Meet 24 Startups Innovating in the Pandemic Response Moonshot
This month, we review the startups in the StartUp Health portfolio that have doubled down — or pivoted — to fight COVID-19 and address the public health crisis it created.
For 2021, we’re excited to introduce Moonshot Programming in which we highlight leading Health Transformers focused on our 12 health moonshots. This month, we’re showcasing the Health Transformers who have focused their efforts to meet COVID-19 demands.
All around the world, people are facing unprecedented challenges and uncertainties as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. It has created both public health and economic crises of historic proportions, with nearly 114 million cases and 2.53 million deaths reported globally.
Despite these drastic numbers, COVID-19 has shown just how fast and efficiently the health tech community can collaborate and re-focus. Case in point: At StartUp Health, an army of Health Transformers has mobilized to help fight the coronavirus and address significant unmet healthcare needs that have been amplified by the pandemic. We’ve compiled a list here.
The companies on this list span a range of industries such as nutrition, finance, senior care, transportation, blockchain, and more. Some are offering users free access to their products or services during the pandemic. Others are helping pinpoint and track problems and solutions amid the pandemic. Others are shifting their operations to produce new products in the fight against the coronavirus, in an ever-changing landscape. Take a look and connect with the companies below.
Get to know the StartUp Health companies that are innovating in the Pandemic Response Moonshot:
1Doc3
‘Healthcare for the rest of us.’ That’s the message Javier Cardona and Nicolas Duran, Co-founders of 1Doc3, are working to achieve. The duo has created one of the largest medical teleconsultation platforms in Latin America with more than 500 doctors and health professionals available for consultations right at your fingertips. Individuals, doctors, and insurers are able to assess symptoms and seek trusted medical advice from a doctor with around-the-clock care via a mobile application (available on Google Play and the Apple App Store) or online. 1Doc3 provides expert medical guidance for over 50 different specialties, allowing users to avoid unnecessary trips to the emergency room and practice social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Aimee Health
CEO & Founder Alan Gale and his team of immunity and nutritional experts are helping transform patient immunity using the latest scientific research and digital tools. Aimee’s practitioner-friendly assessment, science-based protocols, and AI-driven nutrition mobile app provide patients with the tools they need to reach their health goals. Now the team has developed an immunity guide for protecting your immune system amid COVID-19 and beyond.
AlemHealth
Not sure if your radiology report was thorough or accurate? Long waiting times to receive your radiology reports? AlemHealth provides complete, multi-facility radiology management from imaging to reports for both patients and providers. Patients can access world-class radiologists at affordable prices right from their mobile phones, send studies to radiologists worldwide trained at top medical centers, and reduce unnecessary treatment costs.
Beyond Lucid Technologies
Co-founders Jonathon Feit and Christian Witt are on a health moonshot mission to save lives by increasing operational, financial, and clinical efficiencies and ensure that emergency medical services (EMS) agencies get paid for their work by connecting ambulances and care facilities before the patient arrives. Beyond Lucid Technologies’ electronic patient care record platform, Medview, helps import and export data to hospital systems in as little as 30 seconds to help bridge the communication barrier between EMS and care facilities.
Biome Analytics
Biome Analytics helps doctors and healthcare professionals deliver better cardiovascular care to more patients, at a lower cost. For doctors and caregivers, Biome offers a suite of targeted performance applications for each of your cardiovascular programs so you can engage doctors, align care teams, improve outcomes, attract new patients and payors, and improve your national rankings. When COVID-19 hit, Biome focused on using data to find out how to free up much-needed hospital resources and developed an analytic tool that helps hospitals make more ventilators and ICU beds available.
CarePredict
CEO Satish Movva and his team at CarePredict deliver actionable insights to help clients and caregivers provide better senior care. Their comprehensive solution combines wearable technology, smart indoor location tracking, deep machine learning, and sophisticated predictive analytics to bring peace of mind for seniors and their loved ones. As of last year, CarePredict launched their PinPoint Toolset, an automated, digital contact tracing solution specially designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus in high-risk, high-density areas such as senior living facilities and nursing homes.
CliniVantage
Based in Pine, India, CliniVantage provides analytics with custom insights and dashboards, automates workflows, provides real-time decisions and point-of-care alerts for care teams. Last year, the team launched CliniQ, a practice management platform that connects healthcare providers and consumers to expedite the process of patient examination using telemedicine and other advanced features amid COVID-19. They have also launched CareMate Health ATM, a digital health kiosk for smart care delivery that can instantly test for temperature, blood pressure, and other parameters with patient records and digital details for all airports and school districts. It also provides pre-screening and identifies suspected cases (based on their history) for COVID-19.
Cognotion
CEO & Founder Jonathan Dariyanani is on a mission to provide dignity in work and dignity in care through native mobile, story-based training solutions. With Cognotion, the team crafts optimal learning experiences — emotionally and cognitively intense training and test prep applications that combine interactive video narratives with gamified learning modules, augmented by live simulation and social media reinforcement to deliver immediate, lasting results. Cognotion has implemented a no-cost system to train volunteer Certified Nurse Aides (CNAs) in a 60-hour online course in order to help triage and lessen the burden on nurses and doctors as the health care system becomes overwhelmed amid the pandemic.
Conversa
Conversa is on a mission to make conversation the cornerstone of health by delivering personalized, automated virtual care and communication. With Conversa Connect™, its proprietary patient profiling and health signals engine, and an extensive library of evidence-based virtual care pathways, Conversa enables organizations to effectively manage patients with chronic conditions, post-hospital discharge, perioperative care, medication adherence, oncology, pregnancy, lifestyle, wellness, and more. CEO Murray Brozinsky and his team have rolled out several powerful, quick-deploy programs developed with top clinicians — and CDC guidance — to help manage the COVID-19 outbreak. This comprehensive suite of programs is helping to rapidly improve health organization’s care capacity and provide a safe way to screen employees.
HealthTalk A.I.
With HealthTalk A.I., CEO & Founder Jerrod Ullah is helping every patient after every visit get the information and virtual follow-up they need to stay healthy. Through A.I.-assisted patient engagement, HealthTalk A.I. measures patient feedback at scale and provides the tools needed to better evaluate staff performance and the ability to automate the recovery of dissatisfied patients. The team has begun delivering their solutions at a minimal cost to help healthcare organizations tackle COVID-19 and is continuously updating their software to address the pandemic.
Hucu.ai
Healthcare communication simplified. With Hucu.ai, Co-founders Asif Khan and Laura McKee have developed a patient-centered messaging platform that organizes communication, stratifies and visualizes patient risk, and engages the workforce so they spend more time caring and less time chasing each other. During COVID-19, many patients have not been able to visit their clinicians and vice versa. With Hucu.ai’s communication hub, clinicians, patients and hospital staff are able to continue the patient’s virtual visits and communicate with one another without the risk of infection.
Julota
With Julota, CEO Scott Cravens and his team are transforming the disconnected patchwork of local service providers into a well-coordinated network that can proactively manage and support individuals, saving each community millions of dollars in healthcare and operational expenditures. At the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, Julota launched a system for tracking, assessing, and following up with individuals that need to be tested or have tested positive for COVID-19, allowing paramedics, EMTs, caseworkers, and law enforcement officers to extend the capacity of the healthcare system and bridge platforms that don’t always share data but are all working toward health and safety in the community.
Life Recovery Systems
Matt Center, Robert Schock, PhD, and Robert Freedman, MD, are on a health moonshot mission to recover the quality of life for all stroke, heart attack, and cardiac arrest patients with non-invasive cooling technology. Life Recovery Systems’ ThermoSuit allows doctors to cool patients to a target temperature of 33 degrees Celcius in about 30 minutes. And after numerous lab studies, the team realized that rapid cooling with the ThermoSuit resulted in a decrease in the SARS-COV-2 viral load by a factor of 1000.
LifeWIRE
CEO & Founder Howard Rosen and the team at LifeWIRE have invented a communication platform designed for population management in order to fulfill their mission to provide patients access to care, anywhere, anytime, on any device. The technology empowers healthcare providers to have on-going patient contact and insight through personalized, automated remote dialogue. As a response to the pandemic, LifeWIRE’s technology enables employers or healthcare teams that are managing complex populations or health crises like COVID-19, to quickly utilize LifeWIRE, following CDC and state-specific guidelines, for products such as a daily symptom checker, self-isolation management, and long-term COVID-related issues such as mental health.
MedHaul
Founded in the heart of the Memphis Medical District, MedHaul is closing the transportation gap by providing access to quality, inclusive transportation services for often overlooked populations, improving their quality of life and care. For healthcare providers, caregivers, and patients with special needs who are burdened with medical transit amid COVID-19, MedHaul is automating the transit management process, providing a single place to schedule and track rides for any patient, with any need.
Mediktor
Based in Barcelona, Spain, Mediktor is an accurate AI-based medical assistant for triage and prediagnosis for insurance companies and health systems that need to manage utilization more effectively. In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the team at Mediktor developed a COVID-19 Assessment that uses artificial intelligence to not only check a person’s symptoms against symptoms of the disease but also provide differential diagnosis and practical recommendations to the users.
The Mind Company
For smokers trying to quit, The Mind Company has developed MindCotine, a product that specializes in smoking cessation, through a mobile-based solution combining virtual reality, psychological therapy with mindfulness, and a 24/7 craving control support center with on-demand psychological support. The team is offering their smoking cessation program and a 15-minute session with a therapist for free amid COVID-19.
Navimize
Jennifer Meller, MD, and Kavita Mangaland, Co-founders of Navimize, have created a virtual waiting room for modern healthcare. The platform uses proprietary algorithms to automate in-office and virtual patient flow, making implementing social distancing mandates easy amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Open Health Network
For healthcare organizations struggling with hiring and retaining enough engineers to maintain all their mobile applications and new devices, Open Health Network provides a patient experience management system that enables rapid development of AI-powered chatbots, mobile and voice apps, and a content management system to keep everything updated automatically. In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Open Health Network has created a free symptoms tracker (available in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian ), and has compiled around 400 testing locations within a public spreadsheet to create an interactive map to help individuals find COVID-19 testing locations near them.
Patientory
With Patientory, CEO & Founder Chrissa McFarlane is empowering end users globally with a secure platform to manage and transfer their health data in order to achieve actionable insights for improved health outcomes and well-being. Patientory uses blockchain technology via the PTOYMatrix to ensure end-to-end encryption while adhering to regulatory guidelines and compliance requirements. The team is providing real-time COVID-19 patient tracking and a reporting tool, which evaluates users’ current health conditions with a self-inspection quiz and diagnostic testing kit equipped with diagnostic care treatment plan to share with telehealth providers.
Play-it Health
Play-it Health provides education and remote patient monitoring in a rich communication and incentive platform, achieving some of the highest engagement and adherence rates in the industry. In response to COVID-19, Kimberly Gandy, MD, PhD, CEO & Founder, and her team are offering a comprehensive virtual care solution that allows someone to move from tracking symptoms through spot-checking vitals to continuous remote patient monitoring using telehealth.
Quick’r Care
CEO & Co-founder Alex Guastella has created a marketplace where patients can search for facilities by type, find one with the best “next available time,” and register to hold their place in line. The Quick’r Care team has built COVID-19 centers to help patients find immediate care and treatment. The platform allows users to find an ER or urgent care, save their place in line, and pre-register to help with triaging so their information is available on a kiosk when the user arrives at the point of care.
Ride Health
By leveraging technology and data, the team at Ride Health is modernizing traditional approaches to transportation to offer a more effective solution that results in an optimal ride experience for patients across a wide range of clinical and social needs. Last year, Ride Health launched a COVID-19 ride tracking program for hospitals nationwide to help reduce the transportation coordination burden for clinicians and effectively manage patient discharges to assist with efficient operations.
Tahmo
Co-founders Arif Quronfleh and Ziad Ghannoum are on a health moonshot mission to improve patient care by developing core technology for connected and wearable medical devices. The company’s temperature alert device, Thermi, allows for continuous tracking of body temperature for people who are quarantined amid COVID-19 and under stay-at-home orders.
On March 11, 2021, meet five of these extraordinary Health Transformers in our next Health Transformer Showcase. Request an invite today.
Investors: Learn how you can invest in Health Moonshots through StartUp Health’s new rolling impact fund.
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