Investment in digital health has reached its highest level yet. In the first quarter of the year, $1.6 billion was put into this sector, compared to $909 million for the same time last year, according to Rock Health. As money keeps flowing into the space, new companies continue to emerge with exciting possibilities for advancing healthcare.
Jvion
Shantanu Nigam, CEO
About:
Jvion delivers healthcare’s only Cognitive Clinical Success Machine that helps providers take the patient-specific actions that will improve health. Using its underlying Eigen Sphere engine, the machine goes beyond risk stratification to identify the factors (clinical and non-clinical) driving patient risk and—most importantly—the personalized, recommended actions that will change a patient’s risk trajectory.
With the machine, providers are better able to effectively and positively impact more patient lives, individualize interventions, and focus time and the right resources to the exact patients who need them.
Funding:
As a privately held company, we do not release financials. We can disclose that we have achieved significant year-over-year growth and that our investors include Eastside Partners and Martin Ventures.
Offering:
Jvion’s Cognitive Machine is in place across 250 contracted hospitals and hundreds of affiliated clinics.
Big Picture:
With Jvion’s Cognitive Clinical Success Machine, providers have a path to the personalized, prescriptive actions that save lives. Clinicians are using the machine to impact patient lives by reducing the risk of suicide, addressing gaps in the patient experience, lowering rates of hospital-acquired infections, and optimizing patient discharge (just to name a few clinical applications). It is our long-term goal to constantly improve the machine’s ability to positively impact lives and drive better health outcomes across patients and communities.
Nanowear
Venk Varadan, Founder & CEO
Dr. Vijay Varadan, Founder & CINO
About:
Nanowear is the leading developer of patented, textile-based nanosensor technology with applications in the cardiac, neurological, industrial, safety, government, and sports medicine performance diagnostics monitoring markets. We aim to be the world’s leading provider of nanosensor smart-textile technology by focusing on product development that not only enhances preventive health and well-being but also increases efficacy, efficiency, and eliminates cost redundancies.
Funding:
In 2014, Nanowear received a $1.5M seed investment led by The Social+Capital Partnership and a large private holding company, with several influential angels also participating in the round.
Offering:
Nanowear’s proprietary technology provides medical professionals with accurate and continuous diagnostic data through a wearable deployment that is cost-effective and unobtrusive to the patient. Real-time data is captured and transmitted wirelessly, streamlining the feedback process and driving outcomes. Our core focus on innovation and next-gen technologies will continue to propel the company towards exploring unique and groundbreaking applications for our nanosensor smart-textile technology.
Big Picture:
Millions of individuals suffer from chronic diseases that are not only debilitating but also require continuous monitoring. Current monitoring applications fail to afford patients freedom of movement and peace of mind while at the same time providing medical practitioners with a flexible and cost-effective monitoring platform to make informed decisions. Nanowear is striving to bridge the gap and deliver ultimate diagnostic comfort and efficacy at a low cost.
Level Ex
Sam Glassenberg, Founder and CEO
About:
Level Ex creates professional video games for practicing physicians. Using state-of-the-art visual effects and game design methodologies, any physician, right from their phone, can play through clinical cases designed to sharpen their cognitive skills and keep them thinking on their feet: Diagnose patients, perform procedures on ultra-realistic anatomy, learn drug treatment approaches, and train on the latest medical devices. Physicians can also practice once-in-a-lifetime, challenging cases submitted by colleagues around the world.
Funding:
Level Ex has received over $15 million in funding to date. Our investors include JAZZ Venture Partners, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, 4490 Ventures, OSF Ventures, and several others who participated in our recent Series A round.
Offering:
We have two mobile games in the app stores. One is being used by Anesthesiologists (Airway Ex™) and the other is for Gastroenterologists (Gastro Ex™). We will have two more apps in Pulmonology and Cardiology in the coming months. Our goal is to be in a number of specialties over the next year. Life sciences companies partner with us to create experiential marketing campaigns that will drive measurable physician engagement using our professional video games.
Big Picture:
We want to improve the performance outcomes of physicians worldwide and provide a fresh approach to learning that is fun and engaging for our users and industry partners. We plan to expand into new specialties over the next year, release new medical games for healthcare professionals, and continue to build our partnerships with life sciences and medical device companies.
ZappRx
Zoë Barry, Founder and CEO
About:
ZappRx is a digital healthcare company that streamlines the prescribing and prior authorization process of complex drugs, reducing administrative burden for providers and getting lifesaving therapies to the patients that need them most. Currently, prescribing and prior authorization of specialty pharmaceuticals is a highly manual process, which can cause patients to wait weeks for their medication. With ZappRx, physicians are able to expedite the overall process and get medications to severely ill patients within days.
Funding:
- In December 2014, ZappRx raised $5.6M in Series A funding led by SR One, the venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline, with participation from Atlas Ventures.
- In March 2017, ZappRx raised $25M in Series B funding led by Qiming U.S. Healthcare Fund and included participation from SR One, and GV (formerly Google Ventures).
- ZappRx has also received $10.5M in private funding
Offering:
The ZappRx specialty prescribing and prior authorization platform is available and being used by large health systems, including academic medical centers, as well as independent practices around the country. The company is continuously updating its technology and adding rich functionality and products to its portfolio, including a mobile-friendly version that launched this past spring for both patients and physicians. ZappRx currently has significant market share in pulmonology and is actively expanding into additional disease areas such as gastroenterology, rheumatology, and neurology.
Big Picture:
ZappRx is committed to improving the health and lives of the millions of patients who are impacted by a wide variety of rare and complex diseases. Throughout 2018, the company is expanding its footprint to reach more providers in new treatment areas and to provide deeper transparency into the specialty prescribing process. The platform also measures performance rates including prescribing patterns, drug fulfillment benchmarks, and other specialty prescription analytics, making a significant impact on its goal of transforming the way complex, specialty drugs are prescribed.
conversationHEALTH
Alexandra Reeves, Teen Founder of emojiHEALTH (became the first product of conversationHEALTH)
Dr. John Reeves, Partner, Chief Medical Officer
Lexi Kaplin, Partner, Chief Product Officer
Richard Marcil, Managing Partner
About:
conversationHEALTH is reimagining the way pharma brands engage patients and physicians through compelling AI-assisted conversations. These highly personalized interactions can be delivered through chatbot and/or voice devices—and designed to achieve key business objectives—whether that be acquisition, adherence, or healthcare outcomes.
Funding:
The startup has been bootstrapped over the past year and a half, only receiving funding from founders and incoming projects. The rapid growth the team has been experiencing since December may cause this to change soon.
Offering:
We are delivering on a wide range of consumer, patient, and HCP bots projects across North America and the EU. To date, we have engaged in over two million conversations—providing us with rich insights on all aspects of conversation UX. Some of the typical business objectives of our bots are:
- Condition awareness + self-diagnosis
- Product Education and HCP discussion guides
- Adherence Tools (reminders + trackers)
- Non-personal HCP engagement
Big Picture:
Virtually every key moment in healthcare is based on a conversation—whether that be between a physician and a patient, or between an MSL and a physician. We now have the ability to capture the best aspects of these conversations and scale them through an on-demand 24/7 channel.
We recognize that by 2020, 85% of all customer interactions will be managed through conversations without a human (Gartner, 2011). Our goal is that these virtual conversations contain equal parts of medical accuracy and human empathy—the key ingredients required to move the needle on adherence and outcomes.
Wellth
Matt Loper, CEO & Co-founder
Alec Zopf, CTO & Co-founder
About:
Wellth’s platform applies behavioral economics principles at scale to improve treatment adherence and better understand consumer behavior.
Funding:
To date, Wellth has raised more than $2mm in Seed funding led by AXA Strategic Ventures and other strategic health partners.
Offering:
Wellth’s programs are operational across an array of chronic conditions for multiple customer implementations, pilots, and randomized clinical trials. We target not only adherence to therapeutics such as oral medications, injectables, and inhalables, but also use of biometric devices to measure blood sugar, blood pressure, and daily weight. Patients use the Wellth mobile app to verify their behaviors by uploading photos of their pills or devices each day, and earn financial rewards for doing so. To date, our platform averages 89% daily adherence to medications and remote monitoring. Our customer segments include risk-bearing healthcare providers, health and life insurers, and pharmaceutical companies. We also partner with top academic researchers on randomized clinical trials to continually evaluate the clinical effectiveness of our programs and innovate in new areas to better satisfy customer needs.
Big Picture:
Drugs don’t work for people who don’t take them, and devices don’t work in patients who don’t use them. And patient nonadherence rates are strikingly high at approximately 50%. Wellth’s mission is to improve patient behaviors to reduce morbidity and mortality. We do this by applying proven concepts from behavioral economics to overcome cognitive biases that often prevent adherence, such as present bias, the intent-behavior gap, and loss aversion, which are often little-known but powerful frameworks that affect every one of us and our daily choices and behaviors.
