September 9, 2015 by

GuideWell Podcast: Optimizing the Startup Accelerator Experience

The latest GuideWell Insights podcast features an interview with Nina Nashif, CEO and Founder of Healthbox, and Renee Finley, head of GuideWell Innovation. Partners for the past three years on a new accelerator program in Florida, they share lessons on how to optimize the startup accelerator experience. GuideWell’s Kate Warnock offers the following top takeaways:

  • What makes Healthbox unique
  • If the entrepreneur – or the idea – matters most
  • Why certain applications rise to the top
  • What common pitfalls can sap your startup’s momentum
  • How more women entrepreneurs can connect with funding

While Nina and Renee provide perspective from the top down, we invite you to supplement their counsel with peer advice. Our Startup Survival series features interviews with graduates of the Healthbox accelerator program. Check how Peerfit broke through lackluster product adoption by disrupting their business model. Or how CareSpotter perfected its award-winning pitch. Don’t miss survival notes from health tech’s bleeding edge with eTect. Coming soon, Yo-Fi Wellness explains why your solution designer needs to pay as much attention to the buyer as he or she does to the user.

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July 17, 2015 by

Rock Health Video: Omada Health’s Sean Duffy on Designing a Digital Health Company

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July 8, 2015 by

Stanford Medicine X Video: Utah’s Dr. Vivian Lee on Power of “Fresh Eyes Put in the Right Environment”

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June 25, 2015 by

Innovation Diffusion: Shawn Ellis on Zest Health’s Smart Concierge

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Zest Health President Shawn Ellis

Today in Chicago the team from Zest Health will be live pitching their solution to WellTech as one of the finalists in the first round of the newly expanded Insight Product Development Startup Competition. Judges from MATTER, Baxter, and Insight Product Development hand-selected promising early stage healthcare innovations to compete for $35K in cash and professional services to further advance their innovations toward commercialization. On the eve of the competition, we caught up with Zest Health President Shawn Ellis, who joined full-time after a stint as entrepreneur in residence, to learn more about his team’s offering:

  • What is the mission of Zest Health? How did you get started?
    Our company mission is simple: we provide access to the information and guidance that health consumers need to Be Smarter and Buy Better when it comes to their healthcare decisions. We stretch consumers’ healthcare dollars further by helping them comprehensively understand their benefits and conveniently access care while optimizing cost, quality, and other consumer preferences. Our origin story is unique in that we were co-founded by successful entrepreneurs and investors with both HIT and consumer innovation expertise: Lee Shapiro and Glen Tullman of 7wire Ventures (formerly of Allscripts) and Brad Keywell of Lightbank (co-founder of Groupon, Echo Global Logistics, and MediaBank, among other ventures). It’s incredibly helpful to have their robust healthcare innovation and consumer perspectives as we’ve built the business.
  • Zest-phonesWhat problem are you working to solve? What is your solution and how does it work?
    Today’s healthcare consumer is responsible for a larger portion of his/her medical cost than ever, but lacks the resources necessary to make truly informed decisions about care. At best, traditional support services offer fragmented assistance with one or two distinct needs. Too often, consumers must synthesize information across multiple sources and navigate the complex care system independently. The burden of healthcare expense is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US today. Healthcare consumers need help navigating the healthcare system more effectively. Zest has created a Smart Concierge offering that absorbs complexity for consumers and helps them simply understand their benefits and optimally access care. The Smart Concierge is comprised of a personalized consumer-facing application as well as 24/7 support from our live clinical concierge team. We provide comprehensive, integrated support to the individual, including triage, detailed explanation of benefit coverage, real-time tracking of deductible and out-of-pocket progress, the ability to find and schedule in-network care, and visibility to the cost of care that they face. With Zest, consumers can understand and shop for healthcare just as they would any other good or service.
  • Where are you based? How has the area supported your development?
    We’re based in Chicago, IL. It’s an exciting time for the startup community in Chicago, particularly in the healthcare vertical. We’ve been fortunate to join MATTER, which is a community of like-minded entrepreneurs and healthcare leaders focused on driving innovation in health. MATTER has done a great job of leveraging the developed healthcare ecosystem that exists in the Chicago area at large, organizing helpful content and engaging strong mentors with industry expertise who are giving back to startups.

“Consumer centric” solutions shouldn’t necessarily be equated with elegant technology alone. It’s about connecting with consumers in a manner in which they’re comfortable. – Zest Health President Shawn Ellis

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May 29, 2015 by

Innovation Diffusion: Q&A With Wildflower Health CEO Leah Sparks

Kathy Leah together

Wildflower Co-Founders Leah Sparks & Kathy Bellevin

Wildflower Health was founded in June 2012 by healthcare and new business strategists Leah Sparks and Kathy Bellevin to deliver a mobile platform that helps health plans reduce medical costs. Their first program guides expecting moms through pregnancy and was featured this week in the Bloomberg article “Know Exactly When You Get Pregnant.” Reporter John Tozzi details how insurance companies are turning to such apps to reduce costs by reaching pregnant women sooner. Wildflower just signed a deal this month, he reports, to market its solution to Medicaid agencies across the country through Xerox and its 38 state health-information technology contracts. Below, Sparks shares more on her company’s accelerating growth:

  • What is the mission of Wildflower Health? How did you get started?
    Our mission is to make families healthier with mobile-based programs that connect families to healthcare. We got started when I was actually pregnant with my first child, and I experienced firsthand how people often use the healthcare system for the first time when they start families. Pregnancy seemed like a powerful context for teaching people not just about being healthy but how to use the healthcare system in a smart way. This idea dovetailed with my professional experience. I had started several new service lines at McKesson Corporation, and then at DNA Direct I had sourced and structured the company’s first contracts with healthcare payers.
  • WYhealth+screensWhat problem are you working to solve? What is your solution and how does it work?
    We are helping healthcare payers use mobile-based technologies to better engage the “Chief Medical Officer of the Home,” who is typically a woman, who makes 80% of healthcare decisions and influences health for her whole family. Our first product is Due Date Plus, which engages mom and dad throughout pregnancy to keep women on track with preventive measures and to identify the high-risk pregnancies. The product is unique in that it not only has consumer-engaging mobile features, but also has configurable features for our payer clients so that members can do things like click-to-call health plan nurses or look up in-network hospitals, right on their smartphone.

I hope the future of healthcare sees enough technology advancement that our local pizza place doesn’t have more sophisticated technology than healthcare enterprises. – Wildflower Health CEO Leah Sparks

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May 19, 2015 by

Innovation Diffusion: Q&A With BioscanR Founder Tracy Ingram

BioscanR Founder Tracy Ingram

BioscanR Founder Tracy Ingram

Tracy Ingram started his company BioscanR in response to the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE Challenge, a $10 million global competition to stimulate innovation and integration of precision diagnostic technologies. He pulled a team together with expertise in medicine, big data, and sensor technologies, and with some early funding and bootstrapping made it as far as the semifinals with his health monitoring solution. The team is continuing to build out their technology and just last week won the  “Best Wow! Factor” award at the WebRTC developers conference. Ingram shares more on their mission below: 

  • What problem are you working to solve? What is your solution and how does it work?
    We are looking to provide solutions to decrease cardiac readmissions. The BioscanR provides real time continuous vital monitoring similar to what is found in an ER, yet our system goes further and evaluates that information to help give an assessment of a broader picture of the patient’s health. The vitals we measure are EKG, pulse, respiration, movement, blood pressure, and weight. Our algorithms take in all this data and compare it to baseline data on human health that sheds light on the chances of readmission. The primary sensor is a Bluetooth patch that is attached to the chest over the heart. It is an FDA-approved Class II medical device that goes for approximately 24 hours on a single charge. The data is transferred to a tablet or phone to collect vitals during the day. BioscanR is a HIPAA-compliant solution providing real time vitals and alerts to medical professionals to assist in early interventions with both text and video messaging. It does this by incorporating wearable FDA-approved technologies to monitor vitals and transmits those through secure channels for professionally trained monitoring, specifically looking for irregularities and/or problems.test1
  • Where are you in the development process? What are your most immediate goals?
    We just released the telemedicine component of the BioscanR last week at the WebRTC conference. We partnered with mobile services provider Forge by Acision for SMS, chat, and video functionality. Our collaboration won the “Best Wow! Factor” award for its integration of vitals and video conferencing that allows medical practitioners to connect from anywhere on any device, without the need of a specialized app. Our immediate goal is finishing our software development kit (SDK) as we have large health organizations interested in including our vitals-monitoring solution in their existing applications.
  • [Read more…]
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May 15, 2015 by

Health Market 2.0: West Coast Leadership, Global Impact

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Last week in San Francisco, Oliver Wyman hosted the 14th Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center session: Health Market 2.0 – West Coast Leadership, Global Impact. The session brought together West Coast leaders to explore how to speed the diffusion of innovation in healthcare. Oliver Wyman’s San Francisco-based Tom Robinson and Steven Cupps offer key takeaways from the event:

Some 40 leaders from 32 organizations created a cross-industry community that represented employers, insurance, health systems, provider groups, venture capital, retail, health technology, diagnostics, and life sciences. During the session, we discussed the trends fueling the patient-to-consumer revolution, while also exploring the transition through the lens of three emerging markets. We identified these opportunities (see slide above):

  • The New Transparent Market
    New channels are transforming how consumers select and purchase their healthcare products and services.
  • The New Front Door to Health
    The convergence of smart care teams, direct-primary care, navigation services, retailers, mobile apps, and telehealth are breaking the traditional office-centric access model and replacing it with a consumer-led anytime, anywhere model.
  • Personalized and Preventative Health
    The rising prevalence of genomic testing, rapid diagnostics, and big-data algorithms is shifting treatment paradigms towards consumer-directed preventative care.

[Read more…]

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May 13, 2015 by

ICYMI: WIRED Health 2015 Highlights

WIRED Health 2015 was held April 24 in London, bringing together more than 20 industry-leading speakers plus a selection of startups and growth-stage companies working in the fields of medical technology, software, and services. The event was designed to showcase disruptive thinking and innovation in a range of disciplines, from diagnostics and neuroscience to data-driven healthcare and new material sciences helping to re-build the human body. Speakers included Adam Gazzaley, founding director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center, on how video games are the future of medicine and education; Oxford Nanopore CTO Clive Brown on how his company’s USB stick-sized DNA sequencer will enable an “internet of living things;” and Neuroelectrics’ Ana Maiques on her company’s headgear designed to monitor the brain and help patients recover from strokes, epilepsy, and depression.

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May 11, 2015 by

Innovation Diffusion: Q&A With Personal Medicine Plus Co-Founder Natalie Hodge

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Personal Medicine Plus CMO Dr. Natalie Hodge

Dr. Natalie Hodge is a board-certified pediatrician and has been serving children for more than 20 years in St. Louis and Paducah, Kentucky. Her experience has given her insight into the difficulties of behavior change and the importance of maintaining a simple strategy to improve health. Along with public health advocate Brandi Harless and tech entrepreneur Jay Campbell, she founded Personal Medicine Plus to help patients create “a personal health feedback loop for real behavior change.” From their headquarters in rural western Kentucky, CMO Hodge shares more about their digital health innovation:

  • What is the mission of Personal Medicine Plus? What problem are you working to solve?
    Our mission is to end lifestyle disease. We are trying to delay onset of diabetes and hypertension in underserved and at-risk populations by changing the behavior of our patients—both teenagers and adults—on an hour-to-hour basis as they go about their day. We are talking about a group of people who rarely have a glass of water, who have never had any veggies to eat aside from French fries, and who are completely sedentary, taking less than 1,000 steps daily.
  • What is your solution and how does it work?blog-screen-pmp
    We use iOS and Android platforms to deliver our software to patients. Physicians or care managers “prescribe” the software and help patients download the software in their offices at the point of care. Once the software is on the phone, this simplifies the conversation and counseling around behavior change. Behaviors are clearly tracked on a dashboard with a gamified interface that’s engaging and fun for patients to use. The goal is to “get your screen to green” by the end of the day. Three health behaviors can affect 80 percent of healthcare costs: Water intake, fruit and veggies intake, and daily steps. Three simple behaviors. Our software flows data from connected health devices to simplify use and reduce user data inputs. It gathers data from home scales, blood pressure cuffs, and blood sugar monitors.
  • What resonates most with patients?
    I tell patients the first step in improving your health behavior is to track your health behavior. Then, I tell them this is health industry software, not a consumer application. I give them my coupon code that identifies my population. And I tell them their use of the software connects to a population health dashboard that I can see, tracking the entire patient group’s every step and their every weight—as well as their nonuse of the software. Patients’ eyes get really big at that point, and I like to use the analogy of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, or even “big brother” for parents. This adds in the piece of accountability for patients that is missing when consumers use a pure consumer software play. The messages are: “My doctor daily wants me to do this” and “This is how I’m going to accomplish these goals.”
  • [Read more…]
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April 29, 2015 by

Quotable: Healthloop Founder Jordan Shlain’s Advice for Entrepreneurs & More

who-we-help-hero-2xDr. Jordan Shlain founded Healthloop, a cloud-based platform that automates follow-up care so doctors can check in on patients in-between visits. In a new LinkedIn post, he shares the transcript  of an interview he completed with the Health Data Consortium out of Washington, DC. The wide-ranging post “Nuance. Health. Digital. Language. Innovation. Humanity. Data” brings together all these different topics into a thought-provoking piece on the intersection of language and health, data response curves, and more. Below, an excerpt featuring his advice for entrepreneurs:

With HealthLoop, it was an inside-out solution. I’m a doctor, and I solved a problem for myself and other doctors – on the inside of the healthcare system. The advice I would give to entrepreneurs is to make sure you talk to clinicians before you build something and that, if they agree it’s a good idea, they’ll also test it for you. Many smart, talented entrepreneurs start with ‘I see a problem, it happened to me (or my mother) and I’m going to fix it.’ The problem here is that they don’t appreciate how complex and intertwined healthcare is. John Muir once said, “When you tug on a single thing in nature, you realize it’s connected with everything else”. The same is true for health IT. Many of the outsiders trying the outside-in approach run into the issue that, when they try solve one problem in healthcare, that creates four more.

Also, with a healthcare system that is overwhelmed by meaningful use, ACOs, penalties and regulations, doctors don’t want to juggle something new if it’s one more thing to do. It’s not that your product isn’t great, but changing healthcare is like trying to change a tire on a moving car. Unless if you have a champion internally, it will be hard to get anything going. If you choose to go into an incubator or accelerator program, make sure they have a proven track record of getting products into a clinical practice in some meaningful way. However, once you get in and you break into a health system, your product is automatically legacy, and once you’re legacy, people don’t want to get rid of you because they’ve already made the investment in the switch. Nothing goes viral in healthcare. Things go super slowly, and you have to have a realistic time horizon. Things don’t go viral in healthcare like they do in the rest of the internet, they go bacterial. Slow and steady.

Read the full post here.

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