Intus Care, a cost-effective solution for home health care companies to manage and monitor care providers, took top honors and the $25,000 cash prize at the second annual Brown Venture Prize Competition.
Intimately.co, an online retailer that sells undergarments and lingerie for women with disabilities, took second place and $15,000, while ResusciTech, an app that helps people better perform CPR, took third place and $10,000.
Sponsored by Brown University’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, the $50,000 Brown Venture Prize is designed to empower the most advanced entrepreneurial ventures of Brown students. This year, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it was held virtually: All eight finalist teams recorded pitches, and then the competition committee met via Zoom to determine the winners.
The Brown Venture Prize supports teams who have identified a significant opportunity and whose ventures have the potential to create “impact at scale.” Winners receive not only prize money, but also critical mentorship and access to leaders in the Brown entrepreneurial community and beyond.
For first-place winner Intus Care, this was not the startup's first accolade. The health tech company was a semi-finalist in the Rhode Island Business Competition last year, as well as a winner in MassChallenge Rhode Island. Its founders were all featured in Rhode Island Inno's 25 Under 25 in September.
Intus Care was inspired by the inefficiencies in the home health care industry, including no-show appointments by care providers, appointments that are not reimbursable by insurance and massive amounts of wasted time spent on paperwork. According to the company, organizations and payers in the industry lose $10 billion annually due to improper Medicare and Medicaid payments. Now, with the passing of the Federal CURES Act, home health care providers must implement electronic visit verification by 2020 for personal care services and 2023 for all home healthcare.
“Our solution is a simple electronic visit verification platform that is accessible to care providers via their mobile phones,” Robbie Felton, Intus Care's CEO, said during his presentation. “It includes care plans, tasks checklists and GPS verification, as well as access to relevant patient information, so the care providers have a clear picture of the people they are taking care of.”
The company plans to use the $25,000 prize partly for software development, so it can finish building out its family portal feature, and then the rest on sales and marketing to reach 20 additional customers.
Intimately, the second-place winner, came to fruition out of a desire to help the nearly 600 million women worldwide who have some type of disability that affects the way they dress. Founder Emma Butler’s mother, who has an autoimmune disorder, was dismayed by the available undergarments for disabled women.
“When we went to online shop, especially for bras, this is what we found: ugly, medicinal underwear,” Butler said during her presentation. “And in my mom’s words, she said, ‘This is dehumanizing.’”
Today, Intimately is an online marketplace for fashionable and functional undergarments for all women. The company has successfully completed a $20,000 Kickstarter, has sales lined up and has been featured in Forbes. Butler said all she needs now is the capital “to press play.”
Third-place winner ResusciTech will help the average person save lives during medical emergencies, particularly those involving CPR. The company created an app that guides people through the entire CPR process, showing them how to apply the technique as well as feedback.
“If you have a cardiac arrest, the quality of the CPR you receive is the single most important factor in your chances of survival,” said ResusciTech Co-Founder and CEO Abbie Kohler, adding that 90 percent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest incidents are fatal. “Most cases, in fact 80 percent of them, look like this. They happen at work, at school, at home or anywhere else you might go. The best case is there is maybe someone near you who has had a CPR training class. But often they lack the competence to perform CPR at all, and if they do, they will most certainly do it wrong.”
Kohler said the company plans to use its winnings to help complete software validation and verification in order to ensure the app works as intended. It wants to obtain FDA clearance in late 2021 and formally launch in January 2022.
