MedCrypt, a medical device cybersecurity software provider, announces a $5.3 million Series A funding round led by Section 32, with participation from Eniac Ventures and Y Combinator. MedCrypt was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch.
Mike Kijewski
“Last October, the FDA released a major update to its premarket cybersecurity guidance for medical devices, publishing guidelines that line up just about perfectly with the solution we began developing three years ago,” said MedCrypt founder and CEO, Mike Kijewski. “Internet-connected medical technology is entering the market at light speed, calling for devices to be secure by design, which leads to a heightened level of patient safety at all times. We’re thrilled to see continued support from various groups in the industry, from the government to healthcare institutions and device vendors, along with support from our partners to help us further develop our technology and expand our team.”
The HIPAA Security Rule has been in effect for 14 years, aiming to protect electronic health data, yet a new study from CynergisTek reports the healthcare industry has only managed to achieve 72% compliance with it, leaving a gap that poses a security risk for those who are not yet compliant. The study also reports healthcare is expected to suffer two to three times more cyberattacks in 2019 than other industries. This data makes patient safety a critical area of focus.
“Patient data privacy has long been a concern, but the healthcare industry is just beginning to address patient safety risks presented by internet-connected healthcare technology,” said Vidya Murthy, vice president of operations, MedCrypt. “Research shows a 13.3 percent higher mortality rate for patients experiencing a cardiac arrest whose care was delayed by four minutes. While cybersecurity attacks to a device such as a pacemaker seem more dangerous, delays to patient care because of cyberattacks are much more real and likely.”
MedCrypt will use the funds to expand its team, adding new members in sales and engineering roles, and further develop its technology. MedCrypt’s security software allows device vendors to use cryptography to secure data traveling between or stored on devices. MedCrypt then provides remote, real-time monitoring to alert medical device vendors of suspicious behavior that may yield potential security threats to their company, devices and patients.
This round brings MedCrypt’s total funds raised to $8.4 million.
Imagine you could safely wield your medical data the same way you can use an ATM card at any store or cash machine anywhere, anytime.
Founders’ story
The American Medical Association (AMA) believes that one of the biggest challenges in healthcare today is securing, sharing, and using trusted health data in real time. The AMA’s integrated innovation enterprise, Health2047, created Akiri to transform how everyone does it.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Akiri is partnering with healthcare leaders to solve real-world business problems. Akiri is already collaborating with the life sciences industry to solve data challenges related to drug safety and clinical trials.
Market opportunity
In addition to the life science industry, Akiri plans to collaborate with payers, physicians, and health systems to improve the quality and efficiency of care delivery.
Who are your competitors?
Akiri leverages a unique combination of technologies and optimizes them for healthcare, so at this time, Akiri does not have any direct competitors.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates Akiri?
Akiri Switch is unlike any other solution for managing healthcare data. It is not a health information exchange (HIE); an extract, transform, load (ETL) process; or an electronic medical record (EMR) system. Instead, Akiri Switch is an invitation-only, subscription-based, ultra-secure private network. Rather than store any health data, it transmits it through a standardized system of codes.
Health Wizz is an electronic file cabinet for your health records on your smartphone. We help provide the tools to help people aggregate their medical records, organize them, and format them so that they can be shared easily, seamlessly and securely on a blockchain, such as Ethereum.
Elevator pitch
It’s our body, it’s our data. Health Wizz is a secure mobile platform that provides consumers with the necessary tools for aggregating, organizing and sharing their medical health records with other family members or caregivers, as necessary, over the blockchain.
Founders’ story
Raj Sharma
The idea to take on the big health industry interoperability problem came to Raj Sharma, Health Wizz CEO, when he was sitting in the emergency room, helplessly watching his mother undergo yet another series of unnecessary, duplicative medical tests. This was even more painful as she had already done all those tests just a day before, at the first Emergency Room, where she was admitted after a fall. Because of interoperability issues that plague the healthcare industry, the tests could not be obtained in time for her second ER visit. As Raj sat watching his mother, exhausted and annoyed with all of the time and money wasted, he thought that if he had the healthcare data in a secure, portable format, it would have saved time and money, while ensuring better, timelier care. With this idea, he and his two co-founders Sirish Bajpai (CTO) and Dr. Nitin Desai (chief medical officer), founded Health Wizz.
MedTrainer is the creator of an all-in-one compliance management suite that encompasses all the tools healthcare professionals need to manage processes, increase departmental collaboration and simplify compliance.
Elevator pitch
The MedTrainer all-in-one compliance management suite combines a learning management system (LMS) with governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and provider credentialing to make compliance management accessible online, 24/7, to all healthcare organizations at a price they can afford.
Founders’ story
After growing three different companies to profitable buyout, MedTrainer’s co-founders, Steve Gallion (CEO) and Jorge Fernandez (COO), invested the equity from the eight-figure acquisition of the third joint endeavor, Waste Stream Solutions (a more than 4,700 percent return on investment), to co-found and fund MedTrainer.
Gallion and Fernandez realized the inefficiencies and challenges of the current market and created the first all-in-one compliance management suite that encompasses all the tools healthcare professionals need to manage processes, increase departmental collaboration and simplify compliance. The powerful, innovative and affordable solution improves efficiency across practices.
MedTrainer is headquartered in Redlands, California, and has offices in Denver; New York; Washington, D.C.; Queretaro, Mexico; and Mexico City. In 2017, the company doubled its staff to 85 employees, added a chief technology officer to foster continued development and enhance top-level support, and achieved 400-percent growth over the previous year. The system is now used by 300,000 healthcare professionals, representing 15,000 healthcare sites and Fortune 500 companies across North America. Not only have these organizations saved money by consolidating to a single compliance management solution, but they have also seen how proper training and compliance management can directly result in more efficient facility operations and a higher level of patient care.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Founded in 2013, MedTrainer supports primary care offices, ambulatory surgery centers, urgent care facilities, multi-specialty practices, federally qualified health centers (FQHC), dental offices, veterinary practices, long-term care facilities and community health centers. The company uses a mixture of direct marketing, online and offline strategy, and partnerships to promote the MedTrainer suite.
Market opportunity
In the healthcare industry, compliance and education software has always been reserved for enterprise-level organizations and major hospital systems. Even then, healthcare professionals have to run dozens of different software in parallel to manage requirements. Add growing regulations and shrinking budgets and it becomes even more difficult for healthcare providers to keep up with compliance education requirements and provide top care to their patients.
With MedTrainer, healthcare organizations can access more than 25 different modules 24 hours a day. MedTrainer’s CMS provides a learning management system with more than 200 custom courses; modules for management of policies and procedures, SDS, equipment life cycles and contracts; a license and credential tracking center; safety plans and incident reports; expert virtual compliance support; QuickCred provider credentialing; compliance tool kits; OIG/SAM checks; and security risk assessments.
Who are your competitors?
As the first all-in-one compliance management suite on the market, MedTrainer does not have any direct competitors. However, companies like HealthStream, Verity and Relias provide solutions with similar functionality to some of MedTrainer’s modules.
Intiva Health is the first truly integrated career platform for healthcare professionals. It redefines the medical credentialing process by making it faster, more efficient and more secure.
Elevator pitch
Intiva Health provides healthcare professionals with a single place to manage their credentials,continuing education, new job opportunities, secure messaging needs and more. It is built on the Hashgraph digital ledger platform, which means it is faster, more secure, and more error proof than blockchain.
Founders’ story
Intiva Health was founded in 2006 as a staffing agency for surgical services and emergency rooms. Today the Austin, Texas, company it has reinvented itself as a digital health startup featuring a next generation blockchain technology that cuts the time it takes for the medical credentialing process from months to seconds, improves HIPPA compliance,and makes document tampering or theft almost impossible.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Intiva Health focuses its marketing and PR efforts on licensed medical professionals (LMPs), practice managers, and the facilities where they work including medical groups, hospitals and professional associations.The company launched a new brand awareness campaign in March 2018 that includedthe introduction of the Intiva Token, a new cryptocurrency that LMPs can use to purchase continuing education classes, cyber insurance and other services.
Intiva is also partnering with the National Osteoporosis Foundation to test the advantages of using the Intiva Token for charitable donations.
Market opportunity
The Intiva Health Platform automates the burdensome tasks of credential and licensure management, continuing education, and discovering job opportunities for healthcare professionals. Intiva Health’s new ReadyDoc™credential verification solution, built on top of the Hashgraph distributed ledger technology, disrupts the existing broken, slow, and error-prone healthcare credentialing system, which today can take weeks or months to verify credentials, and is subject to tampering.
Intiva believes that ReadyDoc can replace the current processes of credentialing and primary source verification by storing documents and credentials in a Hashgraph-based distributed ledger. Providers and facilities can obtain information that is pre-verified, securely stored, and readily available, creating an ongoing, self-auditing verification of provider work history and clinical reputation.
ReadyDoc will act fluidly between health systems and facilities across the U.S., allowing organizations to instantly verify work history and clinical reputations. In the event of an emergency like the Houston hurricane, facilities will be able staff up by vetting the credentials of qualified providers instantly. ReadyDoc eliminates redundancy and the need for third party verification organizations, letting medical professionals get to work sooner.
Who are your competitors?
We believe that Intiva Health is the first integrative platform to manage healthcare career information from one seamless dashboard. It is certainly the first to use the Hashgraph digital ledger technology and offer a cryptocurrency utility token. However, Doximity also offers a career management application for medical professionals.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates Intiva Health?
Intiva Health can replace the current processes of credentialing and primary source verification by storing documents and credentials in a Hashgraph-based distributed ledger. Providers and facilities can obtain information that is pre-verified, securely stored, and readily available, creating an ongoing,self-auditing verification of provider work history and clinical reputation.
DocuTAP crafts on-demand healthcare software and services that make over a thousand urgent care clinics run efficiently. We design a tablet-based EHR and PM, offer RCM services, and refine patient workflow.
Elevator pitch
A better urgent care experience.
Founders’ story
In May of 2000, DocuTAP’s founders realized that wireless devices would play an increasingly important role in the delivery of healthcare. From that day, DocuTAP software was designed for use on handheld wireless devices. Founding CEO, Eric McDonald dreamed up the idea behind DocuTAP in his basement back in 1999. Eric spent his time consulting with physicians. In 2000, Eric officially started DocuTAP as a company with the help of angel investors. Today, he leads client relations and provides company direction and vision for technology and product design while being viewed as a thought leader in the urgent care industry.
Marketing/promotion strategy
DocuTAP works with urgent care clinics to provide a range of solutions and services including electronic health records, practice management, patient engagement solutions, analytics, billing services and consulting. As the healthcare industry continues to adopt on-demand models to serve the evolving healthcare consumer, DocuTAP provides the necessities for facilities to deliver efficient, affordable and good quality care.
Market opportunity
The healthcare industry is changing. Patients are becoming consumers, and the healthcare consumer wants access to quick and convenient care- without booking out months in advance to still wait in multiple waiting rooms. DocuTAP serves urgent care clinics, however increasingly other healthcare verticals such as pediatrics are adopting on-demand business models increasing the different markets that are in search for the tools and solutions DocuTAP provides. As with every other industry, healthcare must now market themselves to the healthcare consumer, to not only attract visitors but keep them coming back. By keeping patients out of the waiting room with online scheduling and monitoring, allowing physicians to finish a chart completely in under two minutes, and optimizing the work flow of the front desk, DocuTAP gives urgent care clinics the resources to market all of these capabilities to consumers and deliver on these promises each and every time.
Who are your competitors?
DocuTAP has competitors that offer some of the services and solutions they offer, but not in the end-to-end capacity that DocuTAP does. Given DocuTAP’s all-encompassing service and solution offering, DocuTAP considers a few companies who offer similar services competitors.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition and what differentiates DocuTAP?
DocuTAP’s key differentiator is they are not just a software provider, they are an end-to-end business partner. Each customer who works with DocuTAP relies on them for software, consulting, strategic advice, technical support, and expert insights. Whatever a customer needs, they are able to go to DocuTAP for, something competitors are not offering.
DocuTAP has a deep and extensive log of valuable data, available to visualize and pull out useful trends and findings that give them an edge in the market.
The Datica platform manages all ongoing compliance and security burdens not covered by AWS and Microsoft Azure. Through the platform, customers deploy cloud-native applications and integrate with EHRs. The HITRUST CSF Certified Datica platform services all who handle PHI in the cloud, from startups to the Fortune 100.
Elevator Pitch
Datica removes the risks for digital health in the cloud.
Founders’ story
Travis Good, MD
When CEO Travis Good, MD, and co-founder Mohan Balachandran, began solving healthcare’s universal hurdle in building applications in the cloud — HIPAA — the two entrepreneurs solved the problem. Along the way, they realized that other development companies had also been trying to solve the same problem. They thought: Why should any of us reinvent the wheel? With the compelling market need in front of them, they built their HIPAA-compliant platform and made it available to other development teams, and eventually enterprises. Knowing that trust, security, and compliance would remain the pillars to their platform, the founders sought certifications and audits through HITRUST, SOC 2, and GDPR to make the Datica Platform the most trusted foundation on which to build applications in the cloud.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Datica helps healthcare enterprises and digital health vendors accelerate innovation to improve healthcare through the use of its HIPAA compliant platform. We promote Datica to both market segments through outbound and inbound channels, direct outreach through webinars and local/national presentations around the company’s framework for digital health success, as well as through its podcast, quarterly reports, and executive speaking.
Market opportunity
The market opportunity for the Datica platform is extensive, touching all B2B healthcare stakeholders who store, manage and transmit personal health information in the cloud. Our target audience is 60/40 enterprise (healthcare providers, pharma, and payors), as well as digital health vendors. World-class companies like Johnson & Johnson, Zipnosis, Healthloop, Propeller Health, Methodist Le Bonheur, Stony Brook Medical, Optum and more, trust Datica to remove the risks of digital health in the cloud.
Who are your competitors?
Our largest competitors in the compliant cloud space aren’t other PaaS vendors but rather managed service solutions on one of the major IaaS vendors like Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure. With Datica, developers can deploy application workloads to their Datica environment instead of directly to another IaaS to eliminate the burden of compliance. With the Datica Platform, a customer gets the benefits of AWS, Azure, or other infrastructures as the foundation of our platform, plus Datica automates all DevOps and DevSecOps requirements in the cloud. Developers can deploy services & workloads in minutes that are fully in compliance with HIPAA and HITRUST.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and how Datica differs.
Datica differentiates itself in two ways. The first is through open source resources. Datica has a strong belief in open source resources as the fastest and best way to promote healthcare innovation. Datica open sourced its company policies and resources early in the company life. During HIMSS18, we also announced that the Datica platform now uses Kubernetes (an open source system for automating deployment) as its underlying container orchestration, granting customers greater technical flexibility.
Second, Datica stands apart from other PaaS competitors through its firm commitment to third-party audit and verification of the Platform’s trusted security. Datica is HIPAA compliant, HITRUST CSF Certified and has certifications for SOC 2, GDPR, and GxP.
Somatix is a leader in wearable-assisted gesture detection for real-time health intervention and well being enhancement.
Elevator pitch Somatix is a leader in wearable-assisted gesture detection for real-time health intervention and well being enhancement. Somatix derives physical and emotional symptoms from simple hand gestures, utilizing sensors built into a range of wearables to remotely detect, analyze, gain insights and act on massive volumes of body motion data. The platform additionally employs machine learning and advanced analytics capabilities to apply personalized CBT (cognitive behavior therapy)-driven intervention that increase individuals’ treatment adherence and improve people’s lives.
Eran Ofir
Founders’ story|
Eran Ofir is the CEO and co-founder of Somatix, a real-time gesture detection platform for effective healthcare intervention, utilizing sensors built into a range of wearables to remotely detect, analyze, gain insights and act on massive volumes of body motion data. Eran has 20 years of experience in executive roles with multinational companies, where he established and led business units at Orange, AOL Mobile, Amdocs, Convergys and NCR. Over the last decade, Eran has lived and worked in Israel, South Africa, China and the US, selling software platforms, hardware, services and consulting to customers in telecom, internet, retail, utilities, financial services and healthcare sectors. Eran is a Tel-Aviv University graduate in electrical engineering (BSc) and finance-marketing MBA.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Somatix targets organizations with clear financial interest in maintaining high employee, customer and patient health levels, driven by the requirement for technological innovations capable of enhancing preventative healthcare and rehabilitative treatment.
Our G2M strategy aims to directly sell to clinics and hospitals bearing the impact of changes in payment arrangements for the services they render, health insurance companies whose profitability is constantly being eroded by mounting healthcare expense reimbursements and senior corporate human resources managers offering employee benefit programs.
Market opportunity
Smoking-related illness in the United States costs more than $300 billion annually, nearly $170 billion in direct medical care for adults and $156 billion in lost productivity. The global smoking cessation and nicotine de-addiction market is expected to reach $21.8B by 2024.
The population addicted to smoking is rapidly increasing. The growing desire to quit smoking and health complications associated with smoking serve as incentives for companies to introduce novel solutions and drive the growth of the smoking cessation and nicotine de-addiction market.
Who are your competitors?
We identify two types of competitors: big-data analytics and solution specific companies; most are smoking cessation consumer mobile apps. None of the other existing smoking cessation solutions in the market today offers the four key benefits we do (see competitive advantages below), and in fact most don’t even offer a combination of two.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates Somatix?
SmokeBeat is superior to other smoking cessation solutions, mainly because it:
Automatically detects smoking gestures.
Enables clinicians to passively monitor, follow up on and enhance smoker adherence with prescribed cessation treatments.
Provides complete, ongoing awareness of treatment success vs. predefined goals; delivers information-rich statistics on smoking routines, including number of cigarettes consumed, smoking time of day and location, long-term impact on health, financial costs and more.
Employs machine learning and analytics to generate personalized CBT-based interventions.
Imagine you could safely wield your medical data the same way you can use an ATM card at any store or cash machine anywhere, anytime.
The 
Somatix