This week, healthcare technology innovators, thought leaders, and business owners convene in Santa Clara, California for Health 2.0’s 11th Annual Fall Conference. While this year’s event runs from October 2-4, Medgadget was able to participate in the Sunday pre-conference and the annual Startup Pitch Competition.
Evaluating eight “Series A ready” companies, organized into professional solution (B2B) and consumer solution (B2C) tracks, were six judges. The diverse panel of judges included:
- Anya Schiess from Healthy Ventures
- Caroline Arenz from Healthbox
- Alexander Hoffman from Merck Ventures
- Gwyn Ballentine from Texas Medical Center Innovation
- Dennis Hillen from Humana
- Enke Bashllari from Arkitekt Ventures
Starting with the professional solutions track, we first heard from Keona Health, Klara, Exovite, and YouScript.
Keona Health, a 2013 BluePrint health Graduate, is an integrated platform for phone triage and evisits focused on significantly reducing clinical practice call volume. When a patient calls into a practice call center, the call center team uses Keona’s portal to see who is calling and access their medical history pulled from the electronic medical record. Scripts to guide the conversation and tools to schedule an appointment for the caller, which is then documented back within the provider’s scheduling system, are just two examples of how the Keona platform aids the call center team in efficiently taking action to improve and optimize efficiency.
Klara is a central messaging platform for healthcare. With communication limited to manual phone calls, unengaging patient portals, and non-collaborative channels (i.e. email), Klara’s goal is to save practices time and money by moving patient communication to a single, asynchronous platform connecting all key stakeholders. In addition to centralizing communication, Klara allows clients to collaboratively coordinate with other clinics and hospitals as well as pharmacies and labs. Quantifying their current level of user engagement, Klara reports “70% WAU/MAU (weekly/monthly active users) for active staff.”
Exovite is a Spanish company combining 3D printing and 3D scanning to offer customized, ergonomic splints. By personalizing each splint to the individual patient, Exovite ensures the right conditions for limb immobilization and rehabilitation while improving patient quality of life.
YouScript’s goal is to be the leading “self-learning” precision medication management platform. The platform provides real-time dosing guidelines and alerts to ensure patients receive the right dose of the right drug at the right time. For clinical users, a polypharmacy management dashboard identifies and prioritizes patients who are both at risk for adverse drug events and that would benefit from genetic testing. These tools are designed to intelligently trigger and triage alerts to keep care in network and patients at home. In initial use cases, YouScript reports a 39% reduction in hospital visits and a 71% reduction in emergency department visits with even more successful outcomes in a follow-up randomized control trial.
After a quick break, we heard from the consumer solutions track companies including DotLab, DermaSensor, QMedic, and Mediktor.
DotLab is the world’s first diagnostic test for endometriosis. Today, endometriosis diagnosis requires invasive laparoscopic surgery. DotLab provides an easy to use saliva sample collection kit that a patient can receive through the mail. Using a panel of microRNAs, the saliva is used to diagnose and monitor disease progression, recurrence, and therapy response. Actionable results provide peace of mind, as patients are able to track progress with repeat testing over time. The technology is highly accurate with the ability to identify endometriosis with sensitivity and specificity of >95%.
DermaSensor is working to solve skin cancer. Over eight years of development, DermaSensor has secured two patents and today has three ongoing clinical studies. The product is a physical device that uses elastic scattering spectroscopy to evaluate multiple skin lesions for the three major types of skin cancer (basal cell carcinoma (BCC), squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), and melanoma) in less than a minute. Targeting multiple verticals, DermaSensor envisions its product as a solution not only for consumers but also for physicians and retail clinics who need access to quick tools for skin cancer assessment.
QMedic strives to be the Onstar for care management through a medical alert service that intelligently routes alerts to help care networks target the right services to the right resources. Innovating in a market of legacy players like LifeAlert, the product includes a wearable alert button as well as a base station with a speakerphone to enable two-way conversations between patients and clinical teams. Covered as administrative service under the medical loss ratio, QMedic is already seeing 6:1 cost savings by diverting patients away from the emergency room.
Mediktor is a natural language expert system for pre-diagnoses, triage, and clinical decision-making. The user tells the system what is happening in plain language. Based on what is said, Mediktor guides the user through a series of questions to further understand what needs to be done before providing direction and connection with a doctor. Mediktor aims to bring value to health insurance companies, hospitals, providers, and telemedicine platforms, which all benefit from structured data. Being able to document, in a normalized way, symptoms and other risk factors at the earliest stages of a patient issue is core to Mediktor’s value proposition.
Taking home the prizes for this year’s Health 2.0 Startup Pitch Competition were Klara in the professional solutions track and DermaSensor in the consumer solutions track. Congratulations to the winners!
This was a great way to kick off Health 2.0’s Fall event and Medgadget’s coverage of new and interesting technologies being debuted and discussed here this year. Stay tuned for more news from Health 2.0 as we begin the main event this week!
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