Expanding Maternity Health Access and Services

Cayaba Care is a maternal health company offering community-based clinical services via technology-enabled multidisciplinary care teams. Cayaba Care provides care coordination, benefit sign-up, routine maternity care in the prenatal and postpartum period, mental health/counseling, breastfeeding support, and patient education.

Founders

Trends

• Racial disparities result in 2-3x rates of complications, preterm deliveries and maternal/newborn deaths.
• Medicaid has increased coverage to 12-months postpartum, adding coverage of home services/doula support.

Positive Outcomes

• Reduced gaps in care for underserved
• 35% reduction in emergency room visits
• Increase access to maternity care

May 19, 2022Cayaba Care raises $12M to expand maternal health services

August 3, 2021Maternal health platform Cayaba Care launches with $3.2 million in seed funding

Providing Value-Based Care to Underserved Communities

Clinify Health’s cloud-based technology helps independent physicians serving underrepresented communities optimize decision making at the point of care and achieve financial stability, through alternative payment arrangements that promote healthier communities and more robust medical practices.

Founders

Trends

• Clinicians have less than 15 minutes to process 75+ decisions per patient visit.
• Physician practices are experiencing financial instability.
• Growth in Medicaid is market outpacing all others.

Positive Outcomes

• Maintain Independent Providers
• More Practices Successful in VBA’s
• Reduced Gaps in Care for Underserved

Improving Quality of Life for Sickle Cell Disease Patients

Functional Fluidics is a technology-enabled diagnostics company commercializing the gold standard for assessment of red blood cell health. The company’s main offering is two complementary tests that measure mechanical fragility and flow adhesion. These two assays are novel and proprietary and provide important information about the disease state of Sickle Cell patients.

Founders

Trends

• Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) affects approximately 100,000 Americans. 1 out of every 365 Black or African American births and 1 out of every 16,300 Hispanic-American births are born with SCD.
• Diagnostics testing continues to grow as payors want validation on clinical utility of therapeutics.
• Therapeutics companies are deepening their relationships with diagnostic companies to assist in advancement of novel products.

Positive Outcomes

• Reimbursement from Medicaid
• Integration into Academic Medical Centers
• CLIA designation has opened the opportunity for COVID-19 testing

Promoting Financial Literacy to Achieve Financial Freedom

Goalsetter is the first family finance app to provide an education-first saving and investing experience with a financial literacy curriculum that is offered through age-appropriate gamification tools and pop-culture-driven content to engage users of all ages. Goalsetter also partners with banks and financial institutions to offer white-label solutions and provides Fortune 1000 companies with employee benefits solutions that help them and their families become financially healthy.

Founders

April 5, 2022We’re excited to announce that Goalsetter is the winner of the 2022 FinTech Breakthrough Award for “Best Personal Finance Product.”

March 2, 2022Tanya Van Court was selected from a group of hundreds of talented women for her leadership and impact in the FinTech and Financial Services space.

Creating Better Outcomes by Establishing Trust

Health In Her HUE is the trusted digital health and wellness platform that connects women of color to culturally competent healthcare providers via asynchronous and synchronous telehealth consults, while offering health content, connections, and community. Patients of color have better health outcomes when treated by providers who they can trust to see their humanity, listen to them, and take their concerns seriously.

Founders

Trends

• 55% of Black women receive access to healthcare through employer-sponsored health insurance, yet 1 in 5 Black women avoid the doctor due to concerns of discrimination.
• 25% of Black Americans live in areas with shortages of primary care providers.
• Patients who use a primary care provider have 33% lower annual healthcare expenditures.

Positive Outcomes

• Increases use of needed health services
• Lowers cost by avoiding unnecessary ER
• Increases access to education, community, and care

February 13, 2018Health In Her HUE
April 21, 2022Black women and women of color deserve to feel affirmed, validated, safe, and connected

Making Culturally Competent Mental Health Easily Accessible

Hurdle is a digital health platform that provides culturally sensitive teletherapy services targeted to traditionally underserved communities with an initial focus on the mental health needs of Black men. The company’s multifaceted platform offers one-on-one teletherapy, a self-care mobile app, and wellness workshops that are crucial in addressing these communities’ ever-growing mental health issues.

Founders

Trends

• The demand for culturally sensitive mental health support is increasing rapidly. Black Americans are 20% more likely to struggle with mental illness due to complex societal stressors, yet only 53% percent receive treatment for depression compared to 73% of White Americans.
• The supply of mental health practitioners from diverse communities is woefully inadequate with less than 4% being Black.
• Patients increasingly are forced to navigate between the medical and mental health services systems with little organized support.

Positive Outcomes

• Sustained user engagement
• Better health outcomes
• Lower total health costs

November 29, 2021Founder of Hurdle, Kevin Dedner, MPH in an article on NPR highlighting the importance of putting culture first.

February 16, 2022Hurdle has expanded its #MentalHealth services to support #BIPOC communities in California, Texas, and Massachusetts after a rapid year of growth in 2021.

Optimizing Detection and Diagnosis through AI

Iterative Scopes provides gastroenterology AI toolkits designed to provide real-time actionable insights to providers. These computer-aided detection and diagnostic tools – powered by computer vision and machine learning technology – enable gastroenterologists to detect and classify lesions in real time and provide doctors with access to deep neural networks that can help improve patient outcomes.

Founders

Trends

• African Americans are about 20% more likely to get colorectal cancer and about 40% more likely to die from it than other groups.
• Studies have found that the prevalence of Irritable Bowel Disease (IBD) increased from 2001 to 2018 among Medicare beneficiaries of all race and ethnicity groups with a higher increase rate among non-Hispanic Black adults.
• Clinical decision support (CDS) in AI can augment a clinician’s capability to collect, understand, and make inferences on patient data to reach the optimal clinical decision.

Positive Outcomes

• Improves outcomes through AI-assisted detection
• Limits access barriers through improved accuracy upon first visit
• Assists therapeutic development to improve disease treatment

Preventing Disease Progression through Advanced Detection

Kiyatec has developed an advanced 3D cell culture technology designed to predict patient response to therapies before the treatment begins. The company’s technology utilizes patients’ own living tumor cells to create phenotypic 3D cell-based models for drug response profiling and analyzing cell-material interactions, enabling medical practitioners to isolate effective treatments for cancer patients.

Founders

Trends

• In 2020, roughly 1.8M cases of cancer were diagnosed in the United States, and an estimated 60k people died from the disease.
• By 2040, the number of new cancer cases per year is expected to rise to 29.5 million globally and the number of cancer-related deaths to 16.4 million.
• The US spends approximately $150B on cancer treatment annually with 11 out of 12 FDA-approved drugs costing more than $100k annually.

Positive Outcomes

• Gets the patient on the right drug sooner
• Saves time and money
• Improves health outcomes

Ensuring Equitable Access through Telemedicine Software

MD Ally’s telehealth emergency care platform offers unprecedented ease of access between public safety practitioners and providers. This breakthrough technology offers nonemergency 911 telemedicine software that enables EMS to triage the patients to virtual care instead of dispatching costly emergency services, enabling patients to avail on-demand telemedicine and emergency care.

Founders

Trends

• 5% increase in 911 call volume each year (currently 150M calls annually)
• 50% of all 911 calls are non-emergencies
• $155B in avoidable cost/year

Positive Outcomes

• Improved Clinical Outcomes
• Decreased Patient Out-of-Pocket Costs
• Improved Population Health
• Avoided ED Utilization Costs

Improving Adherence and Outcomes through Accessible Technology

Moving Analytics has created a virtual care management platform intended to help clinicians implement virtual cardiac rehab and other secondary prevention programs. This platform uses a system for remote chronic care management that allows hospitals to deliver cardiac rehabilitation, enabling medical practitioners to improve patient outcomes, reduce readmissions, and empower the effective and efficient delivery of quality care to patients.

Founders

Funding Trends

• Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States with more than 868,000 Americans dying of heart disease or stroke every year—that’s one-third of all deaths.
• Heart disease costs the US healthcare system well over $200 billion annually and is projected to cost over $1 trillion by 2035.
• While most patients who experience a cardiac event are prescribed cardiac rehabilitation, only a small percentage of them enroll in and complete a facility-based program leaving the susceptible to further complications and a higher rate of hospital readmission.

Positive Outcomes

• Lowers direct and delivery of quality care to patients
• Higher enrollment and completion rates
• Lower hospital readmissions

Driving Better Adherence and Outcomes through Medication Management

MyMeds is the developer of a real-time data exchange platform intended to connect patients, caregivers, providers, and payors to improve and drive medication adherence. The platform also educates patients through curated news about their health conditions and enables them to chat with a pharmacist.

Founders

Trends

• Nonadherence can account for up to 50% of treatment failures, around 125,000 deaths, and up to 25% of hospitalizations each year in the United States.
• 24% of patients never pick up their prescriptions, while 50% of patients don’t properly take their medications once they’ve picked them up.
• Approximately $100 to $300 billion in healthcare costs could be curtailed annually by addressing medication adherence.

Positive Outcomes

• Drives greater primary and secondary medication adherence
• Improves efficacy of treatment regimens
• Lowers total cost of care

Addressing Nutrient Deficiencies in Pregnant Women

Needed provides pregnancy and family dietary supplements and related services to empower real nourishment in women before, during, and after pregnancy. The company offers practitioner-supported and mama-centric nutrition products, education, and community, helping women to experience optimal nourishment through better identification of their nutrition needs and supplements that truly work in meeting those common needs.

Founders

Trends

• 97% of pregnant women take a prenatal supplement, yet 95% are nutritionally deficient, leading to poor outcomes for maternal and children’s health.
• Escalating fertility, postpartum, and early development challenges and increasing understanding that proper nutrition helps birth outcomes create massive human health and business opportunity.
• Americans poor diet drives $50 billion a year in healthcare costs. Prevention in the form of nutrition will improve health outcomes.

Positive Outcomes

• Optimizes nutrition for optimal fertility, pregnancies, and postpartum recovery
• Provides trusted, fundamental nutrition information
• Combats common pregnancy complications and supports postpartum recovery

February 13, 2022Perinatal Nutrition Company Needed Raises $3.7M in Seed Financing Round

Tech-enabled Medication Reconciliation to Prevent Contraindication

Gaps in medication histories and prescriptions create life-threatening issues for patients around the globe. ScriptSee’s innovative AI-driven platform addresses these gaps and enables providers and pharmacists to conduct comprehensive and seamless medication reconciliations and thereby avoid medical contraindications and unnecessary and costly hospital readmissions.

Founders

Trends

• More than 40% of avoidable medication errors are believed to result from inadequate reconciliation during admission, transfer, and discharge of patients.
• 52% of medication errors can be reduced if medication reconciliation is performed 30 days post-discharge.
• Hospitals lose more than $500M in CMS reimbursement due to unnecessary readmissions.

Positive Outcomes

• Patient taking “right prescriptions”
• Fewer medication contraindications
• Better outcomes at a lower cost

Providing Financial Oversight for Senior Citizens and Caregivers

SilverBills has developed bill-paying technology intended to take over the burden of paying bills for seniors. The company’s technology receives clients’ bills electronically, scrutinizes and pays them, employs technology-based secure systems to alleviate the hassles of daily money management, and charges an economical, flat monthly fee, enabling elderly Americans and their families to live in their homes without the stress and anxiety that often accompanies paying bills.

Founders

Trends

• Mental health, anxiety, visual acuity, manual dexterity, and health problems associated with aging increase susceptibility to financial exploitation.
• Medicare Advantage (MA) supplemental benefits improve overall health and member experience mitigating member churn, loss of premiums, and negative impact on Star quality measures.
• Employers increasingly recognize the burden that elder care places on their employees and as a result the impact it has on employee performance and career growth.

Positive Outcomes

• Maintain Independent Living
• Prevents Loss of MA & Prescription Drug Plan Coverage
• Increased Coverage Stickiness when Offered as Supplemental Benefit

December 11, 2021SilverBills is one of the startups in AARP’s Agetech Collaborative, which just launched.

Facilitating Digital Health Adoption through Compliance Automation

Sym is a workflow automation platform that empowers engineering teams to build the perfect security and privacy controls. A code-first developer platform providing the building blocks to automate the repetitive privacy and data security workflows that so many software companies deal with: manage requests for access to systems, collect evidence of adherence, and then create the necessary reports demonstrating compliance for SOC-2, GDPR, HITRUST, and HIPAA.

Founders

Trends

• Innovation and development of digital health solutions and tech-enabled services continues to grow in healthcare.
• It is necessary for digital health companies to comply with SOC-2, GDPR, HITRUST and HIPAA requirements in order to execute vendor agreements with payors and providers.
• Rising quantity and cost of data breach incidents have propelled investment into this space.

Positive Outcomes

• Lower cost option
• Speed to market
• Growth with customer as compliance needs expand

Female-Focused Care that Improves Access, Outcomes, and Experiences

Tia is a full-service women’s healthcare platform offering a new, women-centric model of care with a blend of in-person and virtual services. The company has built a personalized healthcare model by fusing OB/GYN, primary care, mental health, and evidence-based wellness services into an integrative experience that is convenient, collaborative, and focused on prevention.

Founders

Trends

• Women control 80% of the U.S. healthcare dollars as the “Chief Medical Officers” of their families.
• Despite the estimated $500B in annual medical expenses attributed to women, only 4% of all healthcare research and development is targeted specifically at women’s health issues.
• Femtech market is estimated to be $60B by 2027.

Positive Outcomes

• Improved Clinical Outcomes
• Higher Patient Engagement & Satisfaction
• Lower Cost of Care

May 3, 2021A project over three years in the making, Tia’s doors in SF at the corner of Mission & Van Ness are officially open