No doubt, healthcare is one of the hottest beds for innovation in the U.S. The $1.668 trillion industry often faces problems with keeping people insured, making hospital and doctor visits affordable and is seen as struggling to innovate.
Yet, looking at the lineup of health tech startups and innovators at the Northern Virginia Technology Council's Capital Health Tech Summit Thursday, you wouldn't think the industry is running away from innovation, but towards it. At the summit, seven companies and startups took to the stage to pitch their ideas on how exactly they plan to help bring the healthcare sector into the technology era.
Here are seven projects to watch from NVTC's 2017 Capital Health Tech Summit—
Based in Herndon, Va., 10Pearls utilizes artificial intelligence, AR/VR, machine learning and more to enhance caregiving via video apps. You might know them as the company that designed the new D.C. Taxi app, but the work they do stretches far beyond transportation and mobile needs. For instance, the company is working on ways to enhance how millennial caregivers communicate and work with their senior patients. Clients include MedStar Health, AARP and Avizia.
Ashburn, Va.-based Aperiomics is using data analytics to casually change everything about pathogen diagnosis. At least, that's how CEO Crystal Icenhour phrases it. To do this, her company is utilizing what else but data analytics. Yes, you read that right: Data analytics can change how we detect infections in the body. According to Icenhour, 75 percent of infections are never accurately diagnosed. Aperiomics plans to change that through its technology that identifies all known bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi in just one test.
With its headquarters in Seattle, Avanade has a healthy size office right in Arlington. The company is working to apply virtual, mixed and augmented reality technology to Microsoft's HoloLens devices. Now, what does that all mean? Microsoft's technology allows you to create a hologram within whatever space you're occupying, and Avandale applied its healthcare knowledge to it. Now, doctors who are telecommuting with patients can bring up a hologram of your heart or lungs to display where things are for the patient.
With CGI's technology, the Puget Sound Regional Fire Authority established FD Cares as a way of making transporting people in emergency situations more efficient. Instead of taking everyone blankly to the emergency room, on-site 9-1-1 healthcare providers can get the training and data analytics they need to figure out the best place to take someone with the goal of reducing non-emergency trips to the ER.
Meet Rudy. Designed to be used by seniors who would rather live at their homes instead of moving to a retirement home as they age, Rudy is able to not only make sure that their patient is up-to-speed on their medications, but it can also talk, dance and interact with the senior on an deeper, emotional level. Oh, and did I mention that Rudy is a robot? INF Robotics, based in Fairfax, Va., developed the first deployable in-home automated companion, and it was founded in 2011.
Instead of focusing on how exactly we treat cancer, McLean, Va.-based Perthera is focused on how to get oncologist to regions where people need cancer treatment. According to the company, only 3 percent of oncologists in the U.S. live in rural areas and 70 percent of counties don't have oncologists. In the meantimes, hospitals have spent millions of dollars on advancements in cancer treatments without trying to make their technology more accessible. That's where Perthera comes in with its precision medicine technology, a style of medicine that takes into account peoples' different genes, lifestyles and environments.
Based in Baltimore, Protenus is working to find a way to make your medical documents more secure. By studying how patients and medical staffs interact with a patient's records, Protenus can create a profile to base its customized security technology on. The startup started in early 2016 and they've partnered with more than 150 hospitals, including Planned Parenthood clinics, Johns Hopkins University hospital system, Duke University health system, Inova Health System and Yale New Haven Health.
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