A Richmond startup is hoping participation in a Los Angeles accelerator program will help it transition from a consumer-oriented business to a business-oriented organization.
EqualityMD was invited to participate in the three-month-long program associated with Cedars-Sinai Health System, a large health care organization on the West Coast. The Cedars-Sinai accelerator looks for innovative companies in the health care space. EqualityMD works in LGBTQ health care, helping connect patients with providers.
Participants in the accelerator program receive $100,000 in funding and access to 300 health care professionals. EqualityMD is one of just 10 companies currently in the accelerator. The program ends with a pitch competition in front 10,000 health care professionals in Las Vegas.
“Cedars-Sinai is probably the best partner I can possibly imagine to kick things off version 2.0 of our company,” equalityMD founder Justin Ayars said.
The company has a long history and several iterations. Ayars began his career as a trial lawyer for insurance companies. When the Great Recession happened in 2008, Ayars was laid off and became an entrepreneur. He ran a coffee shop in Williamsburg and launched a restaurant. He then started marketing agency focused on helping companies reach the LGBTQ community. That became a data analytics company for the LGBTQ community, and it went through Lighthouse Labs in 2019. The company never gained traction, but Ayars realized one of the real challenges faced by the LGBTQ community was access to health care.
“The one question I got from across the country, from people from all walks of life, from the LGBTQ community was: ‘Where can I find the doctor who makes me feel safe?’”
The data analytics company became a telehealth platform that helped LGBTQ patients connect with doctors. Ayers raised some money and tested a minimum viable product, but it never took off. The company learned that health care providers needed a larger platform with scheduling, prescription management and billing.
“They wanted more features to be able to bring their entire practice onto our platform,” Ayers said.
That has led Ayers and his team to pivot again with the help of the Cedars-Sinai accelerator program. The goal is to build out a platform that helps companies provide LGBTQ-specific health benefits to employees. Ayers said this type of a platform is one of the best ways for companies to become more diverse.
As part of the accelerator program, Ayers is working on marketing and growing an LGBTQ clinic. It is one of the reasons equalityMD was invited into the program.
“The head of the clinic was asking, ‘Why is nobody going to our clinic?’” Ayers said. “And I said, ‘Do you want it alphabetically or numerically?’ Because people don't trust health systems, because they don't trust providers. And there is a whole lot of red tape wrapped around the second-biggest health system in the country.”
His goal is to have a minimum viable product ready to be presented at the health care expo at the end of the accelerator. Ayers believes he will gain a lot of valuable information that he and his team can incorporate into the next iteration of the company.
“They're going to be connecting us with all kinds of different providers within their network —health care administrators, their partners, their funders, and different ways that we can engage and incorporate our products and our ideas and our trusted networks into the entire Cedars-Sinai health system nationwide,” Ayers said. “That's the potential opportunity.”
