Blueprint Health, the New York-based healthcare accelerator, launched its second class of startups on October 4th.
Like their first demo day, the event quickly became standing room only, and was filled with VIPs from the government, investor, and entrepreneur community.
Most of the nine companies have raised several hundred thousand dollars, and a few already have clients and a respectable revenue stream.
I was particularly taken by the company Symbiosis Health, a web platform that provides all a high deductible health insurance plan holder needs to book and pay for medical services (appointments, diagnostic imaging, labs, procedures), compare prices, and painlessly apply the cost to their insurance deductible.
CEO Piyush Kedia was clear that rather than relying on big data or scraping bills to estimate costs, they recruit service providers to list their costs directly on the site, which often results in savings of up to 60%. I was a little skeptical about this part of the proposition, given the initial struggles of FairCareMD, but hope they prove me wrong as cost transparency and incentivizing patients to reward efficient service providers is fundamental to improving our healthcare system.
I’d also like to see quality information provided alongside costs so patients don’t worry they are taking risks with their health.
Applications are now open for BluePrint Health’s next accelerator program, which runs January 6 to March 29. Read more about the recent graduates below.
The List:
AdhereTech has created a patented pill bottle that measures the exact contents of the bottle (solid or liquid), wirelessly transfers this data to the cloud, and sends tailored reminders to patients if they forget to take a dose. The solution works for both solids and liquids, has an open API, and captures valuable real-time data. AdhereTech will initially focus on high-cost specialty medications, charging the pharmaceutical company to have their medication packaged in their bottles.
AllazoHealth is an analytics company that solves the problem of medication non-adherence for health insurers and Pharmacy Benefit Management companies (PBMs). The AllazoEngine leverages existing member data both to anticipate medication non-adherence and to predict the most effective and cost-efficient intervention strategy for each individual. I would have liked to see data on how much adherence actually improves, and at what cost.
DaisyBill is revolutionizing the incredibly inefficient workers’ compensation billing industry where 40% of bills are not paid. DaisyBill is a Saas platform that allows doctors and office assistants to submit and to get workers’ compensation medical bills paid quickly and efficently.
EMBI’s “out-of-the-box” analytics-as-a-service aggregates data from multiple hospital data systems to provide timely, meaningful, and quality information for hospitals to manage their departments. EMBI’s real-time and retrospective performance dashboards and key metric analytics are being used by hospitals to collect more revenue, manage utilization, risk and patient safety and improve departmental, as well as individual provider performance. They will charge hospitals by subscription fees.
EnHatch has developed a platform heavy on applications that helps medical device companies dramatically increase their sales and marketing team’s ability to educate and to convert surgeons. EnHatch leverages a surgeon’s own social graph and credibility with a product to help medical device companies engage and sell their products to more surgeons.
GeriJoy offers a software service for seniors that improves their quality of life and makes it easier to connect with family. The software takes the form of an intelligent pet inside an Android tablet, and provides many of the mental health benefits of pet therapy. It can also improve safety and labor efficiency in senior care facilities through intelligent audio-visual supervision. I was very interested in how GeriJoy could be used in the inpatient setting, where geriatric patients can quickly become disoriented and suffer hypoactive delirium.
Health Recovery Solutions has created a mobile platform that helps reduce CHF readmissions by providing hospitals with an early alert system. The platform creates a care giver and clinician support network to help patients learn and follow their treatment plan through the challenges of the first thirty days.
Medikly helps pharmaceutical brands and their agencies develop deeper relationships with healthcare providers by understanding them on an individual level. Through the Medikly platform, pharmaceutical brands can deliver personalized and relevant content and measure the effectiveness of deployed content on their market share. In conversation with a team member afterwards, she admitted that advertising to physicians is a highly regulated area, but stated that this is actually a competitive advantage for Medikly as it scares away traditional advertising agencies without the domain knowledge. I spoke to several doctors in the room who were a bit uncomfortable with enabling drug companies to target them in this way, but realistically Medikly had the most clear business model and traction of the BluePrint Health group and was a clear favorite amongst the VCs present.
Symbiosis Health is an easy to use web platform that helps employers transition their employees to a high deductible health plan and make sure that they are appropriately using it. It lets employees book and pay for medical services (appointments, diagnostic imaging, lab test, and procedures) online, easily compare prices and apply the purchases to their insurance deductible. They claim savings can approach 60%. CEO Piyush Kedia noted that there are four times as many medical visits booked each year as flights.
