TMCx Digital Health Cohort: 21 Startups Leveraging Information Technology to Enhance Healthcare Efficiency

In early June, TMCx, the incubator under the Texas Medical Center (TMC) in Houston, showcased the 21 digital health startups that were finalists. TMCx’s current areas of focus include artificial intelligence, medication management, healthcare process improvement, remote care, and behavioral/neurological health.

TMCx provides entrepreneurs with essential resources for business growth, including training courses, office and meeting spaces, and a multidisciplinary advisory network composed of legal experts, healthcare professionals, corporate executives, and investors. Spanning 100,000 square feet, the incubator program features state-of-the-art facilities designed to advance early-stage life sciences research and support digital health startups.

In the fall of 2016, more than 300 companies competed for spots in the TMCx program, with 20% of the participating startups hailing from Silicon Valley, California. Over the course of these four months, the startups involved in the TMCx program achieved significant milestones, completing initiatives such as pilot programs, contracts, agreements, and strategic partnership arrangements.

Below is a list of 21 outstanding digital health startups on TMCx, curated by VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat):

Location: San Francisco

Arterys is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup founded in 2007, with Fabien Beckers serving as its Chief Executive Officer. The company is dedicated to creating an intelligent, automated diagnostic platform that leverages high-performance cloud computing technology to rapidly analyze and process imaging data, providing healthcare institutions with more precise 3D vascular imaging and quantitative analysis.

Arterys has launched software for analyzing MRI data in patients with cardiovascular disease, enabling physicians to quantitatively assess cardiac blood flow and function non-invasively, thereby improving clinical outcomes for heart disease patients. The company is currently raising $12 million in Series A funding to expand into its next target area: oncology diagnostics.

Location: Washington, D.C.

The company was founded in 2014 to develop a remote monitoring app for pregnancy. Designed as a “to-do list,” the app provides guidance on maternal health during each trimester through specialized, clinically approved tasks covering nutrition, exercise, and other related behaviors. Over the past three years, the company has established partnerships with General Electric, March of Dimes, Startup Health, and 11 hospital systems across China.

Location: Melbourne, Australia

CNSDose, a Melbourne-based company, has developed a method that leverages genomics technology to accelerate the identification of suitable antidepressants. This approach enables personalized antidepressant prescriptions for patients, eliminating the need for trial-and-error medication testing and reducing error rates. Ajeet Singh, founder of CNSDose and a former psychiatrist, has secured nearly $1 million in funding, which will be used to support a clinical trial scheduled to launch in the United States this October.

Location: Houston

Founded in 1996, the company provides mobile workspaces to deliver personalized health services and nursing assistance to eligible patients in home settings. It enables care team members to streamline and optimize patient care workflows, while offering consulting services in personal care, home healthcare, hospice care, euthanasia, and Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS). Additionally, the company offers specialized programs such as CBA, PHC, CCP, MDCP, as well as compliance and due diligence services.

Location: Ottawa, Canada

DOT offers more precise wearable consumer devices capable of diagnosing and treating mental disorders such as ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). Its core product is a neurofeedback headset,Can be combined withBy integrating with interactive applications, the system offers personalized diagnosis and treatment through the gamification of neurofeedback therapy. “This will serve as our entry point into the U.S. market. We aim to achieve growth in the United States by collaborating with associations and leading institutions in the field of child health,” said CEO Yishel Khan.

Location: Palo Alto, California

Glidian, co-founded by Robert Romano, Ashish Dua, and Maxwell Wu, offers an electronic portal that streamlines the prior authorization process for medications and procedures. The company is dedicated to improving the efficiency with which healthcare providers submit requests to health plans by automating existing manual prior authorization workflows. Providers initiate authorizations based on payer-specific criteria, thereby reducing the likelihood of denials. After submission, the company tracks authorization status and provides real-time updates, minimizing the administrative burden on providers associated with contacting health plans.

Location: Portland, Oregon

Healthcoin leverages blockchain technology to improve the prevention of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. It connects employers, hospitals, life insurance companies, governments, and health applications into a unified network. This network enables effective prediction of when patients have successfully prevented disease, provides comprehensive data visibility, facilitates the establishment of shared programs, and even allows two cities in different countries to compete to determine which can implement the most effective preventive measures. The company’s CEO is Diego Espinosa, and Nick Gogerty serves as Chief Operating Officer; he is a highly innovative entrepreneur in the industry.

Location: Houston

Founded by Robert Grzeszczuk, the company develops quality management and clinical decision-support tools powered by intelligent algorithms. Its AI virtual assistant helps mitigate communication inefficiencies; for instance, radiologists can use its smart report editor to correct errors directly. Similar to Gmail’s functionality, the assistant prompts radiologists if they omit critical details—such as vascular involvement—in a pancreatic cancer report. Additionally, the company’s chatbot, Flo, notifies physicians when critical results are available and provides direct patient care guidance, eliminating the need to review test results solely through electronic reporting terminals.

Location: San Francisco, California

The company was founded in 2015, with CEO Sirj Goswami as one of its founders. It develops and operates a cloud-based platform, having launched the online platform InsightRX, which leverages principles of quantitative pharmacology and machine learning to enhance patient care.

The platform guides treatment decisions by analyzing drug concentration and biomarker data collected from patients beyond the standard time windows. Furthermore, it aggregates data from both large patient populations and those with rare diseases, leveraging clinically validated pharmacokinetic models, physiology, pharmacogenomics, drug concentrations, and biomarkers to optimize dosing regimens.

Location: San Francisco, California

Lantern offers personalized programs that combine daily practice with professional coaching to address issues such as anxiety, stress, sleep disturbances, and depression. It assesses users through a series of brief questions to understand their emotional strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, thereby creating tailored solutions.

In addition, users can obtain assistance and feedback from online professionals through the app and telephone consultations. The company won the SXSW Accelerator Award in 2014 and has attracted interest from venture capital firms. Last year, it raised $16 million in funding, became a partner of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), and plans to collaborate with more than 30 universities across China.

Location: Scranton, Pennsylvania

Mr. Mecca and John Strauss graduated with degrees in biology in 2014 and founded M&S Biotics, a healthcare analytics company that leverages radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology and artificial intelligence to optimize resource utilization in integrated operating rooms (ORs). The company is developing a multifunctional system that automatically tracks surgical procedures in the OR, assists hospitals in personnel management and oversight, and provides advanced data analytics. This will enhance hospitals’ sterile processing and distribution capabilities.

Location: Santa Clara, California

The company aims to enhance the delivery of high-quality care through communication and collaboration solutions. Co-founder Greg Hunter is a former national track and field champion. Its core product, ManageUP, is an integrated operations platform that automates tasks, manages projects, and engages employees. Developed based on feedback from physicians and administrators, the product features an intuitive and fully visual interface. The platform has already undergone market testing.

Location: Palo Alto, California

Medable, founded by Michelle Longmire, has developed mobile applications that enable healthcare companies and developers to easily build or scale medical-grade services. The company provides comprehensive support for clinical applications, including communication, collaboration, and health data management, with full support for protected health information (PHI), including HIPAA-compliant cloud storage technologies. In September 2016, the company released its first cloud solution, Synapse, which enables Apple’s new CareKit Bridge API to facilitate real-time health management on iOS.

Location: San Francisco, California

Medifies, based in San Francisco, has developed an innovative software platform for healthcare providers to facilitate communication with patients’ families. Nat Pagle serves as the company’s CEO, while co-founder Paul Petronelli is a cardiac surgeon. Operated by non-clinical staff, the Medifies platform does not display protected health information (PHI) or personally identifiable information (PII), thereby reducing frequent phone calls and alleviating family anxiety. This approach enhances the experience of both caregivers and patients, improves patient satisfaction, saves clinical staff time, and minimizes communication errors and treatment mishaps.

Location: Atlanta

NeuroLex Laboratories is a seed-stage symptom diagnostics company that applies speech analysis technology to detect various health conditions in the pre-symptomatic phase. Jim Schwoebel is the company’s CEO and founder; he is an accomplished biomedical engineer from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a partner at CyberLaunch, an incubator based in Atlanta.

NeuroLex administers a 1–2-minute voice test to patients, extracts brief speech samples, and derives features from both acoustic waveforms (e.g., fundamental frequency) and textual content (e.g., semantic coherence). It then generates reports using customized machine learning models tailored for various conditions, including psychosis, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. This approach reduces the average diagnostic time to five minutes and improves patient outcomes through early intervention.

Location: Adelaide, Australia

Personify Care’s mobile platform leverages patient behavioral data to enable clinical teams to monitor post-discharge recovery, increasing patient adherence to existing evidence-based clinical protocols by 90%. The platform has been adopted by the majority of surgical departments in Australian hospitals and has been proven to enhance monitoring efficiency for patient rehabilitation eightfold without increasing the workload of clinical nurses. This allows clinicians to intervene before issues become severe, thereby reducing treatment costs. Ken Saman, CEO and co-founder of the company, stated that he plans to launch the platform in the United States in the second half of the year.

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Psious, a behavioral health technology company co-founded by Xavier Palomer and Danny Roig, aims to bring a valuable virtual reality platform to mental health treatment, with its flagship product being the Psious ToolSuite.

This platform provides mental health professionals with animated and live-action environments for use in clinical practice. It offers a variety of solutions, including more than 30 resources (such as VR, AR, and 360-degree videos) for treating anxiety disorders and phobias, as well as enhancing mindfulness and relaxation techniques. Therapists first access a web interface through which they can control the virtual environment via a mobile app; patients wear headsets, and the therapist guides them through various scenarios. The Psious platform is suitable for individual practitioners and is affordably priced.

Location: Houston

The company’s first product, MigrnX, provides clinicians with accurate, actionable data for the treatment of migraine. MigrnX is the first tool capable of automatically managing migraine, directly improving patient care outcomes, and has been proven effective.

Location: San Francisco, California

Stroll Health is a SaaS startup with Matt Maurer serving as Chief Operating Officer. The company aggregates and processes millions of healthcare transactions to assist physicians and patients in making informed healthcare decisions. Its product, Stroll Health, is an EHR-integrated software for ordering care services. It provides patients with tailored diagnostic recommendations through real-time scheduling, automated insurance-related tasks, and continuous patient communication, thereby addressing issues such as care gaps and non-adherence to medical advice. Clinical trials have demonstrated that its product can reduce healthcare costs by 30%.

Location: Minneapolis, USA and Bangalore, India

Vios Medical, led by CEO Amit Patel, is dedicated to reducing healthcare costs and alleviating resource constraints. The company has developed an FDA-cleared patient management platform that leverages IoT-based sensors to provide remote care services and big data analytics. Designed to automatically monitor, analyze, and manage patients across various hospital and home settings, the platform aims to enhance clinicians’ workflow efficiency, operational efficiency, and patient safety.

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Ward Medication Management is Australia’s largest clinical pharmacy services company, with Stuart Ward serving as CEO. The company’s decision-support analytics engine provides evidence-based prescribing recommendations. Its closed-loop system collects population health data, medication information, and patients’ unique biological characteristics and medical histories. Subsequently, a quality-of-life–based analytics engine processes this information to generate clinical reports and tracking based on evidentiary outcomes. Clinical observations and analyses are fed back into the loop, enabling continuous improvement in precise medication analysis within a real-time environment.

Note: The above content is compiled. VCBeat strives to ensure the accuracy of the translation.

References:

http://hitconsultant.net/2017/06/09/39147/