Shelli Pavone has spent the last 18 years in the health care industry.
For the last seven, she has spent her time focusing on startups in the space, where she noticed that startups were often failing to connect with clinicians productively, even though they had created potentially breakthrough health innovations. As she saw it, startup leaders were not connecting with enough clinicians, or the right clinicians, or a diverse array of clinicians—and their companies were the worse for it.
"A lot of the companies I had worked for and known of, they typically find one or two clinicians within their network who were great people to use as a sounding board. But in health care, that's just not enough," Pavone told BostInno. "One of the major reasons health care innovations fail stems from people not being able to access the right expertise."
The process was frustrating for clinicians, too, who wanted to see those innovations come to life.
To begin solving that problem, Pavone and and her co-founder Michelle Higginson started Inlightened last year. It's a platform designed to connect clinicians with entrepreneurs who are looking for a specific area of expertise. Entrepreneurs can peruse the network of experts, built up over the last several months by now-CEO Pavone and chief marketing officer Higginson, and connect for short conversations or long-term projects.
Inlightened made its public launch this week. There are currently more than 100 clinical experts on the platform, each of them thoroughly vetted by Inlightened's team.
Clinicians set their own rates, usually either hourly or project-based, and Inlightened takes a 15 percent cut. The startup also has different subscription levels for companies to be able to access the network of experts, based on the size of the company and other variables. Inlightened additionally has an enterprise level, through which companies can engage Inlightened itself to perform background work and research for them.
The startup has so far raised $500,000 from angel investors in a pre-seed round it closed last summer. Pavone said she and Higginson will look to begin raising a seed round at the end of the year.
"We're focused on building a diverse network—and I mean diverse from every perspective," Pavone said. "We're not just focused on getting opinions from the same five thought leaders from the same institutions here in Boston. [We want to engage experts of] different races, ethnicities and genders, those in different practice locations and types, and those that are treating different populations as well."
