Tag Archives: Digital Health

Master the Art of Storytelling: Chrissy Farr’s Guide for Health Tech Founders

October 25, 2024Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsChrissy Farr, Digital Health, Health Tech, Logan Plaster, Manatt, Masterclass, StorytellingNicole Kinsey

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Elevate your startup’s narrative with Chrissy Farr, a renowned health tech journalist and investor.

In this Masterclass, members of StartUp Health’s Health Moonshot Communities had a chance to interact directly with Farr, Managing Director at Manatt Health, and health tech investor, advisor, and author of Second Opinion. Farr has impressive communications savvy and a deep understanding of the health industry and emerging trends, with an emphasis on the intersection of health and venture capital. She provides a range of go-to-market, fundraising / investor relations, social media strategy, content development and communications counsel to both emerging and established companies as well as the investors behind them.

In this insightful episode, you’ll learn:

The power of storytelling in shaping your company’s future
How to craft compelling narratives that resonate with investors and the media
Leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT for effective communication
Balancing founder time between operations and communications
Quantifying the impact of your communications efforts
The role of social media in your strategy

This episode is a must-listen for any health tech founder looking to refine their messaging and build a stronger brand.

Tune in now to unlock the secrets of effective storytelling!

Do you want to attend Masterclasses live and ask your questions of experts? Members of our Health Moonshot Communities are leading startups with breakthrough technology-driven solutions for the world’s biggest health challenges. If you’re mission-driven, collaborative, and ready to contribute as much as you gain, you might be the perfect fit. Learn more and apply today.

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Navigating the Longevity Economy: An AgeTech Masterclass with Mary Furlong

July 19, 2024Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsAgeTech, Digital Health, Health, health innovation, Health Longevity Moonshot, Healthcare, Healthy Longevity, Innovation, Logan Plaster, Longevity, Mary Furlong, Masterclass, Senior Care, SeniorsNicole Kinsey

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The heart of AgeTech, according to Mary Furlong: “Baby Boomers want a vision of the future, not a memory of the past.”

In this week’s StartUp Health NOW podcast episode, we dive into the booming longevity market with Mary Furlong, a legendary figure in AgeTech (senior innovation). In this excerpt from a Masterclass held for members of the StartUp Health community, Furlong shares her practical wisdom gained from more than 30 years in the industry, raising over $300 million for senior-focused businesses.

In this action-packed Masterclass, you’ll learn:

Creative, holistic, and practical go-to-market strategies for the longevity market.
How to identify real senior needs – sometimes it starts with a simple happy hour!
Proven tips for building socially conscious businesses that serve this rapidly growing population.

Mary Furlong is a leading authority on the longevity market. As the President and CEO of Mary Furlong & Associates (MFA), she’s a champion for companies creating products and services that empower older adults. She was named one of the top 100 women in Silicon Valley and received the first-ever lifetime achievement award from Aging 2.0.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from the best! This is an actionable and inspiring masterclass excerpt – take notes and get ready to take your longevity business to the next level.

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Inside the Impact Board: How Katya Hancock Supports Youth Wellbeing in the Digital Age

July 11, 2024Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsChildrens Health, Digital Health, Health Moonshot Impact Board, Health Moonshots, Impact Board, Innovation, Katya Hancock, Logan Plaster, mental health, Mental Health and Happiness, mental wellness, non-profit, nonprofit, Teen Health, wellness, Young FuturesNicole Kinsey

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This week on StartUp Health NOW, we explore youth wellbeing in the digital age with Katya Hancock, Founding Executive Director of Young Futures and a member of StartUp Health’s Health Moonshot Impact Board.

After 10 years as part of the StartUp Health executive team, Hancock brings her experience to this innovative non-profit focused on helping young people thrive online. We’ll move beyond the “screen time villain” narrative and explore real solutions for navigating the digital world’s tensions. We’ll discuss Young Futures’ first million-dollar funding challenge, tackling loneliness, social connection, and wellbeing. Inspired by the Surgeon General’s call to action, they’re empowering youth-led efforts alongside established organizations.

Focus on Youth Wellbeing: Young Futures aims to improve youth wellbeing and mental health, especially in marginalized communities. The organization seeks to shift the narrative from focusing on challenges to providing practical solutions.
Innovative Support for Nonprofits: The organization hosts funding challenges to support innovative nonprofits working to improve youth well-being. The first challenge, called The Lonely Hearts Club, focused on addressing loneliness and social connection.
Building a Collaborative Ecosystem: Like StartUp Health, Young Futures brings together grantees in an ecosystem to collaborate and support each other. This approach helps create a stronger network of organizations working towards common goals.
Real-World Applications: Examples of supported organizations include Hip Hop Into Learning, which helps kids express themselves and find community through hip hop, and Sesame 3G, which connects seniors, teens, and preschoolers for mentoring and social-emotional learning.
Challenges and Opportunities: Hancock emphasizes the importance of addressing the digital tension young people face and providing them with the tools to navigate the digital world healthily. She also discusses the need for nonprofit leaders to adopt practices from the for-profit startup world, such as long-term goal setting and effective communication with funders.
Supporting StartUp Health: Hancock expresses her commitment to ensuring young people are part of the conversation in healthcare. She appreciates StartUp Health’s model and media presence, which can help raise awareness about youth mental health and integrate it into broader health discussions.
Personal Insights and Future Goals: Hancock shares her personal journey and how her work with StartUp Health and Young Futures has influenced her views on technology and parenting. She envisions Young Futures becoming more of an entertaining media company to engage and support young people effectively.

Join us for a dive into the future of youth and technology!

If you’re interested in the latest on how to help teens thrive in the digital age, follow the Young Futures Newsletter and their LinkedIn page.

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A Masterclass with the Founder of One of the Great Success Stories in Health Innovation

June 14, 2024Business, Health, Innovation, Startupsbusiness, diabetes, Digital Health, health innovation, Health Moonshot, health startups, Health Tech, Health Transformer, Innovation, Logan Plaster, Sami Inkinen, Type 2 Diabetes, Virta, Virta HealthNicole Kinsey

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Virta Health is one of the greatest success stories in health tech today.

Join us for an insightful StartUp Health NOW episode featuring Sami Inkinen, the visionary CEO & Founder of Virta Health, a pioneering company focused on the reversal of Type 2 diabetes. In this Masterclass, originally recorded in front of a virtual audience of entrepreneurs in the StartUp Health community, Inkinen – also a member of the community – shares his journey and the innovative strategies behind Virta Health’s success.

Inkinen’s impressive background includes co-founding Trulia, leading it to a successful IPO and eventual sale to Zillow Group. At Virta Health, he’s raised $366M and achieved a $2B valuation, with the company recognized as a TIME100 Most Influential Company in 2023. Beyond his business acumen, Sami is a world-class athlete and health advocate, known for his rowing expedition to raise awareness about diabetes.

In this episode, Inkinen delves into:

The biggest surprises he faced as a health tech founder
Balancing his roles as CEO, father, and husband
The strategic planning rhythms that drive Virta’s mission
His personal journey, from existential crises to global health impact

As is typical of members of the StartUp Health community, Inkinen is generous in sharing his wisdom. Tune in to learn from his experience and gain valuable insights into leadership and achieving sustainable product-market fit in the digital health industry.

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Remote Work, Compensation, and Age Dynamics: Unpacking Digital Health Workforce Trends

April 10, 2024Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsAequitas Partners, compensation, Digital Health, executive search firm, health innovation, Innovation, Logan Plaster, Polina Hanin, remote work, workNicole Kinsey

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In this week’s StartUp Health NOW episode, we’re talking about work. Specifically the digital health workforce, and we’re talking with the one and only Polina Hanin, Senior Principal & Head of Development at Aequitas Partners.

Here at StartUp Health, we had the pleasure of working with Polina for several years, and it’s unlikely anyone has a better grasp on the digital health ecosystem. She’s worked with hundreds of founders and executives across healthcare. When she moved over to Aequitas, an executive recruiting firm in the digital health space, we knew she was going to continue to help a lot of people.

One thing she did, and the reason behind this interview, is launch the industry’s first – and certainly most comprehensive – workforce survey. If you work in digital health, you’ve probably seen information about it in your inbox.

In our conversation, which took place at ViVE in Los Angeles, we get into exactly what Polina has learned after four years of conducting this workforce survey. Particularly of interest were the trends around remote work compensation, attitudes towards hiring remote workers, and how work priorities shift as we age.

Lets get right into it.

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10 Years Later: A Health Tech Investor Reflects on Her Early Days at StartUp Health

December 7, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsDigital Health, Funding, Health, Health Tech, investing, Irem Rami, Norwest, StartUp Health, startups, venture fundingNicole Kinsey

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Ten years ago, Irem Rami became one of the first Fellows to join StartUp Health. In her role she helped vet the very first companies to join our community. That was back when it seemed very audacious indeed to have a goal of supporting 1000 healthcare startups. A few years later and we’ve now welcomed 500 startups into the community and are still going strong. In that time Rami moved on, went to business school, and is now a principle health investor at Norwest, a $3B multi-stage fund.

We called up Rami up for this StartUp Health NOW podcast episode to give us that decade look back – you know, it’s hard to understand where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from. She’s got a unique perspective on the durability of the StartUp Health vision and what it means to chase the same seemingly impossible dream for more than 10 years.

We also wanted to hear Rami’s advice for health innovators seeking to raise funds in this difficult market. She evaluates opportunities on a daily basis and had some sage advice to share for our listeners.

Enjoy the episode.

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Quantifying Mental Health: How Mobio Interactive Is Unleashing Precision Psychiatry at Scale

October 5, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsBechara Saab, Digital Health, health innovation, Health Moonshot, Health Tech, Health Transformer, Innovation, Logan Plaster, mental health, Mobio Interactive, StartUp Health NowNicole Kinsey

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There’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in business: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, the famed management consultant.‌

If business leaders such as Peter Drucker are right, not being able to measure the effect of an action would make it impossible to know if we should be doing more or less of that action – or if we should be doing it at all.

But if the saying is true in management, it’s even more true in clinical medicine in most areas of healthcare. Despite this seeming to be self evident, you’ve got to measure it to manage it yet there are still swathes of care that are delivered by some version of trial and error.‌

Our guest this week is Bechara Saab, PhD, CEO, Chief Scientist & Co-founder of Mobio Interactive, a company that joined the StartUp Health community in 2022.‌

Dr. Saab started as an academic researcher. It’s safe to say he loves measuring, loves gathering hard data and proving that he has found causation not just correlation in his work. So when his research introduced him to the modern world of mental health diagnosis and mental healthcare, he was taken aback by what he saw as a lack of solid objective measurements.‌

How could you help someone with anxiety, for instance, if you couldn’t accurately measure their anxiety before and after a treatment?‌

That is the thorny challenge that Dr. Saab is tackling with Mobio Interactive.

As you’ll hear, he’ll explain just how his research led to a solution that provides those objective measurements. His company, based in Singapore, came up with an accessible tool that provides clinically-validated therapy within a platform that objectively quantifies how a patient’s mental health is affected by therapy in real time and without a wearable, thereby allowing personalization of mental health therapy at scale.

Enjoy!

Innovators: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot

From the Archives: Dr. Robert Wilson on How Partnering with PreventScripts Enhanced His Medical Practice

August 9, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsAccess to care, Brandi Harless, chronic care, Cost to Zero, CovenantCare, CovenantCare Family Practice, Cure Disease, diabetes, Digital Health, Dr. Natalie Davis, Dr. Robert Wilson, health innovation, Health Moonshots, health transformation, Health Transformers, Logan Plaster, md, Natalie Davis, PreventScripts, Robert Wilson, Type 2 Diabetes, Type II DiabetesNicole Kinsey

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Typically on this show we talk to the health tech founders – who we call Health Transformers – that are creating the tools and platforms that will modernize our health system. Or we talk to top investors on what they’re looking for in startups.

But, on this week’s StartUp Health NOW, we look back at one of our most-popular podcast episodes, which featured a different kind of guest: one that helps round out the picture of how healthcare innovation goes from idea to real-world implementation.

Robert Wilson, MD, is a family physician who runs CovenantCare Family Practice, a multi-site medical practice in Tennessee. Dr. Wilson popped up on our radar because he was an early partner for PreventScripts, a startup that’s part of the StartUp Health community. PreventScripts, led by Brandi Harless and Natalie Davis, MD, has created a platform that helps family doctors like Dr. Wilson identify patients who would benefit from chronic care management. Think about a patient who is pre-diabetic and all signs point towards a long battle with Type 2 diabetes. While Dr. Wilson might be too overextended to identify and coach this patient before the disease sets in, PreventScripts can identify the risk and put the patient on a clinically-proven program. Patients with chronic diseases, or the risk of disease, get heightened care between visits, and Dr. Wilson gets added reimbursement.

We wanted to talk to Dr. Wilson to understand why he was interested in partnering with a health startup, as this is one of the key hurdles for any health innovator. How do you find the right clinical partner, a place to prove out your brilliant idea in the real world, and then iterate based on user feedback?

In the conversation – our most-downloaded episode in the past year – we’ll get into the real-world challenges that Dr. Wilson faces, his motivation for evolving his practice, and how PreventScripts has helped him fill gaps in patient care.

We will be back with fresh episodes after Labor Day!

Founders: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot

How Avanlee Care Is Teaming Up with Retailers to Address the Caregiver Crisis

July 14, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, Startups, UncategorizedAccess to care, Access to Care Moonshot, Avanlee Care, Avanlee Christine, Caregiver, Caregiving, Digital Health, Entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, health innovation, Health Moonshot, Health Moonshots, Health Transformer, Health Transformers, Healthcare, Healthy Longevity, Innovation, Logan Plaster, LongevityNicole Kinsey

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Our podcast guest this week is Avanlee Christine, CEO and Co-founder of Avanlee Care, a company that joined StartUp Health in 2022. A few years ago Avanlee found herself helping to coordinate care for her grandmother. Everyone in the family wanted to help, but she lived far away, and there just wasn’t a good way to check in on her health and be the kind of support that Avanlee and her family wanted to be.

As many entrepreneurs do, Avanlee said to herself: There must be a better way. So She raised some funds (that’s a story in itself), built a team, and set out to design a platform that eases the burden on unpaid caregivers. And she did all while having her first child.

Listen in as she explains the details of the Avanlee Care product as it stands today and about how she’s finding eager partners in some of the country’s largest retailers and employers. Turns out easing the caregiver burden isn’t just a moral good, it’s also good for a company’s bottom line.

Founders: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot

Two Top Health Investors Share Their 2023 Tips for Founders

July 6, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, Insights, Startups7wireVentures, Digital Health, Distributed Ventures, Entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, Funding, fundraising, health innovation, Health Tech, impact investing, investing, Lee Shapiro, Logan Plaster, raising funds, Shawn Ellis, WisdomNicole Kinsey

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Whether they like it or not – and they probably don’t – every health tech founder needs to think about money. How much they need, and how to get it. For many founders, raising outside funds becomes a whole new full time job that they have to take on. This year, funding in the sector has dipped sharply, making that job even harder and more stressful.

On our podcast this week, we hear from the other side of the table. We sat down with the heads of two major health tech investment firms and got their advice for health innovation entrepreneurs in 2023.

First up is Lee Shapiro, managing partner at 7wireVentures and long-time collaborator with StartUp Health. Shapiro is a luminary in digital health investing so we asked him for his macro view of the industry and got a few practical tips for founders raising funds today.

Then we hear from Shawn Ellis, managing partner at Distributed Ventures, a $100M fund that invests in Seed and Series A deals and has a strong health tech focus. In our chat Ellis broke down where his firm has found success recently and exactly what he looks for in a pitch.

Founders: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot