim Ness of Spartanburg.
Prime Genomics from San Francisco and co-founded by Sandy Shaw is developing a breast cancer diagnostic that analyzes saliva.
Second Light, co-founded by Ajay Pal Singh, is developing a software platform for seniors including social connectivity, medication adherence, physician visits and caregiver services.
ThoroughCare hails from Philadelphia and is led by Dan Godla. It’s developing a care management portal to improve patient engagement.
Vheda uses data analytics to develop personalized care programs for people with chronic conditions. The goal is to change behavior using live video coaching sessions with certified medical practitioners over a mobile device. The idea is to reduce healthcare costs by scaling back office visits to physicians.
Mercom Capital CEO Raj Prabhu said in response to emailed questions that EMR, EHR, medical imaging and data analytics companies received the most venture capital investments in the second quarter within practice-focused technologies. But much of the investment growth in Q2 has gone towards consumer-focused technology companies like mhealth apps and wearable sensors, telehealth, including remote monitoring, and physician rating/search companies.
