The Texas Medical Center’s accelerator, TMCx, has announced its second group of startups, with 13 companies specializing in digital health.
The cohort is the first of two classes TMCx plans to host this year. The health IT companies will be in the five-month program until June, and a second group of companies focusing on medical devices will make up an accelerator class for the second half of the year. Among the 13, five are from Houston, pointing to a strong digital health scene in TMCx’s backyard.
“Bringing 13 companies together, each of them focused on different aspects of digital healthcare innovation, will foster an incredible synergy that can lead to unpredictable associations, collaborations and greater acceleration for each company,” Erik Halvorsen, director of the TMC Innovation Institute, said in a press release.
On Monday, the entrepreneurs were at the accelerator’s campus, getting IDs and parking badges, an orientation sessions, and meeting a few mentors. I spoke to a few of them over boxed lunches, learning more about their innovations related to patient records security and applying data analytics to track patients across the healthcare system.
TMC does not require a stake in the companies though Halvorsen told me back in November that this year the medical center will be looking to making direct investments.
Here are descriptions of the full class:
—Aprenda Systems (Houston): Provides organizations with accurate and timely directory data through access to its Signature software, which it calls the world’s first identity convergence platform.
—CareSet Systems (Houston): Builds physician networks using CMS data.
—DocResponse (Houston): A software company focused on healthcare diagnostics for clinical decision support.
—ePreop (Seal Beach, CA): Its SurgicalValet software helps coordinate perioperative care, including patient engagement, billing support, readmission prevention, and other functions.
—GreenLight Medical (San Francisco): A “decision engine” to promote cost and quality-conscious purchases within hospitals for new medical technology review and approval.
—Moving Analytics (Marina Del Rey, CA): Helps hospitals implement home-based cardiac rehab programs delivered through patients’ mobile devices.
—Qidza (San Francisco): A mobile platform that translates developmental science into fun health-screening activities throughout human development, beginning with babies.
—Secure Healing (Houston): Helps hospitals comply with auditing the requirements of HIPAA and other regulations by automatically identifying inappropriate access of confidential information.
—Sense.ly (San Francisco): A virtual nurse platform that helps clinicians better manage and communicate with their patients.
—The Right Place (Houston): Provides hospitals and post-acute providers a more efficient and reliable way to match the right patient to the right place of care.
—TowerView Health (Philadelphia): Helps chronically ill patients manage their medication.
—Valera Health (New York): Provides smartphone-based support for behavioral wellness and care coordination.
—Xpress (Santa Fe, NM): Puts providers and patients in charge of healthcare, giving them real-time access to unbiased pharmaceutical resources and information.