- The Cedars-Sinai Accelerator recently welcomed 11 health-tech companies as part of its fifth accelerator class
The Cedars-Sinai Accelerator recently welcomed 11 health-tech companies from across the United States and Europe as part of its fifth accelerator class. These companies are innovating solutions for a wide variety of healthcare challenges ranging from the way hospitals count inventory and schedule staffers to products like a smart brace for knee replacement patients.
“It’s exciting to see our innovation community grow with each new class of companies, and these founders and their teams bring a remarkable breadth of backgrounds and experiences,” said Cedars-Sinai Accelerator managing director Anne Wellington. “I’m looking forward to seeing how our fifth class transforms care at Cedars-Sinai and beyond.”
The teams for each company are going to spend three months in Los Angeles working closely with Cedars-Sinai mentors, including doctors, researchers, and administrators. And the Cedars-Sinai Innovation Space was designed to maximize interaction among the startup teams and it is located directly across the street from the medical center.
All of the accepted companies in the program are receiving a $100,000 investment from Cedars-Sinai. At the conclusion of the three-month program, CEOs will be able to see their progress with an audience of investors, mentors, potential customers, and members of the news media on Demo Day.
The new Cedars-Sinai Accelerator class includes:
1.) AMPAworks
AMPAworks CEO Bianca Gonzalez is a former surgical nurse practitioner who is intimately familiar with the challenges of missing inventory and the time-consuming task of taking inventory. And so Gonzalez and her partners (all MBAs from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania) developed a small cube that fits on any shelf and uses image recognition to count inventory and provides a real-time video feed of the count.
2.) ClinicianNexus
ClinicianNexus is an “Airbnb for clinical rotations” founded by Katrina Anderson, MBA. The platform allows health systems to assess and share their capacity to teach, filling in the who, what, when and where on the platform. And this information is shared with the schools so that students can apply for rotations as efficiently as possible. Currently, ClinicianNexus is already working with 60 hospitals and 100 schools with 10,000 students signed up.
3.) Feedtrail
Feedtrail — a company founded by Paul Jaglowski, Mikko Lehmus, Chris Miller and Gert Volmer — provides a simple patient survey prior to discharge that takes seconds to complete. And Feedtrail’s clients (36 healthcare providers in five countries) report they are receiving an increase in feedback as well as more actionable insights.
4.) FocusMotion Health
Founded by Cavan Canavan and Grant Hughes, FocusMotion Health has created a smart knee brace and an app and dashboard platform that captures how much a patient walks and exercises. Plus it measures a patient’s range of motion and flexibility for 20 exercises and sends the data to the medical provider. And the company’s first product — which is known as the TKR Recovery System — is aimed at patients undergoing total knee replacement.
5.) Hawthorne Effect
Hawthorne Effect — a virtual platform to track each patient’s data — founded by Jodi Akin is currently in use at several U.S. medical centers. Studies have shown that 89% of clinical trials are missing data and half of participating patients drop out before the study is completed.
And Hawthorne Effect also trains investigators to visit patients in their homes to certify data and keep patients engaged. The data is then transferred via a secure database platform to the principal investigators. As a result, there are lower patient withdrawals, more complete data collection, and improved patient experience in clinical trials.
6.) Health Note
Health Note — a company founded by Joshua Reischer, MD and Aaron Rau — has developed a simple-to-use platform that patients sign into before a physician appointment. The platform asks all the questions a physician would normally ask at the start of a visit. Then the information is formatted into a physician’s note and sent to the medical record system.
7.) Lantum
Lantum — founded by UK native Melissa Morris — makes it easier to schedule shifts of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals through a workforce management platform. Through the platform, hospitals can easily schedule their staff and swap shifts, negotiate rates, and complete time sheets. Plus Lantum can also arrange for next-day payments. Lantum is currently being used by 2,000 healthcare organizations and 20,000 healthcare professionals in the U.K. Previously, Morris worked as a healthcare consultant with McKinsey & Company for several years.
8.) Notisphere
Founded by Guillermo Ramas, Notisphere is a digital platform that enables suppliers to announce recalls and provide real-time communication between suppliers and healthcare providers. Ramas has 20 years of experience in healthcare technology.
9.) OMNY
OMNY runs a platform that facilitates real-time sharing of data particularly around pharmaceutical usage. For example, OMNY co-founder and CEO Mitesh Rao, MD cited the tracking of high-cost oncology drugs.
Without centralized data, hospitals struggle to know exactly where drugs are located or when they are utilized. OMNY has partnered with a number of big pharma, biotech, and hospital systems.
Rao — formerly the chief patient safety officer at Stanford — had co-founded OMNY with G. Sunny Grewal (Helix, Outset) and Sean O’Brien (Virtustream, Dell EMC).
10.) Parker Isaac Instruments
Parker Isaac Instruments has created a tissue-separation instrument which automatically isolates lymph nodes from the surrounding fat, which results in higher lymph node yields. This is essential since dissecting specimens can be a tedious manual process.
Once the nodes are separate, it is studied under a microscope to detect the spread of cancer. The instrument was piloted at a community hospital in upstate New York and is currently being tested in the Cedars-Sinai Pathology Lab.
Parker Isaac Instruments founders Alex Bodell and Charles Stern were inspired by Charles’ mother — who works as a pathologist and they have a shared passion for mechanical design.
11.) Virti
Virti — founded by Alexander Young, MBChB — is a company that employs virtual and augmented reality coupled with artificial intelligence to transport physicians and students into difficult clinical environments. And Virti believes that experiential education should be affordable to everyone in healthcare. For example, Virti is able to virtually place physicians in stressful environments like an emergency department dealing with a traumatic event. Then Virti assesses participants to help improve their performance.
This also helps reduce patient anxiety by creating virtual hospital experiences for patients, taking them on the journey from the parking garage to the operating room. Currently, Virti is in use in medical and nursing schools as well as healthcare simulation centers in the U.S. and U.K.
