GigaOM » medical-devices

Surgical gaming and handwashing police: 5 Blueprint Health startups to watch

Ki Mae Heussner — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 23:20:41 +0000

Health care may be woefully behind the rest of the world in embracing information technology, but eleven startups graduating Thursday from New York-based startup accelerator Blueprint Health have some compelling ideas for moving it along.

After three months of training, the startups shared plans for everything from reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving patient education to deciphering confounding lab reports and simulating complicated surgeries.

While all of the companies made a strong case, here are the ones that most caught my attention:

IntelligentM

Want to know the culprit behind $10 million in annual lost revenue for hospitals? It’s not medical errors or billing mistakes (although those can obviously be expensive problems too). It’s something far less technical: dirty hands.

According to startup IntelligentM, one in every twenty patients admitted to the hospital will get an infection while admitted, and 50 percent of those infections are related to poor hand hygiene on the part of health care workers. To keep their hands clean, the company has created a sensor-equipped SmartBand that tracks when, where and how well a doctor or nurse washes her hands. If a doctor washes her hands properly, the bracelet buzzes once; if her hand-washing fails to meet the compliance requirements, it buzzes three times. It also can sense when a health care worker is about to insert an IV and buzzes if’s been too long since she last washed her hands. In addition to letting hospitals track the aggregate behavior of their workers, it emails each health worker with a weekly hygiene report.

Luminate Health

If you’ve ever received a copy of a lab report, you know they’re nearly impossible to decode. But Luminate Health plans to break into the $75 billion lab testing market with a digital platform that helps patients understand and access their lab results. Paid for by the lab testing companies, the dashboard displays lab results in colorful, intuitive graphs that give patients clear guidance on how to improve their health. It also enables doctors to add explanations and interpretations of the results. As part of the new health care legislation, labs will be required to provide patients with digital access to their reports. With Luminate’s dashboard, the company said they can not only be compliant with the new law but increase lab volume by strengthening the relationship between physicians and their patients.

Touch Surgery

Like a high-tech version of the board game Operation, Touch Surgery gives surgeons a virtual way to learn and practice medical procedures. Just by swiping their fingers, doctors can simulate any procedure from an appendectomy to cleft palate surgery to a carpal tunnel release. The founders’ pitch is that it gives surgeons a way to practice and learn faster, while collecting data on risk, education and other issues that could be valuable to hospitals, medical device companies and academic institutions. The app is free but the company makes money by charging medical device companies to place content in the app that trains surgeons to use their device. So far, it has signed contracts with two major medical device companies and is used by doctors at Duke, Stanford and other top institutions.

Keona Health

Each year, nurses at the average hospital spend 25,000 hours on the phone answering basic patient questions, said startup Keona Health. But by cutting the average triage call from 15 minutes to 60 seconds, the company said it can not only free up half of a hospitals’ nursing staff to meet with patients in person, it can help hospitals generate an additional $800,000 in revenue.

The key to its efficiency is an online service that guides patients through a set of questions based on standard triage protocol. A patient with a cough can describe his symptoms and ask whether or not he should come in to see a doctor, or a new mother could ask whether she can continue taking a certain medication while breast-feeding. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other algorithms, the platform analyzes the data and then provides nurses with a report. From there, nurses can reply via text message, email or phone call with the appropriate response.

HealthyOut

HealthyOut is still in stealth mode, so there’s not too much I can share now. But if you’re a foodie who wants to stay healthy, this is a startup to keep in mind. It already offers a mobile app for iOS and Android that helps diners find dishes at local restaurants that match their diet and nutrition preferences. And, so far, has attracted investors including 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and former IAC CEO Peter Horan.

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For Kore Telematics money and medicine are key to M2M growth

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 16:00:08 +0000

Kore Telematics, one of the top providers of cellular bandwidth for companies that want to get their products or inventory on the internet, is seeing 40 percent growth in total connections with a third of those coming from medical device and payments processing. It looks like the focus on machine to machine connections is bearing fruit, and medicine and money are winning.

Alex Brisbourne, president and COO Kore Telematics, said in an interview last week that most of the company’s business is associated with asset or fleet management (making sure drivers are where they say they are and tracking high dollar equipment) but the company has been growing in those categories as it expands internationally. With hundreds of carriers around the world and different frequency bands for radios, tracking something across countries can be a challenge, so businesses may value the Kore services more if they need connectivity across different carriers and continents.

But in encouraging news for those of us watching the medical device space (as well as who don’t carry quarters for parking meters) roughly 30 percent of the new additions (or 13.3 percent) are from companies adding connectivity to heart monitors or payment processing to things like parking meters. About two-thirds of the growth is in medical devices and one-third in mobile payments. A couple of years ago, the medical device category was growing by 2 percent from a much smaller base, noted Brisbourne, as a means of comparison.

The growth of medical devices hasn’t gone unnoticed by others in the industry, and it is a topic we’ll discuss at our Mobilize 2012 conference in San Francisco this week.

Kore’s figures represent only cellular connections and are limited to its customers, but it’s nice to see the hype around connected medicine finally gathering real devices. I’ve been eagerly waiting for connected health products since about 2005, and have so far been pretty unimpressed. However, newer products and attempts to make use of the data those products are gathering are making me feel like connected medicine might really be around the corner.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:01:08 +0000

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

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