UC Davis Health's digital health innovation center has launched an incubator and announced its first startup, a home caregiving platform led by former AKT Development Corp. CEO Chrysanthy Demos.
The UC Davis Health CoLab Innovation and Technology Incubator introduced WellCent on Monday.
“Startups like WellCent play a critical role in expanding our health system's innovation ecosystem,” Dr. Yauheni Solad, UC Davis Health chief medical information officer for digital health and vice president of innovation, said in a news release. "They represent a key part of our strategy to accelerate innovations that we incubate at UC Davis Health that ultimately can scale nationally."
WellCent will be a digital platform that connects patients and at-home caregivers with validated medical devices and resources. According to the release, it aims to make innovations in health care easy to use and understand through training and resources.
Demos told the Business Journal that she has been working on WellCent since July of 2021.
“I’m so excited to be the first company to come out of the incubation center at the CoLab,” Demos said.
Before starting WellCent, Demos led AKT — a company founded by her father, Angelo K. Tsakopoulos, and the largest land developer in the Sacramento region — for three years.
While there, she pursued developments with home designs targeted at allowing seniors to age in place, at home.
“It’s really a continuation of something I’ve cared about for a really long time,” she said.
She said she is one of many caregivers in the “sandwich generation.”
“We’re taking care not just of our aging parents and our aging loved ones but also our children,” she said.
For those with loved ones suffering from dementia or degenerative motor diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, she said professional care is sometimes unattainable.
“The cost of care can run into the tens of thousands of dollars per month,” she said. "For a lot of people that’s just unaffordable, and the burden of care often falls to them."
She said the focus of WellCent will be to translate the innovations coming out of research centers like UC Davis and make them accessible to these caregivers.
“It’s so exciting, and it’s so much fun to work with such an incredible group of people,” Demos said. "They’re all so bright and they’re all doing great work."
The number of people who are caring for a family member is on the rise. According to a study by the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, more than one in five Americans are now providing unpaid care to an adult with medical or functional needs.
“Caregivers play a critical role in our health care system,” UC Davis Health CEO Dr. David Lubarsky said, in the news release. “They represent the invisible front line of health care, and companies like WellCent will offer much needed services to support this group through innovative smart home-enabled solutions.”
UC Davis Health’s Digital CoLab, Digital Collaborative for Innovation and Validation, was started with the goal of making it a global hub for collaboration on digital health innovations. The CoLab works with physicians and other innovators to develop and launch new products that help deliver health care outside of the hospital.
In 2021, the CoLab and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) subsidiary Amazon Web Services announced a collaboration on a cloud innovation center in Sacramento to explore new techniques to deliver health care without going to a hospital.
Last year, the CoLab partnered with Colorado-based company BioIntelliSense Inc., to introduce its wearable patient monitoring device to its clinical practice, and General Catalyst, a venture capital firm with a portfolio of digital health technology companies.
