Breakthrough boot camp
Texas Medical Center program helps to guide innovators from design to implementation in offices, hospitals
LAPTOPS out and coffee cups full, the young entrepreneurs busily took notes about medical device procurement, one of the topics in the newest accelerator program at the Texas Medical Center.
Tuesday’s class opened the fourth group in the program, called TMCx.
It includes representatives of 24 digital health startups that, among other things, provide software to help obstetricians, automate waiting-room notifications about patients undergoing surgery and improve the reliability of patient information as it is transferred among caregivers.
After a monthlong boot camp, the participants will get months of development leading up to a Demo Day presentation in June.
This is the largest group since the accelerator launched in 2015, said Erik Halvorsen, director of the TMC Innovation Institute.
“It speaks to how our name, brand and reputation has increased in recognition,” he said, noting that applicants are citing conversations with accelerator alums and advice offered from investors and board members as their main reason for wanting to participate in TMCx.
This is the second group to feature startups focused on digital health, be it software, applications or devices geared for consumers, hospital systems and more.
Members of the AT&T Foundry for Connected Health located inside the TMC Innovation Institute helped in the startup selection process and will provide lectures for participants,
Halvorsen said.
On the first day, Eric Richardson and Farzad Soleimani, associate directors of biodesign for the Innovation Institute, walked class members through the process of identifying how their startup’s product or service would meet market needs, how to reach the consumers or hospitals that comprise that market and how to analyze who their customers would be.
In addition to interactive workshops, the first day included a panel discussion with TMC leaders.
The new group brings people with a variety of backgrounds together.
Diana Cabrales, director of operations for Houstonbased ConsultLink, shared with her classmates how her company works to improve the way patient data are shared between medical professionals as patients are moved from, say, the emergency room to hospital care.
Nate Pagel, CEO of Medifies, said he is looking forward to real-time feedback.
San Francisco-based Medifies is a mobile website that offers quick updates to families of patients in surgery.
It provides updates such as, “Anesthesia has started” or, “The surgeon has started operation.”
Pagel’s background is in software design, not health care, so he’s looking forward to learning from his classmates about processes like how to market to hospitals.
Anish Sebastian, CEO of Babyscripts, has more experience in the field but said he could use a refresher on startup business fundamentals including making sure his product actually meets a market need.
Washington, D.C.-based Babyscripts offers obstetricians software to monitor prenatal care outside of the hospital as well as “mommy kits” for patients that include blood pressure cups, weight scales and an app with pregnancy information.
Sebastian said he was drawn to the program by the boot camp format as well as the networking opportunities within the Texas Medical Center.
“It’s an impressive package they’ve put together,” Sebastian said.