NeuronUP is an online platform for professionals working in neurorehabilitation and cognitive stimulation with patients with cognitive deficits related to Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, traumatic brain injury, ADHD, normal aging, etc.
Elevator pitch
In the United States alone, there are millions of people living with Alzheimer’s,Parkinson´s, traumatic brain injury, Multiple sclerosis, and ADHD. There is an absolute necessity to help rehabilitate people with these conditions and NeuronUP can help.
Founders’ story
Iñigo Fernández de Piérola
NeuronUP was born out of the psychology clinic of our boss, CEO and founder, Iñigo Fernández de Piérola. During his work as a psychologist, he realized that a lot of his time was spent making or searching for materials to use with his patients. Much of the content he found online or elsewhere wasn’t very useful, was very expensive or was geared only towards children. Setting out to fix that problem, NeuronUP got its first spark of life.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Being an online platform, NeuronUP puts a lot of energy into SEO to try to capture relevant searches. We get a lot of word of mouth traffic from pleased clients too. Once a month for our Spanish speaking-client base, we host online chats with renowned people working in the neurosciences. NeuronUP Academy is very popular and keeps people coming back to the site. We would like to implement that for our English-speaking clients as well in the future.
Market opportunity
Our target audience are the professionals working in neuropsychology, occupational therapy and speech therapy. With the millions of people in the world with cognitive deficits related to neurodegenerative diseases, brain injuries,mental illnesses, neurodevelopmental disorders and mental disabilities, these professionals need and deserve help to save time and energy putting together their rehabilitation strategies.
Who are your competitors?
Our clients are only professionals who can direct the rehabilitation strategy based on what each individual patient needs. Other similar products like BrainHQ and Cognifit will sell to the end user and we feel like that isn’t the best strategy.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates NeuronUP?
Professionals are able to create a strategy easily for each individual patient by working with NeuronUP. Activities such as worksheets, serious games, simulators and content generators can be personalized to the patient for maximum efficacy. Content is also classified by the cognitive function being worked, which allows for rehabilitation at the clinic or at home.
MedPilot uses patient demographic data and payment historyinformation from the practice management system to categorize accounts in order to tailor content, frequency and message medium, boosting engagement rates and patient satisfaction.
Elevator pitch
MedPilot transforms patient financial care through technology-enabled services.
Founders’ story
Jacob Myers
When Jacob Myers, our CEO, worked as a revenue cycle management consultant he noticed numerous solutions to help providers work with insurance companies, but saw a huge void on the patient side of the equation. MedPilot was founded to help providers more efficiently and effectively work with patients to help them understand and resolve their medical expenses.
Marketing/promotion strategy
MedPilot partners with practice management softwares and revenue cycle companies to help them add value to their provider clients who are interested in better patient solutions.
Market opportunity
Because of changes in the health insurance landscape, patients now account for more than 30 percent of healthcare payments. Providers used to overlook patients and only focus on collecting from insurance companies, however now patients can no longer be ignored.
Who are your competitors?
Most healthcare providers engage revenue cycle companies who specialize in insurance billing to also manage patient balances. The old school manual methods of working with patients is time-intensive and laborious, so these vendors don’t put a lot of effort into helping patients.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates MedPilot?
Typically, revenue cycle teams only utilize costly patient statements and occasional phone calls. Now close your eyes and picture the exact opposite …
MedPilot pulls in patient demographic information and billing data from the practice management system into our platform. Our software then uses data science and behavioral targeting to inform our specialized Patient Services team on the best times and frequencies for phone calls, texts, emails and statements to drive patients to our proprietary online bill pay.
For example, if a patient drops off on our help center, we would pause statements and prioritize their account to receive a call from our smart dialer, saving money, resolving the account quicker and increasing patient satisfaction.
Business model
MedPilot’s business model is a percent of successful transactions on our platform when working with healthcare providers directly. We utilize a licensing fee-model when engaging with RCM and practice management companies.
GlucoMe enhances the way diabetes patients and medical teams work together by changing the traditional face-to-face diabetes care paradigm with an AI-enabled digital diabetes clinic.
Elevator pitch
The number of diabetes professionals has remained flat over the last decade. Conversely, the population of those with diabetes is growing. GlucoMe makes it possible for diabetes professionals to successfully manage this growing population by treating the right patients, at the right time, at the right cost, no matter their location and provide effective and continuous care to up to 10X more diabetes patients than with the current standard of care. The solution encourages a combination of face-to-face in-clinic and digital (virtual) visits enabling ongoing communication, treatment changes as necessary and immediate intervention as required.
Dov Moran is one of Israel’s most prominent hi-tech leaders, entrepreneurs and investors. He is known as the inventor of the USB memory drive (sold his company M-systems to SanDisk for $1.6B). In addition, Dov was the Founder and CEO of Modu, which developed a revolutionary modular phone (acquired by Google in 2011. Modu’s assets are the basis for Google’s modular phone Project Ara).
Yiftah Ben Aharon is a technology executive. He was head of R&D for the machine learning investment fund and led software development at Modu after serving in the IDF’s elite 8200 intelligence unit.
Moran is diabetes T2 patient and faces the challenges of diabetes management daily. Ben-Aharon has a parent with diabetes. He is a primary caregiver and is deeply involved in the diabetes monitoring loop. One day they were discussing how it was possible that in the era of smart technologies, diabetes patients were still facing the challenge of clinical data availability. Some of the smart monitors that were available in the market were expensive and practically available to only around 25% of diabetes patients globally. That was the starting point for solving the connectivity issue to ensure the continuum of clinical data for professional analysis and for all patients.
Yiftah Ben-Aharon
Moran and Ben Aharon started with developing smart monitors for their own use. They shared their invention with others. The feedback was so encouraging and enthusiastic that they started a company. GlucoMe began with providing clinical data, thereafter analysis functions and later developed its AI platform. Today GlucoMe is an end-to-end solution that includes diabetes monitors, a mobile app and a digital diabetes clinic with software for healthcare professionals.
Marketing/Promotion strategy
GlucoMe provides healthcare providers and insurance companies with new digital capabilities to easily review and assess massive quantities of data – real-time information, trends, analysis, treatment recommendations – and treat for up to 10 times more patients than they could with only face-to-face office visits.
Market opportunity
In 2017, diabetes expenditure came to some $727 billion, and is expected to increase to around $776 billion during the coming two decades. In 2017, an estimated 8.8 percent of the adult population worldwide had diabetes. However, the number of healthcare providers worldwide has either not increased at all in certain areas or not increased nearly enough to provide adequate attention to the growing number of patients who have diabetes. Until now, it’s been an uphill battle. GlucoMe’s technological advances have made it possible to make this ratio work.
Who are your competitors?
GlucoMe has several competitors on different aspects of the solution whether is it software or hardware. Companies like Glooko, Livongo, One Drop and alike can be considered GlucoMe’s competitors. All are US companies, which are for the most part not currently active outside of the US.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates GlucoMe?
Some of the competitors are mostly the device companies and some are coming from the software direction. There are several parameters that can differentiate GlucoMe from competition: affordability of the GlucoMe’s monitors, their universality, simplicity of operation and connectivity (GlucoMe’s BGM is the only one to transfer data to both iOS and Android through its microphone. It does this using audio connectivity), in addition to several software features where GlucoMe is leading the way.
Vyasa Analytics provides a highly scalable deep learning platform for organizational data, enabling conceptual querying and collaborative analytics to help inform key decisions derived from your most valuable information assets.
Elevator pitch:
Vyasa Analytics provides deep learning software and analytics for life sciences and healthcare organizations
Founder’s story:
Christopher Bouton, Ph.D.
Dr. Christopher Bouton earned his Ph.D. in molecular neurobiology from Johns Hopkins University and sold his first big data software company, Entagen, to Thompson Reuters in 2013. Living in India for four years as a boy, he developed a great respect for Vyasa – an important Hindu figure, storyteller and compiler of information – and believes that AI approaches will help us better compile and gain insights from our data systems. In 2016, he founded Vyasa Analytics to apply AI in life sciences and healthcare.
Marketing/promotion strategy:
Vyasa engages with life sciences and healthcare organizations to educate the industry about deep learning technologies, including speaking alongside executives at conferences and events. Dr. Bouton is also a frequent contributor and commentator to industry publications.
Market opportunity:
In 2016, the pharmaceutical industry spent some $157 billion on research and development. This figure is set to increase to more than $180 billion by 2022. The healthcare analytics market was $8.69 billion by 2016 and is estimated to reach $33.38 billion by 2022.
Vyasa is positioned to capture hundreds of millions of dollars in these markets by allowing organizations to conduct analytics on data relevant to their research. Other analytics companies in the space experiencing rapid growth include Lattice.io (acquired by Apple for $200 million), BenevolentAI (valued at $1.7 billion) and Exscientia (recent deals with GSK for $43 million and Sanofi for $273 million).
Who are your competitors?
While there are many deep learning companies, Vyasa is the only one applying deep learning to life sciences and healthcare specifically.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition?
Focusing in the life sciences and healthcare verticals is a key differentiator for Vyasa. In partnership with life sciences and healthcare organizations, we build software to help design better therapeutics, free up researchers for higher-level thinking and solve problems that matter for humanity.
Business model: Vyasa has a B2B business model. Every project is a blend of software licensing and services, provided to the life sciences or healthcare organization to advance their research goals. We are projecting upwards of $3 million in revenue in 2018.
Vaica is helping to solve the hundreds of billion dollar, global medication nonadherence problem with digital, medication management and adherence solutions.
Elevator pitch
Vaica helps get people to take their medications as prescribed — pills, liquids, inhalations, injections, etc — with precise patient support that optimizes medication adherence.
Founders’ story
Tomer Gofer
All of Vaica’s founders, including Tomer Gofer, its current CEO, started off in a different company that developed smart cabinets for medication dispensing in hospitals and addressed the medication adherence problem, as well as medication errors in the hospital environment. After a few years they realized that the true and more complex problem is actually at home, when the patient is suddenly left alone and is expected to cope with multiple medications, confusing prescriptions and absolutely no support. From that point they decided to address the bigger problem and find a solution that focuses on making it possible for even the most complex patient to take their medications as prescribed and lead independent lives at home.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Vaica’s distinctive solution includes a software/hardware combination that ensures accessibility to both patient and caregiver, the possibility to customize a product to the requirements of any therapeutic area as well as a particular patient’s needs and real-time notifications sent to select caregivers if a dose is missed in order to empower a relevant, proactive intervention. Vaica’s solutions have been tested at 15-world class medical centers, reporting a 92 percent to 98 percent success rate. Vaica’s solutions are commercially available worldwide.
Market opportunity
Vaica market opportunity focuses on three main segments: pharmaceutical companies, specialty pharmacies and Payers.
Specialty pharmacies are a rapidly growing segment. Medication adherence and patient education is right at the core of the specialty pharmacy operation. This new care standard drives specialty pharmacies to provide services beyond the ones that are typically provided at the retail level. In 2014, it was estimated that retail, mail, and specialty pharmacies dispensed about $78 billion in specialty pharmaceuticals in the US.
Different payers such as health plans and self-insured employers, are a main focus for medication adherence technologies due to their will to prevent complications that result from medication non-adherence and come with great cost.
Who are your competitors?
We have competitors, such as different adherence apps or dispensing devices that are available in the market. We compete over similar segments, but none offer a complete end to end solution that includes software, physical devices and customization.
Founded in 2014, Modio Health is a cloud-based credentialing and career management solution for healthcare providers and organizations.
Elevator pitch
Modio Health makes physician career management easier. Replacing outdated and time consuming credentialing processes, expensive middlemen and pushy recruiters with a technology platform that serves both physicians and healthcare organizations. Our goal is to streamline hospital operations, from straightforward, cost-effective credentialing to transparent physician staffing.
Product/service description
The Modio platform is home to thousands of healthcare providers, as well as many larger healthcare organizations and practices. By integrating with government agencies, public databases, and private sources, Modio has built a centralized practitioner database, called the Unified Provider Record, for healthcare providers and their affiliated organizations. Case studies show that the Modio platform decreases both provider credentialing time and the associated costs, reducing administrative burdens and eliminating lapsed licensure.
Origin story/founder story
Modio Health was born from the firsthand experiences of our team of doctors. Our founders had all been stung by the inefficiencies they encountered in their years of practicing medicine. The hassle of credentialing, the constant, nagging contact from recruiters, and high fees for licensing and job placements encouraged them to create a solution to these pain points. After heading a successful EHR implementation business in the early 2010s, they left their full-time jobs to get Modio off the ground. With the help of a Bay Area network of technology and production experts, and their own connections with healthcare providers, our founders launched Modio in July of 2015. Modio immediately gained traction with large ASCs, medical groups, and hospitals. Just nine months after its initial launch, Modio is already an integral part of many healthcare practices.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Our marketing strategy is heavily based on our extensive network of providers. Whether that’s our in-house team of physicians, or providers whom we’ve helped to get credentialed or find jobs, our network is constantly building up through referrals and simple word-of-mouth communication. We also promote the Modio name through targeted media, conferences, and mail campaigns.
Market opportunity (in your particular space—numbers, competitors, etc. are helpful)
Modio offers a scalable solution for healthcare management in a chaotic landscape. Few platforms aim for the level of comprehensivity that we do; Modio is the only service that combines credentialing services, an open job marketplace, and practice management all in one. In an industry that wastes more than $200 billion dollars every year in hospital administration costs, our efficient, inexpensive system is the first step to solving the problem.
Lightning Bolt invests heavily in research and software development to solve complex problems in the area of medical staff scheduling.
Elevator pitch
Lightning Bolt is the leading provider of automated physician scheduling for hospitals around the world. The company manages more than 3 million physician hours each month, helping to create shift schedules that promote work-life balance, productivity and patient safety.
Product/service description
Lightning Bolt’s cloud-based scheduling platform helps hospitals create dynamic staff schedules with a few clicks, automatically optimizing hundreds of complex scheduling rules. Physicians are able to request time-off and shift changes through the platform, creating transparency and a fair system that balances staff needs. The system also includes HIPAA-compliant messaging and detailed analytics.
Origin story
Working as a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to schedule massively parallel supercomputers in 1998, Lightning Bolt founder Suvas Vajracharya, Ph.D. was approached by a high school friend, a doctor, for help with a big frustration. The doctor noticed that the seemingly simple task of creating call schedules for his group was deceptively complex, time consuming, and often proved an inaccurate science where equitable distribution of staffing resources, or the honoring of individual physician requests, would often conflict or simply could not be met.
Suvas saw that his own technology experience with scheduling supercomputers could provide the foundation for creating an elegant, easy to use solution to solve the inherent complexities in medical staff scheduling. Both supercomputing and medical staff scheduling share fundamental requirements, including the need to distribute tasks equally and efficiently in the presence of complex and often changing rules with varying priorities. Within a few months, Suvas developed a prototype scheduling system to tackle his friend’s challenging problem and Lightning Bolt was born.
Marketing/promotion strategy
The company’s growth has largely been through word-of-mouth between physician executives and hospital operations leaders who have discovered the software and become loyal customers. Lightning Bolt also attends several industry events each year, including HIMSS, MGMA and RSNA.
Market opportunity
The vast majority of physician scheduling is still done manually today at America’s 5,700 hospitals. There are emerging players in the space of automated scheduling but nowhere near as established as Lightning Bolt. The company is part of a growing sector of hospital operations technology, including companies such as Silversheet, Modio Health, HealthLoop and AnalyticsMD.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition
Lightning Bolt is the only platform that considers significant and complex relationships to auto-generate the best possible schedules for large medical organizations. Also, they are the only scheduling system that provides transparency across a healthcare workforce. Since manual scheduling using spreadsheets or paper is the largest competitor, Lightning Bolt’s biggest differentiators tend to be time and efficiency. In one case study, iNDIGO Health Partners generated a $38M ROI over 5 years by switching from manual to automated scheduling with Lightning Bolt.
With a powerful database of more than 20,000 hospitals, Gauze helps employees, students and staff find the exact medical facility for their healthcare needs just when they need it. Search by an array of criteria, such as international hospital accreditations and certifications, that demonstrate adherence to global quality standards; medical specializations such as oncology, trauma, or endocrinology to direct you to the hospital with services to match your needs; or even whether a facility is publicly or privately funded which may dictate if they offer emergency or trauma services in the first place. Stop looking for a needle in a haystack—search Gauze to find the right healthcare provider for your emergency and basic healthcare needs while away from home.
Elevator pitch
You’ve got Montezuma’s Revenge in Mexico. Or, having a heart attack in Hamburg. Perhaps you’re simply sick in Seoul. You don’t speak the language. You might be scared. And, you don’t know where to go. We do. We’re Gauze and we’re transforming the way people connect with healthcare around the world. Gauze uses proprietary information and disruptive technology to connect the 1.1 billion international travelers around the world with any healthcare facility outside the United States right when they need it, according to their specific medical needs and geographic location.
Inspiration for origin
Sue Garber
I (CEO Sue Garber) became ill while visiting the Middle East and, like many other travelers, waited until I got home to receive care. Turns out, I needed open heart surgery to fix a congenital heart defect I never knew I had. My situation was pretty dire and sickness affects all of us regardless of our current location. I had worked in international healthcare and medical assistance for several years and knew that getting appropriate tools, information and resources into the hands of those who are outside their home countries would facilitate access to quality healthcare no matter where you find yourself.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition
There is currently no company offering such an immediate, accurate and technology-based solution such as Gauze. Medical assistance companies rely on telephonic communication to physically speak with a person prior to referring them to an appropriate medical facility. This can be costly with international roaming rates coming into play, not to mention the time-cost factor of waiting for a phone representative to tend to your needs. Gauze removes the middle man by giving immediate access to valuable healthcare information in virtually any country around the globe. Gauze covers the world, protecting you.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Gauze offers B2B services for multi-national organizations who send out international travelers and expatriates, universities that offer study-abroad programs to students and faculty, and nonprofit organizations that are sending out charity and missionary workers to some of the most remote places on earth. As such, Gauze participates in a wide variety of thought leadership, social media and speaking platforms across a broad spectra of professional and industry associations who are geared toward keeping travelers and expatriates healthy while abroad.
Market opportunity
The international medical assistance community is relatively tight knit with many employees from one organization making their rounds through the various players. These options include Medex, HTH Worldwide, Global Rescue, ISOS and OnCall International. There’s a number of smaller operators as well that earn less than $50 million and it’s estimated that the entire industry nets around $3 billion. With only a fraction of the 1.1 billion travelers actively utilizing these services, there is room for expansion–particularly via disruptive technology that facilitates interaction across a more mobile and technologically connected audience.
NeuronUP is an online platform for professionals working in neurorehabilitation and cognitive stimulation with patients with cognitive deficits related to Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, traumatic brain injury, ADHD, normal aging, etc.
Vyasa 
Modio Health makes physician career management easier. Replacing outdated and time consuming credentialing processes, expensive middlemen and pushy recruiters with a technology platform that serves both physicians and healthcare organizations. Our goal is to streamline hospital operations, from straightforward, cost-effective credentialing to transparent physician staffing.
Lightning Bolt invests heavily in research and software development to solve complex problems in the area of medical staff scheduling.
With a powerful database of more than 20,000 hospitals, Gauze helps employees, students and staff find the exact medical facility for their healthcare needs just when they need it. Search by an array of criteria, such as international hospital accreditations and certifications, that demonstrate adherence to global quality standards; medical specializations such as oncology, trauma, or endocrinology to direct you to the hospital with services to match your needs; or even whether a facility is publicly or privately funded which may dictate if they offer emergency or trauma services in the first place. Stop looking for a needle in a haystack—search Gauze to find the right healthcare provider for your emergency and basic healthcare needs while away from home.