Disrupt the Bay brought health care executives, health care professionals and health care-focused startups under one roof on Nov. 7, all to raise awareness and money to fight children's cancer.
"This is the future, and I strongly believe Tampa Bay could be a leader in health care transformations and health care technologies," Moez Limayem, dean of the University of South Florida Muma College of Business, said. "Tampa Bay is still looking for identity; this could be our distinctive industry to show the world how it's done. Today is only the beginning."
The nine startups pitched solutions to a crowd of investors and medical professionals, ranging from preventing falls to listening to heartbeats. We've got the full details below.
CardiAcoustic: Co-founder Valentina Dargam is a student at Florida International University in Miami and wants to use heart echoes to help patients with currently undiagnosed cardiac issues. Its software uses heart sounds to diagnose when patients have potential problems with their aortic heart values. Memorial Health and Baptist Health South Florida are partners.
E-Cover: The Tampa-based company provides an instant messaging system from clinics to patients that ease questions and concerns during both pre- and post-operation. The HIPAA-compliant app is available on iOS and Android. CEO Ben Sever said they are currently rolling out a pilot program for health systems.
KnowFalls: The Sarasota-based company will have a patient observation system and patient sitting capabilities, according to CEO John Montelione. The virtual patient observation system is expected to roll out in January 2020, with fall-prevention system using AI expected to follow later that year.
KUUR Health: Founder Taylor Precourt created KUUR Health for patients to have direct, 24/7 access to providers who study "mind, body and spirit." The St. Petersburg-based company will have a subscription and non-subscription service and existing primary care practices can join KUUR.
MedZoomer: Founder Marvin Kloss wants his company to be the "GrubHub of prescriptions." The app will have a GPS tracker for the pharmacist, courier and customer to track when a prescription is being delivered to the customer. The customer needs an ID verification and signature to receive the prescription, which comes with a delivery fee. The company is in the most recent fall accelerator cohort for the Tampa Bay Wave.
Pride Analytics: Medical student Ryan Nasir, CEO of Pride Analytics, created his startup to help the intersection between health care and medicine. The company translates data within the health care system to improve the quality of health and treatment for the patient, with a specific focus on mapping chronic pain data.
RubiDex: CEO Steven Teal, along with CTO Mike Felker created a hardware and software solution with RubiDex to prevent health care data bases from getting hacked. According to the founders, the system syncs in any cloud, is infinitely scalable, blockchain-backed and is fast due to the custom language the duo created.
UC-Care: A former participant in the Florida-Israel Business Accelerator program, VP of Business Development and Marketing Tomer Schatzberger is looking to improve biopsies for prostate cancer. The company makes medical devices for urologists which improves detection and treatment of the cancer.
Verapy: An Inno on Fire winner, Verapy is looking to make physical therapy fun for children. The virtual-reality headset tracks the movement from the patient for doctors to review their progress and encourage more movement than traditional physical therapy exercises.
