Tag Archives: Innovation

Qura’s Tiny Implantables Could Revolutionize How We Treat Hypertension

February 16, 2024Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsCure Disease, Dr. Hendren, Health Moonshot, Health Moonshot Update, Health Tech, Health Transformer, Health Transformers, Implantables, Innovation, Logan Plaster, Qura, Will HendrenNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (38.2MB)

When it comes to health technology, often the next big thing is really, really small.

Our guest on the show this week, Dr. Will Hendren, has seen personally that when it comes to implanting a medical device in the body, size matters.

Dr. Hendren spent decades as a surgeon working with rescue devices like pacemakers, which themselves have evolved from being the size of a pack of cigarettes to being smaller than a triple A battery. It doesn’t take a degree in biomechanical engineering to appreciate that you want a lower profile machine sitting next to your heart.

Now, with his company Qura – a member of the StartUp Health community since 2016 – Dr. Hendren is taking that concept to the next level. He and his team are the leading edge of miniaturizing medical devices to such an extreme degree that it opens up a whole new market for remote patient monitoring.

In our interview we’ll talk about how Dr. Hendren and his team have built an implantable the size of a vitamin that can take blood pressure readings passively and transmit that information to the patient and their caregiver wirelessly. We’ll talk about some of the tiny tech that it was necessary to invent in order to make this breakthrough possible, and we’ll talk about how remote monitoring at scale could be a gamechanger for hypertension and heart disease, which are two of the top causes of death globally.

Let’s get into it!

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Collaborative Innovation Within Health Systems: Wisdom From an EVP & Chief Digital Officer

February 9, 2024Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsChief Digital Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, health innovation, Innovation, Logan Plaster, Masterclass, Providence, Providence Health System, Sara Vaezy, WisdomNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (56.2MB)

At StartUp Health, we get the pleasure of talking with many, many founders of healthcare startups. It’s a perk of the job, because each founder, each new idea, inspires us and gives us hope that we’re on the cusp of some major breakthroughs.

Then reality sets in, and we’re reminded just how hard it is to go from an idea – even a brilliant one with validation – to commercialization and broad use. It’s one thing for a founder to find a single clinic to use their platform or device, but a common question is: How do you get your startup adopted at a large hospital, or better yet, a hospital system? Do you just call up the Chief Digital Officer, or Chief Innovation Officer, and they’ll get it sorted?

Not exactly, according to our guest today. For one thing, the role of hospital’s Chief Digital Officer has changed dramatically.

Sara Vaezy is Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Digital Officer for Providence, where she is responsible for system strategy and digital innovation for the integrated delivery network (IDN), which includes 52 hospitals and 1,085 clinics and serves over 5 million unique patients.

So, how can a startup work with a hospital system effectively? What do hospitals look for in a startup and what are some of the red flags for a project that’s going nowhere? And what are the greatest pain points for which hospitals are actively seeking solutions?

To answer these questions, we invited Vaezy onto a Masterclass, which are virtual sessions we hold in front of a live audience of founders from the StartUp Health community. We’ve cut the session down to share the highlights with you, and we’ve included some of the founder questions from the Q&A as well, since they are very practical and relevant.

Let’s dive in!

Innovating in Alzheimer’s disease? Learn how you can join our Alzheimer’s Moonshot.

Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? Learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.

Want more content like this? Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Innovators: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot

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Gamification in Healthcare: How Two Founders Are Using Games to Heal

January 12, 2024Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsArcade Therapeutics, eddii, Farhaneh Ahmadi, Farhaneh Ahmadi PhD, Health Moonshot, Health Moonshots, Health Transformers, Innovation, mental health, Mental Health and Happiness, Raj Amin, T1D, T1D Moonshot, Type 1 Diabetes, Type 1 Diabetes MoonshotNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (27.2MB)

This week, we’re talking about gamification in healthcare. Gamification has been a popular buzzword in tech and in health, but it just means using elements we associate with games in non-game contexts. It means capitalizing on the motivations we find in games through things like progress updates and level-up badges to change behaviors and get us to do things that are going to be good for our health.

Today on the show, we’re talking to two founders who are gamifying the healthcare experience in two unique ways.

The first conversation is with Raj Amin, CEO & Co-founder of Arcade Therapeutics, a company that has been in the StartUp Health community since TK. They are a science-first game studio developing games that act like medicine, focusing on mental health. We’ll hear exactly what they’re building and why clinical research is key to their approach.

Then we’ll hear from Farhaneh Ahmadi, PhD, CEO & Co-founder of eddii, a company that is part of our T1D Moonshot. She and her team are using mobile gaming elements to help young people with their Type 1 diabetes management. Her company uses a character named eddii that talks to the user, tells them stories, and plays games with them – making it more relatable and more enjoyable to manage diabetes.

Listen in to learn more about these innovative approaches to improving health.

Innovators: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot

Funders: Become a Health Moonshot Champion

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Innovating in Alzheimer’s disease? Contact us to learn how you can join our Alzheimer’s Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? Contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.
Looking to break down health barriers? Contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.

No More Suffering in Silence: Meet Two Founders Tackling Gut Health

December 15, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, Startups, Uncategorizedartificial intelligence, BetterMeal AI, Diet, Foursquare, Gut Health, Health Moonshot, Health Moonshots, Health Transformer, Health Transformers, Innovation, Jeff Glueck, Logan Plaster, Nutrition, Nutrition & Fitness, Nutrition and Fitness, Salvo, Salvo Health, Swathi Arulguppe, Whole HealthNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (34.8MB)

On this week’s StartUp Health NOW episode, we’re talking about the future of gut health with Jeff Glueck, CEO & Co-founder of Salvo Health, and Swathi Arulguppe, CEO & Founder at BetterMeal AI.

There’s no doubt gut health is having a moment.

For a long time, health issues in the gut, like irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease, were met with outdated pamphlets about diets. The result was millions of people suffering in silence with painful, life-limiting conditions.

It’s not that GI doctors didn’t want to help. There just didn’t seem to be a lot that they could do.

Thankfully our understanding of the importance of gut health – and its connection to mental health and whole health – has resulted in a wave of innovation. And on this podcast episode, we’ll talk to some amazing entrepreneurs working to break this cycle and bring relief to patients.

Our first guest, Jeff Glueck was the CEO of Foursquare before he co-founded Salvo Health. He’s taking on gut health from two innovative angles.

The first is through the establishment of a digital clinic which makes specialty GI care available to patients at scale and on demand. Second, Glueck and his team are capitalizing on the latest research connecting gut health to mental health and other conditions. This connection between the gut microbiome and whole health is just exploding and Salvo is helping patients stay on the cutting edge.

Then we’ll check in with Swathi Arulguppe, CEO & Founder of BetterMeal AI.

You’ll hear how Arulguppe has taken her own journey with a debilitating GI condition, combined it with her passion for data, and built a platform for helping deliver AI-driven personalized meal recommendations to patients. By understanding the biological connections between human gut and food at the deepest level, she has built an app that helps guide its users on how to best manage their gut health through their nutrition.

Let’s jump in and find out where we are in gut health innovation.

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Funders: Become a Health Moonshot Champion
Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
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Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.

How Two Founders Are Using AI to Tackle Wasteful Healthcare Spending

November 30, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsAI, artificial intelligence, Cost to Zero, Health Cost IQ, Health Moonshots, Health Transformer, Health Transformers, Healthcare, healthcare spending, Hindsait, Innovation, Jude Odu, Logan Plaster, Pinaki DasguptaNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (27.1MB)

On this StartUp Health NOW episode, we’re talking about wasteful spending in healthcare. This is one of those topics that’s hard to put in perspective. The institute of medicine says that 30% of healthcare spending could be categorized as wasteful, putting the total tab north of $750 million. It could be a trillion dollars.

Health insurance premiums are up 7% year over year, according to Health Affairs. Analysts point to inflation as a strong cause, but this nearly trillion dollars in unnecessary spending isn’t helping the equation.

Bottom line, healthcare costs are out of control and driving many people into medical bankruptcy. If 30% of healthcare spending is unnecessary, we’ve got to get this under control. Thankfully, we’ve got founders in the StartUp Health community who are passionate about this issue.

Jude Odu, CEO & Founder of Health Cost IQ, and Pinaki Dasgupta, CEO & Founder of Hindsait, will help us understand what constitutes wasteful spending and how advances in AI allow us to root it out at the source.

This is the kind of innovation that takes some courage, because pointing out to a hospital that they’re double billing or telling an insurer that they’re making massive errors doesn’t make you popular with either party. But it’s got to be done if we’re going to get overall health costs under control.

Enjoy the episode.

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Innovators: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:14 — 31.2MB)

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

Virtual Reality for Brain Health: Virtuleap’s New Platform Uses VR to Detect Cognitive Decline Early

September 28, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsAlzheimer's, Amir Bozorgzadeh, Brain health, Dementia, Health Moonshot, Health Transformer, Healthy Longevity, Innovation, Logan Plaster, Neuroscience, Virtual Reality, Virtuleap, VRNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:47 — 27.2MB)

Our StartUp Health NOW guest this week is Amir Bozorgzadeh, CEO & Co-founder of Virtuleap, a brain health company that joined StartUp Health in 2019.

Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, and expanding to Barcelona, Spain, Virtuleap improves brain health with VR. In this chat, Amir will walk us through their new platform – Cogniclear VR – that combines neuroscience with virtual reality games and activities to detect cognitive disorders. He’ll explain how VR can play an important role in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and other dementias, why VR needs to be applied with care in health, and where virtual reality is going next.

Enjoy!

Innovators: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot

How GO-Pen’s “Insulin Pen for All” Is Making High-Quality T1D Care Globally Accessible

September 22, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsDenmark, diabetes, Diabetes Moonshot, GO-Pen, Health Device, health innovation, Health Tech, Innovation, Insulin, Insulin Pen, Logan Plaster, Ole Nielsen, Startup, T1D, T1D Moonshot, Type 1 DiabetesNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:37 — 25.9MB)

Our StartUp Health NOW guest this week is Ole Kjerkegaard Nielsen, PhD, CEO & Co-founder of GO-Pen, a company in our Type 1 Diabetes Moonshot community.

As you’ll hear, Nielsen and his team based in Denmark have built a new kind of insulin pen, one that is affordable and accessible to all while also adhering to the absolute highest standards of quality. This more accessible insulin pen could change millions of people’s lives.

We’ll also get a glimpse into the uniquely challenging startup journey of developing a physical medical device. Nielsen and his team have been winning awards and grants on a regular basis, but the road is still steep. Whether it’s negotiating with a manufacturer across the globe or getting FDA approval, bringing a medical device to market as a startup with limited funds is a challenge that could intimidate even the most market-tested CEOs. Nielsen pulls back the curtain and lets us see that challenge from the inside and shows us where GO-Pen is going next.

Enjoy!

Innovators: 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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:45 — 21.4MB)

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

How Health Tech Startups Can Launch with Government Contracts

June 9, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsAccess to care, Digital Health, health innovation, Health Moonshot, Health Moonshots, Health Tech, Health Transformer, Health Transformers, Innovation, Logan Plaster, Nutrition, Nutrition and Fitness, Shireen Abdullah, Suzy Shirley, VA, Veteran Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, VHA, YumlishNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:36 — 18.9MB)

So you’re healthcare founder who has designed and built, by the sweat of your brow, a new platform or product that can help people live longer, healthier lives. Now, you just need to get it into people’s hands so they can use it, give feedback, help you iterate, and ultimately scale. As every founder knows, building the product is just a first step. Getting to market is a whole other challenge.

There are lots of different approaches for go-to-market strategy – with StartUp Health’s community of nearly 500 companies we’ve seen them all. One we wanted to highlight today is the idea of pursuing partnerships with the government or military. Given the enormous number of people that fall within the care of the military and federal agencies and the funding that gets allocated for their health, this is a tempting strategy. But it’s not for the faint of heart or those short on runway.

In this week’s podcast episode we’ll talk to two people who are making this marriage of startups and government contracts work – from two different angles.

First we’ll hear from Shireen Abdullah, CEO & Founder of Yumlish (which joined StartUp Health in 2019), about how she’s working with the US Air Force to help keep recruits healthy and service ready. Turns out, poor nutrition could actually become a national security threat.

Second, we’ll hear from the other side of the table. Suzy Shirley heads up community engagement at the VA’s Pathfinder program. Pathfinder was established just recently with the express purpose of making it easier for startups to access the Veterans Health Administration, which, if you’re not familiar, is massive. The VHA is the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, providing care at more than 1200 facilities, covering over nine million enrolled veterans. Many healthcare startups would love to work with this patient population, but traditionally the administrative barriers have been high. Suzy Shirley explains how her team is changing the paradigm. She provides some practical tips for how runway-limited startups can make meaningful headway with such a huge government institution and start piloting high-impact products.

Enjoy the episode, which was recorded at the ViVE 2023 conference in Nashville.

Founders: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot