7. It turns out that some mental health treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, are just as effective when delivered online as they are when delivered in person. Cognitive Health Innovations offers subscription-based online therapy tools that walk users through cognitive-behavioral solutions to their everyday stresses, or connect them with their therapists via secure messaging. “We believe the Internet is the new frontier for mental health treatment,” says co-founder Josh Susser.
8. Your doctor could soon have much easier access to the exploding supply of medical literature. It’s difficult and expensive for doctors to keep up with the latest science in their fields. Docphin is aggregating articles from over 500 medical journals in an online “medical news platform” that curates content based on each user’s interests. The service is available only to doctors at academic medical centers so far, but in its demo day presentation Docphin announced a new enterprise version that will be available to any medical center.
9. There are people out there who want to reward you for making healthy choices in your life. No, this isn’t a retread of item No. 1. It’s about HealthRally, a crowdfunding platform designed to help people achieve health goals by making it easier for their friends and family to rally around them and pledge cash rewards. A reward as low as $200 can triple success rates for people who are trying to quit smoking, says founder Zack Lynch, and can quintuple success in reaching weight-loss goals. The startup makes money by keeping a 7 percent cut of each reward.
10. For patients who can’t afford the copayments on expensive drugs, there’s still a way to get needed medications. Medmonk, another former Y Combinator company, is creating a Web-based database that pharmacists can consult for discount codes provided by pharmaceutical companies. “For a medication that costs $400, the pharmaceutical company will happily pay a $50 copay, because it means they’re going to get the other $350 from an insurance company,” explans founder Somaira Punjwani.
11. Your doctors will soon be able to access your CTs, X-rays, and other medical images in high resolution on their iPads. Nephosity has come up with a way to liberate medical images from the slow, expensive picture archive and communications systems (PACS) made by companies like GE, Philips, Siemens, and Fujifilm. Not only can doctors pan and zoom through the images on their tablets, but two doctors can collaborate remotely by sharing access to the same image in real time. Eventually, Nephosity hopes to replace the traditional PACS vendors.
12. Soon we could all be wearing 24/7 diagnostic arrays on our skin. Wearable wireless patches made by Sano Intelligence sample blood through microneedles and perform blood chemistry assays, relaying the results to doctors continuously. The company plans to test the technology first on hobbyists and athletes, then on patients participating in clinical trials. Distributing the patches to everyone with a medical condition could eventually form “a basis for a future model of health care” based on continuous monitoring, says co-founder Raj Gokal. The company plans to compete in the Nokia Sensing X Challenge.
13. It’s getting easier to set up an exercise regimen and adhere to it. Almost two-thirds of Americans get no exercise at all. (Likely the same two-thirds who are overweight.) Part of the problem is that it’s hard to design an exercise program that you can stick to week after week. Sessions offers an exercise coaching program that connects subscribers with coaches who help them develop and update realistic, 7-day plans that are integrated with their work schedules. In a pilot program in February involving 50 testers, the program helped people increase their exercist time by 35 percent, says founder Nick Crocker. The secret sauce at Sessions, he says, is achieving the “right mix of content, tone, timing, frequency, and medium” to keep users highly engaged.
* * *
Most of the teams emerging from Rock Health, with the exception of Agile Diagnosis, are in search of seed or Series A funding. Only two—Sessions and AchieveMint—have revenue so far, but all of the rest mentioned plausible ways to earn some (and that was definitely a first for me, after about five years of attending demo days like this one). Maybe none of these companies will change the world fundamentally—but all of them are doing something fundamentally useful. And it could be that myriad incremental changes, if they’re going on in enough corners of the industry, will add up to a new healthcare system that we can live with.
