In Austin, an emerging area of startup activity is in the medical technology and healthcare area, said Mellie Price, founder and CEO of SoftMatch.
In fact, one third of Capital Factory’s new startups are in the medical field.
Price spoke Thursday at the Austin Technology Council’s Emerging Austin: Healthcare Tech summit at the AT&T Education and Conference Center. About 150 people attended the event.
Overall, the deal flow and venture funds in Austin still greatly lag Silicon Valley in all of areas of technology, Price said. Austin attracts $600 million annually in venture capital to invest in about 150 deals, said Price. That compares to Silicon Valley’s $24 billion in venture capital annually for 1,500 deals.
With the new Dell Medical School, the opportunities for Austin to excel as a center for medical technology startups is great, Price said. But the community has to support the effort and continue to rally around those seeking to make change, she said.
To showcase some of the talent already working on big ideas here, ATC hosted an Austin Showcase panel, which Price moderated. The panel featured Bryan “Buzz” White, founder and CEO of BlueHub Health, Richard Sayles, Founder of Sapling, Senem Guney, founder and CEO of NarrativeDX , Sriram Vishwanath, president of Accordion Health and Patti Rogers, founder and CEO of Rallyhood.
White created BlueHub Health after a life-threatening medical issue arose with his wife and White couldn’t find a previous medical record with information on it that he needed. So he created BlueHub Health that allows patients to keep track of all of their medical records online in one place.
“Imagine never having to fill out a clipboard at a doctor’s office again,” White said.
BlueHub Health says it costs less than $1 and takes less than one minute to retrieve medical records from its system, compared to an industry average of seven minutes at a cost of $7 for traditional medical record keeping system.
Sapling is tackling the problem of keeping patient records safe when they are transferred to a law firm, said Richard Sayles, its founder.
“You need software that does exactly what you want it to do,” Sayles said. “Sapling builds flexible, intuitive software.”
Sapling is working with Norton Rose Fulbright’s healthcare group to provide data and security to medical records sent to its lawyers. Sapling created a system that acts as a virtual private cloud for clients and provides them with their own data space. None of the medical records get mixed up. The software creates a separate space for each client and it’s scalable, Sayles said.
The software keeps the law firm in compliance with federal healthcare privacy laws, Sayles said.
NarrativeDX is a platform that provides patient experience data to a hospital. It takes data from a variety of sources including surveys, phone transcriptions, social media records and uses its natural language processing software to provide feedback to hospitals, said Senem Guney, its founder and CEO.
“Improving patient experience is a top priority across the spectrum,” she said.
Hospitals get reimbursed at higher rates for providing quality care, Guney said. So it’s important for them to improve their performance based on patient feedback.
For example, one hospital got low rankings for nurse communication, Guney said. NarrativeDX’s data digging and analysis figured out why. It turns out that on cold nights the hospital ran out of blankets and the nurses told the patients they didn’t have any more blankets. The patients wrote poor communication in the survey because they didn’t have a place for no blankets. The hospital restocked blankets and improved its rating.
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