Rock Health has announced its sixth class of startups. These seven startups have been working out of the new office of the San Francisco-based digital health accelerator for five months, but were just announced by the accelerator. Like other recent classes, they received a $100,000 in investment and a variety of other perks during their stay in the program.
Some startups are still in stealth mode, while others have been making news right along during the past five months. They include startups working on both provider and consumer options, and many of them have already secured significant early investments.
Here's the seven new Rock Health companies:
Ambient, a startup that spun out of the Mayo Clinic, raised $1.1 million in February for a product suite that includes three software platforms developed and tested by Mayo Clinic physicians, all of which are designed to make it easier for doctors to extract the information they need for a particular patient at a particular time from their hospitals’ information systems. The first is called "AWARE", which stands for Ambient Warning and Response Evaluation. It’s an interface for EMR data that prioritizes and organizes a patient’s medical information in three ways: by organ, chronologically as a timeline, or as a customized checklist that displays only the next steps relevant to that case.
Another product, called Yes Board, is a patient tracking tool for emergency departments. The system, which has been used at Mayo for about five years, allows all staff members in the emergency department to monitor the location and status of all patients from monitor screens throughout the department. The final tool, called Synthesis, is a mobile viewer for both Aware and Yes Board, allowing doctors to access the same information from their iPads or iPhones.
Another startup in the class that has already raised money is Doctor in Demand, which picked up $3 million from Venrock, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Shasta Ventures and athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush in December last year. The startup offers patients a portal from which to connect to physicians and is available on iOS and Android platforms. Each video call costs $40, can be paid for with a credit card, a health care spending account, or flexible spending account. Correction: When we wrote about Doctor on Demand last year, the service was available in 15 states and a previous version of the article reflected that. In fact, the service is now available in 47 states -- all but Alaska, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.
Factor 14 is a hardware and software startup with a particular focus: the 4 million patients taking oral anti-coagulants, including patients suffering from or at risk for deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, myocardial infarction and ischemic stroke. The company's still staying pretty quiet, but they are apparently working on helping providers manage patients remotely in the hopes of reducing healthcare costs and improving outcomes.
This Mountain View, CA-based company is working on a "credit score for health" that will be determined by having customers take a health assessment survey. The company is in stealth mode and is hiring. In a mission statement on their website, the founders write "We believe that the best way to improve the world's health is to celebrate the healthy, rather than cajole and harass the unhealthy." CEO Munjal Shah previously founded Like.com, which was purchased by Google for an undisclosed sum in 2010.
Kurbo Health has also been out there making headlines while matriculating at Rock Health. The company, which has raised $1.8 million in seed funding, announced its mobile behavior change program for kids at a TechCrunch event earlier this month.
The Kurbo Health program is designed for users aged 8 to 18, but is intended to create a supportive environment at home so the entire family participates. The app offers a manual entry food tracker that assigns colors (red, yellow, and green) to different foods so that children understand at a basic level which foods are healthy and unhealthy. Kurbo also offers games, a section to view progress, and challenges. Users receive feedback and coaching via video and text alerts within the app based on the foods they track. The app also offers encouragement and recommendations.
Kurbo Health’s onboarding program lasts 10 weeks before transitioning into a behavior maintenance program. Children and their families use the web portal and app to track their eating habits and also participate in weekly individual, online coaching sessions that last 10 minutes. The version of the program with live coaching costs $85 per month, the text message-based version costs $35 per month, and the program is free to use if no live coaches are involved. The company’s coaches include teachers, parents, and fitness instructors who have past experience working with children.
Currently launched only in California, Stride Health uses data to match people searching for insurance on the open exchanges with the most appropriate plan for them. The key piece is the Health Insurance Recommendation Algorithm, or HIRA. Although the company hasn't reported any funding raises, on its website it boasts investments from Mayo Clinic, Mohr Davidow, Kleiner Perkins, and Doll Capital Management. Stride Health is also hiring.
Studio Dental is taking aim at working people who don't feel they have time to go to the dentist -- an activity which takes an average of four hours out of the workday, according to the company. Instead, in San Francisco, Studio Dental provides a dentist's office on wheels that will come to the workplace, getting the worker in and out in an hour for the same cost as a normal office visit.
