Last month, Baptist Health South Florida and Dreamit, a venture-backed accelerator, hosted a Healthcare Innovation Shark Tank to emphasize the importance of innovative solutions within healthcare.
Eight healthcare technology startups had three minutes each to pitch a panel of Baptist Health leaders during the event. These entrepreneurs were challenged to solve key problems in healthcare while meeting business needs.
Twice a year, the top healthcare technology and medical device startup companies from around the world are selected from hundreds of applicants to participate in Dreamit Health’s 14 week acceleration cycle. The company has launched more than 275 startups with a collective worth in excess of $1.5 billion.
The sharks, or judges, included Wayne Brackin, Chief Operating Officer, Baptist Health South Florida; Adriene S. McCoy, Corporate Vice President, Chief HR Officer, Baptist Health South Florida; Ghassan Haddad, M.D., Director of Hospital, Acute Care Program, South Miami Hospital; and Paul Di Capua, M.D., MBA, MSHPM, Medical Director of Primary Care Development & Evaluation, Center for Healthcare Advancement & Outcomes, Baptist Health Medical Group, Baptist Health South Florida.
“Baptist has always had an interest in innovation and has always been at the forefront of healthcare and how to provide the best healthcare to our population,” says Dr. Capua. “Part of this initiative comes from the Baptist Health Center on Innovation, which seeks to identify the best ways for us to continue to do what we’ve always done, which is to provide the best care we can for the patients that we treat.”
The startups in the competition included:
Braincheck: Assesses brain health in 5 minutes using mobile interactive games based on gold-standard neurocognitive tests. Building on 40 paying organizations and 10K baselines in the concussion space, BrainCheck launched its dementia product with 3 assisted living centers.
Eko: Entered the market with a smartphone enabled digital stethoscope used by approximately 2600 physicians in 450 hospitals for long term tracking of heart sounds. Mobile sensors and a remote monitoring platform will launch in early 2017 to provide a clinically validated early-warning sign for heart failure readmissions.
GraftWorx: Seamlessly integrates a sensor package into "smart" wearables and implantables for dialysis and peripheral arterial disease patients and transfers clinically actionable data from the device directly into the EHR to identify those who are at risk of poor outcomes.
Lilu: Developing a nursing bra that automates compression and breast massage to help pumping moms to produce more milk in less time. 800+ moms have signed up to try Lilu and two LOIs are in place with maternity stores, anticipating a Q3 2017 commercial product launch.
PadInMotion: Streamlines patient engagement in the treatment process from arrival through discharge and follow-up via a digital content platform. 2K active licenses across ten top tier hospital systems and two high end skilled nursing facilities, generating 30K+ MRR.
PhotoniCare: Changing the way middle ear disease is managed by enabling physicians to look through the eardrum without cutting it open, saving months of treatment time per patient and unnecessary costs. FDA approval is expected in the first half of 2017.
Synotrac: A patent-pending implantable medical device that allows doctors to actively monitor joint health via a smartphone app after joint replacement surgery to reduce the incidence of $100K+ revision surgeries by up to 80%.
Yosi: Eliminates patient intake from waiting rooms and provides an end to end patient on-boarding solution to reduce paperwork by 40% and no-shows by 45%. Already being used by 160 physicians, 3 enterprise clients and 1 payer to drive an 88% patient engagement rate.
There was not intended to be a “winner” but rather an event that allowed a platform for these startups to present their concepts to Baptist Health. Moving forward, the conversation with Baptist Health may continue for a few of the start-ups.
“It was a fun event,” says Dr. Capua. “I love watching Shark Tank. I’m a big fan of the show and getting to participate as a shark was really fun. I hope to get an opportunity to repeat.”
Dr. Capua says that the panel of judges were impressed with each of the competitors.
“I give a lot of credit to DreamIt because they really sought to create solutions to real world problems that exist within the delivery of healthcare,” he says. “One of the things they had done was to be sure that the problems presented to the startups were real problems faced by healthcare systems. The solutions the teams presented are ones that will find traction within healthcare systems as well as alignment between the entrepreneurs and the companies with health system invectives.”
Dr. Capua’s best advice to healthcare organizations on how to continue to best foster innovation is simple – to define your strategy and vision because healthcare and the healthcare landscape is changing rapidly.
“At Baptist, we’re pursuing what we call the quadruple AIM. It’s an expansion of the more familiar triple AIM,” he explains. “The triple AIM is this concept that healthcare should strive to provide high quality, low cost care with the best patient experience. We’ve found that it’s impossible to achieve that if you don’t have engaged providers and healthcare professionals, so our quadruple AIM is the triple AIM plus being engaged as physicians and healthcare professionals.
He adds that if you don’t have an engaged workforce that seeks to want to provide the best care to your patients, then the rest is not going to come. If you have an engaged workforce, everything comes secondary to that.
“We have a laser focus on this quadruple AIM as a way of driving innovation and change,” he says. “That’s how we define and that’s how we decide what to focus on and where to move forward.”
