Hidden away in the Countway Library of Medicine for the past three months, seven teams of fledgling entrepreneurs have been developing tools that could one day change how patients interact with doctors and manage their own health.
The plan? To create affordable diagnostic, monitoring and even therapeutic health care programs for use on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. In other words, health apps.
“Digital health care is an emerging space that is at the forefront of the intersection between technology and health care,” said Sarah Pollet, chief operating officer of Rock Health, one of the nation’s first digital health care startup accelerators. “It’s bringing together technologists and physicians in unique ways to change how we access, monitor and track our own health.”
Co-founded by two Harvard Business School graduates in 2011 and hosted on the HMS campus, Rock Health brought its program to Boston this summer. The Boston incubator provided 15 entrepreneurs and their startup companies with seed funding and guidance. A total of seven teams each received $20,000, free office space and expert mentorship over the course of the summer to develop their ideas into tangible products.
The eclectic mix of students and post-grads, with backgrounds ranging from medicine to engineering, presented their pitches to investors and other interested parties on the Rock Health Demo Day at the Broad Institute on Aug. 24.
Digital health care has remained largely untapped due to high barriers of entry for startup developers. The complex challenges of medical issues, patient interactions, laws and regulations can often be overwhelming for small companies with little funding, while larger developers hesitate to take on risky, innovative projects.
Rock Health hopes that by providing expert mentorship across multiple fields, these barriers can be overcome to make the estimated $60 billion global mobile health care market more accessible for entrepreneurs.
“We want to attract technologists that might otherwise be solving problems in other spaces, and give them a platform to springboard new ideas,” Pollet said. “We provide them with education on every kind of issue they will encounter—physician mentors, business and legal experts and back-end developers. They get access to any sort of resource they would ever need.”
With guidance from mentors across the greater Boston area, including many from HMS, the teams are working on unique ways of tackling health care issues.
One of the teams, Reify Health, is looking to bridge the gap between health care providers and patients using mobile technology. They are working on a platform that would allow doctors to assess or give advice to patients over text messages or email. One implementation of the system is already being tested at Johns Hopkins, where researchers are sending personalized text messages to help patients manage their cystic fibrosis, and examining whether the technology can help reduce medical complications and hospital visits.
Another team, Home Team Therapy, aims to help physical therapy patients through an online video game. A major issue for patients in rehabilitation is the loss of motivation to continue their therapeutic routines when they return home. By creating a game that integrates personalized physical therapy routines, provided by a patient’s own doctor, with an Xbox Kinect controller, a video game device, this company believes it can make the process more engaging.
These teams, along with the other startups, hope to follow in the footsteps of previous incubator companies. Though only two years old, the team at Rock Health have helped some of their previous startups raise millions in venture capital and other investments. Their goal is to build on their success on the upcoming Demo Day.
A limited number of complimentary tickets to the event are available to the HMS community on a first-come, first-served basis. Register at Rock Boston Demo Day with the code: hmsrocks.
