Before introducing their latest batch of startups to a packed room of investors, Blueprint Health co-founders Mat Farkash and Brad Weinberg stepped back a bit to talk about where the healthcare IT accelerator has come over the past few years.
“It’s kind of weird to think back [to] about three years ago, [when] Mat sent me this rather long, momentous e-mail that said, ‘let’s do it,’” Weinberg joked.
From there, Blueprint has gone on to graduate 38 health tech companies from four different classes, counting the nine new startups (their founders pictured above) that showed their wares at the City Winery in Lower Manhattan on Thursday. According to Farkash, 10 of the 11 companies that completed the accelerator’s last boot camp in April are generating revenue, as are 89 percent of the startups that have come out of Blueprint Health since its first class in 2011. He didn’t say how many of the graduates are profitable.
Still, those companies have been successful getting the cash they need to get off the ground. According to Farkash, Luminate Health, one of the grads from its last class, recently closed a $1 million funding round. Another, Touch Surgery, raised $1.5 million and now is on pace to collect $500,000 a year in revenue. HealthyOut? It raised $1.2 million. Keona Health? $600,000. The list goes on.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that these startups, or many of the others churned out by Blueprint, are in the clear by any stretch. Even with an initial investment in the bank, it takes years of work, relationship building, and perhaps a little luck, to create a successful, sustainable business—let alone returns for investors.
“They still need to figure out how to navigate large companies, find key stakeholders, to find those advocates who will help them move their business forward,” Weinberg said. “But what we’ve seen over these past three years is that all of these companies’ businesses are built on the support of relationships.”
That’s the work that lies ahead for Blueprint’s latest crop. The accelerator looked at over 300 applications for its latest class, which began in July, before backing nine new entrants. Here’s a recap of those companies and their business plans:
WellTrackOne—The Affordable Care Act contains a provision called the “Annual Wellness Visit,” under which Medicare pays physicians $180 per patient, per year, to perform a brief preventive health checkup—but Peter Bechtel, CEO of WellTrackOne, said that only a small percentage of seniors have done it. WellTrackOne wants to solve this with a service/software combination: it schedules the visits, staffs a practice with a nurse to perform it, and has the software to generate a Medicare-approved report for a physician to review and integrate into the patient’s electronic health records. The idea is that this will help physicians make more money without taking up more of their time. WellTrack charges clinicians $100 per patient for its services, and generates about $50 in gross profit from each visit. It isn’t profitable yet, but has close to $1 million in revenue, and expects to be able to generate about $5 million in revenue by 2014.
ReferBright—A digital marketing platform designed to help independent health practitioners boost their referrals. A practitioner fills out a ReferBright profile—indicating rates, specialties, qualifications, and acceptable insurance—and the startup distributes it to a slew of websites, directories, and apps that are tailored to that practitioner’s specialty and location. ReferBright charges a $19 to $49 per month subscription fee, with a three-month commitment up front. It breaks even on each deal after three months, and earns an average of $300 per year, per practitioner, according to co-founder and CEO Brett Larkin.
CredSimple—Medical credentialing, or the mandated process of screening physicians for their qualifications, is a time-consuming, expensive procedure that often takes two to three months, according to CredSimple CEO Mike Simmons—his web-based service is designed to make it much more efficient. Clients upload a list of
