Cedars-Sinai Demo Day Goes Virtual
Seven Start-Up Companies to Present Their Innovative Healthcare Solutions to Investors, Potential Customers and the Media
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented innovation on the part of healthcare providers everywhere who rose to meet the challenges of the past year.
And the next generation of healthcare innovations will be on display during the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator Demo Day, on Wednesday, April 7, from 3:30-5 p.m. Click here to register to attend the virtual event.
During the Demo Day program, leaders from the seven start-up companies selected to participate in the Accelerator's sixth class, will take to the virtual stage and highlight their product and progress to investors, mentors, healthcare executives and select members of the media.
"The companies in this year's class will be key players in the innovations that are sure to result from one of the most challenging eras in our nation's history," said Darren Dworkin, senior vice president of Enterprise Information Services and chief information officer at Cedars-Sinai, who is one of the founders of the accelerator. "Cedars-Sinai is committed to investing in new technologies, new ways to engage with patients and improve their lives."
How Does the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator Work?
The Cedars-Sinai Accelerator provides businesses accepted into the program with a $50,000 investment and access to mentorship from some of the most respected healthcare leaders in the nation. At the conclusion of the three-month program, each startup CEO will share their team's progress with an audience of investors, mentors, potential customers and members of the news media at Demo Day.
Since 2016, 54 start-up companies have participated In one of the six Accelerator classes. Cumulatively, alumni companies have raised more than $400 million in funding, and have hired more than 700 employees. In the past year, three alumni companies have had successful exits. NarrativeDx was acquired by Press Ganey, MedPilot was acquired by Vitalyze Health and Enso Relief was acquired by Hinge Health.
“Over the past five years, companies participating in the accelerator have built products that are used every day by patients
and providers, both at Cedars-Sinai and around the world," said Anne Wellington, managing director of the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator. "I’m eager to see the future impact of this group of companies, who are tackling important challenges such as reducing provider burnout, improving health equity, and staying virtually connected to patients.”
Companies Participating in Demo Day
Butterflly Health–Leveraging the therapeutic power of peer groups using social media-style tools, Butterflly delivers behavioral health solutions–including mindfulness therapy, culturally sensitive cognitive behavioral therapy, coaching and teletherapy–for underserved children, teens and adults. Co-founded by Areva Martin and Rodney Bell, Butterflly delivers a patient-focused experience that is safe, evidence based, highly personalized, de-stigmatized and designed to fit into a person’s life.
Dieta Health–With no cure for irritable bowel syndrome, yet hundreds of treatment options, including diet adjustments, medications, supplements and lifestyle changes, patients are often confused and overwhelmed with options. Co-founders Asaf Kraus, a data scientist and himself an IBS patient, and software engineer Ben Neigher created an app called Dieta to help people who suffer from IBS to improve their symptoms by providing personalized digestive health recommendations. Dieta captures high-resolution data on a patient’s diet, bowel movements, medications, and other factors, and then uses machine learning to generate precise recommendations for their path to relieving symptoms and improving quality of life.
Diligent Robotics–Diligent Robotics is an artificial intelligence company creating robot assistants that help healthcare workers with routine tasks so they can focus on patient care. Co-founded by robotics experts Andrea Thomaz, PhD, and Vivian Chu, PhD, Diligent's first product, Moxi, is a hospital robot assistant that performs non-patient-facing tasks like gathering supplies and bringing them to patient rooms, delivering lab samples, fetching items from central supply, and removing soiled linen bags.
Dock Health–Dock Health is a task management and collaboration platform built to help healthcare teams work better together. Co-founders Michael Docktor, MD, Nitin Gujral and Keather Roemhildt aim to use thoughtful design and simplicity in their web and mobile app to solve workflow challenges with the goal of freeing up more of clinicians' time for face-to-face patient care.
Fathom–Translating information about a patient's medical care from their medical record into billing codes is a critical part of healthcare infrastructure. Fathom uses artificial intelligence to take a "first pass" at certain medical coding tasks, allowing human medical coders to focus on the most critical charts. Co-founded by Andrew Lockhart and Christopher Bockman, the company's system can reduce coding costs by up to 70%.
Repisodic–Repisodic aims to simplify the patient discharge process and minimize readmissions by helping care teams manage patient discharges. The Repisodic platform generates a list of customized post-acute care provider options for the patient based on information such as insurance accepted, clinical services offered and driving distance, while highlighting providers the health system has partnered with, allowing the patient to receive quality care in the community. Co-founders Mike Cwalinski Jr. and Ryan Miller launched the company in 2017.
Upside Health–Chronic pain can be complicated and difficult for patients to manage, and frustrating and intensive for clinicians to treat. Upside Health co-founders Rachel Trobman, Jason Trobman and Ofer Wellisch, MD, have created a patient-facing platform called "Branch" to help clinicians monitor and manage patients' chronic pain care. It uses both self-reported and passively collected data to deliver targeted educational content, rewards for functional achievements, resiliency training and an active community support system to help sufferers manage their conditions, and helps health systems reduce the cost and time burden associated with pain care.
Read more in Discoveries: Innovation: It's Academic