5 Startups That Are Making Medical Breakthroughs Seem Easy

Healthcare presents one of the biggest frustrations for customers but for forward thinking companies, it can also provide some of the largest opportunities. The size of the market and the chance to impact the lives of people are almost extraordinary. Last year, investors and venture capitalists poured $12.2 billion into the healthcare industry, according to a report by Silicon Valley Bank. Here are some to watch out for.

Maven

Maven is provides women and their families with healthcare via its digital care platform of online clinics. Their funding has now totaled more than $15 million. It launched in 2015 and has had almost 100,000 patients. They have nearly a thousand medical practioners.

Interested patients can book appointments using video or messages to a large network of women’s health and maternity services. It includes midwives, therapists, OB-GYNs, dieticians and others. Their medical team is available 24/77

Maven already operates an on-demand marketplace with Maven Maternity Maven Maternity. It is utilized by top companies throughout the U.S., including Protective Life Corporation and Snap. They support new parents from conception to the pregnancy, postpartum issues and also transitioning back to the workplace.

Augmedix

Augmedix uses Google Glass technology to create tools to increase a doctor’s productivity. They have gained $23 million funding from OrbiMed and McKesson Ventures, among others. Their main product is their remote scribe technology which uses Google Glass. It seeks to help doctors cope with their huge documentation and charting requirements. It would free them up to see more patients and foster better relationships with them.

They have developed the biggest remote scribe service so far in the world. It is built from a safe and protected enterprise platform. It has been installed in some of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S. Augmedix complements staffing, quality assurance, network support, analytics and business processing improvements.

Flatiron Health

Flatiron Health was founded by Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg in 2012 after they sold their first company to Google. Turner’s seven-year old cousin was diagnosed with leukemia a few years earlier. It was during his cousin’s cancer treatment when he saw the fragmented healthcare system firsthand.   He and his partner sought a lofty goal. They wanted to combine the smartest people in medicine with leading edge technology to change the way cancer is treated.

Most of the available clinical data on cancer is not structured and kept across thousands of community clinics and hospitals that are not connected. They felt they could solve this problem. Their oncology-specific workflows and products like DocSearch were created to reduce minutes of workflow down to seconds.

PeraHealth

PeraHealth creates clinical surveillance technology that is predictive. It has $14 million in funding from Mainsail Partners, an equity firm. They used it to build clinical tools, and spur adoption efforts as well as R&D.

It is in use at around 80 hospitals such as in Houston Methodist and the Yale New Haven Health System. PeraHealth integrates with electronic health records (EHR) to improve bed assignment and nursing assignments, clinical documentation, discharge plans and more. They developed an index and scoring system that can help manage illnesses by helping doctors spot patients who are most in need of early interventions.

Biolectrics

Biolectrics is a dental health startup that creates medical products. They combine medical, biological and electrical research to create new technologies to treat gum disease using a family of dental health devices called OraFlow.

Dentists who want to whiten their patients’ teeth could use hydrogen peroxide teeth whitening gel, but devices to treat gum disease such as periodontal disease were limited. Their first generation product was similar to a mouth guard that was attached to an electronic controller. It was designed to help dentists by giving them a take-home dental care device that would complement their existing procedures.

Biolectrics has completed testing the OraFlow devices at Case Western Reserved University. Clinical trials are being designed and managed by the Center for Dental Studies, University of Buffalo, New York.

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