Today in the United States, we do an entirely poor job of taking care of our pregnant mothers. If you look at statistics like maternal morbidity and mortality, it's been going up. And, through the pandemic, it's only gone downhill. We're one of the worst – actually the worst – of any advanced country. Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. Today we've got two very special guests on the show talking about on...
Apr 27, 2023•24 min
Our guest this week is Andrew Garza, co-founder of Lifestores Healthcare, a company that joined StartUp Health in 2019. When Andrew and his co-founder Bryan Mezue were launching their business in Lagos, Nigeria, their focus was on creating a chain of tech-enabled pharmacies – and by doing so, they’d create an accessible avenue for primary care in one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Fast forward a few years and they’ve done a couple key things, which we’ll cover in the interview. They...
Apr 20, 2023•25 min
On this episode of StartUp Health NOW, we’re talking with Jo Bhakdi, CEO & Founder of Quantgene, a company that joined StartUp Health in 2019. Bhakdi and his team have made a name for themselves by offering a kind of deep genomic profiling that allows them to identify cancers early, detect hereditary diseases, and find adverse drug interactions. The name of the game here is genomic medicine and we're not talking about 23andMe or Ancestry.com. As you'll hear in the interview, Bhakdi has a rev...
Apr 14, 2023•29 min
Victor Wang, CEO & Founder of StartUp Health company care.coach, is at the tip of the spear of the AI-in-health revolution. He’s got an insider’s understanding of how technology like ChatGPT will shape healthcare. An MIT-trained roboticist who worked for NASA, Victor has created a conversational avatar that cares for seniors and people with disabilities. Currently there’s a human in the loop, but as you’ll hear in the interview, Victor has no trouble imagining a future where conversational A...
Apr 06, 2023•22 min
On this week's StartUp Health NOW podcast episode, we sat down with Charlie Bullock, the CEO and Co-founder of Scan.com, which is, to oversimplify, an online marketplace for diagnostic imaging services. We wanted to dial Charlie up for two reasons. The first is that this StartUp Health company has officially grown from their UK roots to developing a significant beachhead in the United States. We wanted to get a play by play about that process and distill some useful cross-border growth strategie...
Mar 24, 2023•29 min
According to multiple news sources, cyber attacks surged in 2022. That doesn’t necessarily surprise anyone, but what may be a surprise is learning that healthcare is the most targeted sector. Turns out, patient records have a high resale value, and ransomware attacks on hospitals can be profitable. This increase in cyber threats coincides with waves of new companies making data more accessible to patients. So on one hand we’ve got a groundswell of startups fighting the good fight of leveraging p...
Mar 17, 2023•26 min
Welcome to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. One of our favorite things about the StartUp Health community of nearly 500 companies and upwards of a 1000 entrepreneurs is how global it is. It is so easy to get caught up in your local challenges and your standard ways of doing business and forget that there is this global village of entrepreneurs, many of whom are thinking in wonderfully different and creative ways abou...
Mar 10, 2023•25 min
Last year StartUp Health launched a Health Equity Moonshot with the goal of creating a guiding equity framework for how we support health startups. That work has been led by our Chief Impact Officer Kaakpema "KP" Yelpaala. One of the first things KP did was to build a cross-disciplinary impact board who could help us guide our policies, and one of the first people he turned to for that task was today’s guest, Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH. Dr. Maybank is the Chief Health Equity Officer & Senior VP...
Mar 03, 2023•59 min
On this StartUp Health NOW episode, we go to Portland, Oregon, to meet a Health Transformer helping women assess their risk for breast cancer. We chat with Kaitlin Christine, CEO & Founder of Gabbi, because she successfully raised more than $4M in 2022, at a time when many other young startups were struggling to raise. We stress with the startups in our portfolio that raising capital is just one small piece of the health moonshot journey, but there is no denying that it can give rocket fuel ...
Feb 24, 2023•26 min
Every quarter we publish a little thing called the StartUp Health Insights report. It’s all about health innovation funding, and one of the data points we track is where in the world health innovation funding is landing. We call these health innovation hubs, and the same three or four cities always dominate the list. Companies in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and London account for the vast majority of dollars raised in healthcare. However, at StartUp Health, we know it takes a global village...
Feb 17, 2023•34 min
Welcome to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. As we've reported recently, the health tech funding landscape has tightened in the last year. In other words, it's harder to raise money for your business. But there's an upside to this cooler market: There's a heightened emphasis being put on the fundamentals of business like cash flow and profitability. That means less noise being generated around innovations that turn ou...
Feb 10, 2023•47 min
Welcome to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. It’s no secret that 2022 was a down year for health innovation funding. Earlier this month we published our Year-End Insights Report, which showed a 50% drop-off in digital health funding compared with 2021. Of course, you have to take those numbers in context. For one, 2021 was a crazy, exuberant year for funding, fueled by a COVID-induced rush to virtual healthcare. Secon...
Feb 02, 2023•22 min
Welcome to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. What can music teach us about the confusing, inspiring, sometimes frustrating world of healthcare? According to Dr. Stephen Klasko, our guest in this first StartUp Health NOW episode of 2023, the answer is a lot. Dr. Klasko was the President of Jefferson University and CEO of Jefferson Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He launched JeffConnect, a pioneering initiative in ...
Jan 27, 2023•33 min
Welcome to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators transforming the future of health. Value-based care has the dubious distinction of being the oldest new idea in health innovation. For decades we’ve talked about the benefits of creating medical payment structures that tie compensation to the patient’s outcome, rather than simply paying for services. It’s pretty clear that if a hospital makes its money off of performing certain tests or procedures, it’...
Nov 23, 2022•19 min
Troy Bannister is the CEO & Founder of Particle Health, a StartUp Health portfolio company that is shaping the new standard of healthcare data exchange with a user-friendly API platform. Fresh off their $25M capital raise, Troy shares his views on the future of interoperability and why interoperability needs to be a core pillar in any healthcare startup’s playbook. Healthcare’s future is about data, and in front of a live, interactive audience of Health Transformers, Troy chats with StartUp ...
Nov 08, 2022•54 min
In this week's StartUp Health NOW episode, we continue a series we’ve been running where we sit down with members of StartUp Health’s Impact Board to learn a bit about their stories and why they’re so passionate about this health moonshot model of supporting founders at scale. Today we’re talking to the venerable Sue Siegel, former Chief Innovation Officer at GE and CEO at GE Ventures and at Healthymagination, an initiative GE launched in order to invest billions of dollars into helping deliver ...
Nov 01, 2022•19 min
For this StartUp Health NOW episode, we are joined by Aaron Kowalski, PhD, the CEO of JDRF International. Anyone orbiting in the universe of Type 1 diabetes will know that JDRF is the world’s largest nonprofit funder of T1D research. In his role atop the organization, Kowalski has combined his professional experience as a molecular biologist and executive with his personal passion to fight Type 1 diabetes in order to impact patients like his own brother. Kowalski is also a recent addition to Sta...
Oct 25, 2022•20 min
Our guest this week is Naheed Kurji, the CEO and Co-founder of Cyclica, which joined StartUp Health way back in 2014. He’s going to get us up to speed on the world of AI-powered drug discovery. We’ll learn how artificial intelligence and machine learning are speeding up our ability to identify molecules and find new uses for market-tested drugs. Naheed will give us an inside look at how Cyclica is specifically trying to reshape this market, then he’ll zoom way out. As the chair of the Alliance f...
Oct 18, 2022•35 min
This week we welcome Cheryl Cheng to the interview chair. Cheryl is the CEO & Founder of Vive Collective. Previously Cheryl was a Partner at BlueRun Ventures, one of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley. At Vive, she’s taking her 15 years of experience growing startups and putting it specifically into building, funding, and scaling digital health companies. Cheryl is also an advisor to the Stanford Biodesign program and is on the advisory board for Yale Medical School's Digital Health and Inno...
Oct 11, 2022•58 min
This week, our guest is Brian Neman, the CEO and Founder of Sanguine Biosciences, a company that joined the StartUp Health portfolio in 2018. Brian and his team first made a splash by bringing an at-home on-demand business model to specimen collection for clinical trials. Instead of having to get yourself to a lab, you tap a few buttons on your phone and a nurse shows up at your house to take your blood. That business has evolved significantly over the years, which we’ll get into in the intervie...
Oct 04, 2022•24 min
Typically on this show we talk to the health tech founders – who we call Health Transformers – that are creating the tools and platforms that will modernize our health system. This week we have a different kind of guest who will help round out the picture of how healthcare innovation goes from idea to real-world implementation. Our guest is Robert Wilson, MD, a family physician who runs CovenantCare Family Practice, a multi-site medical practice in Tennessee. Dr. Wilson popped up on our radar be...
Sep 27, 2022•23 min
As our listeners will know, StartUp Health invests in what we call health moonshots. These are big, audacious health goals that guide us as we push innovative health entrepreneurs — our global army of Health Transformers — to collaborate and focus on long-term impact. We have health moonshots around curing cancer, improving women’s health, ending the opioid crisis, and we’ve recently added another focused on Type 1 diabetes. This week, we launched a Health Equity Moonshot at the Clinton Global I...
Sep 20, 2022•26 min
We’ve talked extensively on this podcast about how COVID ushered in a period of rapid adoption of telemedicine. According to McKinsey, we went from around 11% of people using telehealth to around 46% during the pandemic. Few companies in the world were better poised to capitalize on this moment than Amwell. What’s so interesting about Amwell is that they weren’t created to meet this moment. They have been patiently and persistently ringing the telemedicine bell since 2006. Back then, seeing your...
Sep 13, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Jon Miller is best known for being a former CEO of AOL, Head of Digital Media at News Corp, and Chief Executive of the media powerhouse IAC. With all of that experience in media, Miller might seem like an interesting choice for the StartUp Health board of directors, which he joined recently. After all, on the board he joins the likes of Toby Cosgrove, MD, whose pedigree as the former head of the Cleveland Clinic needs little explanation. Obviously, Miller’s experience in business, finance, and m...
Sep 06, 2022•19 min
Emotional regulation. It’s a fancy term for something very simple, and something we often take for granted. Emotional regulation is a person's ability to effectively manage and respond to an emotional experience. We do this work unconsciously all day long, deciding how to respond when we’re cut off in traffic or when we see something we disagree with on social media. How we respond to emotional situations can have massive ramifications for our lives, yet we don’t typically spend much time thinki...
Aug 30, 2022•36 min
This week on StartUp Health NOW we’re talking to Joseph Schneier, the CEO and Co-founder of Trusty.care, a company that joined StartUp Health in 2018. Joseph holds a special place here at StartUp Health because not only is he a four-time serial entrepreneur, but he’s heading up his second StartUp Health-backed company. Joseph's latest endeavor, Trusty.care, is a platform that makes sense out of the byzantine world of Medicaid and Medicare benefits. It’s not flashy work – which Joseph is the firs...
Aug 23, 2022•22 min
In health innovation – which is the world we inhabit at StartUp Health – there are certain issues that get the lion’s share of attention. Think wearables for tracking daily activity or new mental health solutions. A lot of attention is going towards interventions for seniors and addressing issues of loneliness and isolation. These are wonderful areas of development. But there are other areas of health that have huge implications across society, yet have a way of flying under the radar. There’s s...
Aug 16, 2022•30 min
"The more you know, the better you’ll do living with diabetes," says Claudia Graham. "There's nothing more important in diabetes than empowering patients." If you follow StartUp Health at all, you have seen headlines about our new Type 1 Diabetes Moonshot. To recap, we’ve launched an initiative designed to speed up innovation around Type 1 diabetes by bringing together a cross-disciplinary team of investors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, researchers, and other industry experts. At the heart of...
Aug 09, 2022•17 min
Toyin Ajayi, MD, co-founded Cityblock Health in 2017 with the goal of meeting patients where they are. Cityblock Health, which joined StartUp Health in 2019, provides patients with 24/7 support and care that is affordable and fits complex needs. Their mission is not just to improve quality of care, but to improve the health of whole communities. In this conversation, Dr. Ajayi, who stepped into the role of CEO this year, shares how their high-touch care concept adapted to COVID. She also explain...
Aug 02, 2022•55 min
Our guest this week, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, PhD, doesn’t pull any punches. She’s the co-founder of Wise Therapeutics, which joined StartUp Health last year, and author of the new book Why Anxiety is Good for You (Even Though it Feels Bad). As you’ll hear in the interview, Dr. Dennis-Tiwary is on a bold mission to change how society thinks about anxiety, so that millions of people can thrive in the face of adversity rather than settling for being comfortably numb. She’ll also explain how her work i...
Jul 26, 2022•21 min
