Now we move on to explore some start-ups working to improve healthcare experiences and outcomes and patients and staff.
Health Folder
Overview: Health Folder is a Polish start-up founded by Wiktor Żołnowski: an app collating medical documentation to support patients in keeping on top of their healthcare journey.
Why? Wiktor was diagnosed with cancer in recent years and noticed that after two or three months of treatment, he had already collected a very thick folder of medical documentation. Visits to his doctor necessitated a period of searching through that document for relevant information, which was time-consuming and inefficient.
What happened? Wiktor sought to build a medical documentation app focusing on the paper folders that patients take with them to different doctors, hospitals and specialists. People can digitise their paper documentation or upload electronic documentation they already have access to, so that documentation can travel with the patient wherever they go. Three months into building the prototype, Wiktor took the app back to his doctor to show him, which resulted in the doctor joining Wiktor as his business partner and co-founder, bringing medical expertise with him. As of last winter, Health Folder had over 1,000 active users, with aims to increase that number and also to introduce family profiles to the app.
ezClinic
Overview: Chicago-based start-up ezClinic offers a ‘digital nurse’ powered by artificial intelligence, with the aim of providing a ‘personal assistant’ for critical and acute care nurses.
Why? Founder James Martin was already interested in developing a health tech platform when his own father experienced a heart attack whilst in ICU, with information about his medications failing to transfer over from check-in to ICU. James identified a challenge around missed adverse events leading to a reported three million deaths annually “because nurses can’t be everywhere at once”.
What happened? James and his team interviewed more than 300 providers in the US to help them develop the platform, which utilises 3D sensors, AI and machine learning aiming to identify adverse events or risks and notify clinical teams. As of November last year, ezClinic offered a working prototype awaiting clinical testing, with results from a test in an ICU simulation centre averaging 95 percent performance precision with use of high-fidelity mannequins and patient actors. This year, the team set out to test in a clinical setting with a view to developing datasets and improving algorithms, before performing a live test with nurses receiving alerts.
Dasera
Overview: Dasera aims to empower organisations to manage risk across the entire data lifecycle from creation to deletion, by automating data discovery, classification and access control.
Why? Historically organisations have tended to categorise data security as a budget line item, Dasera notes, leading stakeholders to “prioritise spending over reasoning” and leading to challenges around decreased cyber security spending. Dasera highlights the “indispensable value” of cyber security solutions and chose to strategically pivot and align its offering with emerging needs around generative AI.
What happened? Dasera offers a data security posture management platform that automates data security and governance controls, safeguarding structured, semi-structured and unstructured data throughout the entire lifecycle in multi-cloud and hybrid environment. The platform enables continuous data usage and storage visibility, assisting companies with detecting risks and aligning data security strategies with business objectives. Specialising in the automation of data security, benefits include reducing risks; fostering collaborations between data teams and owners; providing actionable insights to streamline operations; and granting more access to data whilst generating less risk. Dasera states that its mission is to “reinvent data security for the way cloud-first organisations use data”.
PIPRA (Pre-Interventional Preventive Risk Assessment)
Overview: PIPRA (Pre-Interventional Preventive Risk Assessment) is a Zurich-based medtech company that has developed an AI-based surgical tool, designed to assess a patient’s risk of suffering from postoperative delirium.
Why? Co-founder and CEO John Klepper identified that delirium is a “disease area which is extremely prevalent and under-addressed”, with research reportedly indicating that delirium affects almost one in four patients over 60. It can lead to serious negative outcomes for the patient such as increased nursing home admissions and long-term cognitive complications such as dementia, and is also reported to be “60 percent more expensive to healthcare than diabetes”.
What happened? John used to work in Alzheimer’s disease, using artificial intelligence for prediction and prevention purposes, and teamed up with anaesthesiologist Nayeli Schmutz and cell biologist Dr. Benjamin Dodsworth to found PIPRA. The tool utilises AI to calculate the different risk factors and generate an individual risk score for the patient. PIPRA’s algorithm extracts routinely collected data from electronic health records and stratifies patients into risk groups, highlighting which patients might be at risk for developing delirium. The aim is to help facilitate effective delirium management to support targeted prevention and diagnosis.
