StartUp Health NOW Podcast

Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease. It’s the most common cause of dementia, impacting around 55 million people globally. It’s a leading of death for the elderly, but mortality isn’t the worst thing about Alzheimer’s disease. Before they die, this disease robs people of their minds, taking away the interests and knowledge that made them who they are. In a tragic way, it steals people’s identities. That’s the challenge, and it’s a big one. Thankfully, there are incredible entrepreneurs and researchers working to tackle Alzheimer’s disease, and we’ve got one of them on the show this week. You’ll get to hear from Christian Dansereau, PhD, the CEO & Co-founder of Perceiv AI. Christian will share how his Canadian company – which joined the StartUp Health community in 2022 – is using decades of work in artificial intelligence to predict Alzheimer’s years earlier, so that the disease can be treated, slowed down, or even cured. After Christian, we’ll talk to another founder passionate about helping seniors thrive as they age. Colby Takeda built Pear Suite after spending years running a senior care facility. Pear Suite – which also joined the StartUp Health community in 2022 – is a digital platform designed to empower community health workers, those front line providers and organizations that really understand the needs of the community on a block by block level. While they started with a focus on senior care, they’ve expanded their mission to new, often neglected communities, and their team is expanding as well. Perceiv AI and Pear Suite offer two complementary takes on helping seniors living longer, healthier lives. It represents the marriage of early diagnosis, deep data, AI, and daily care, delivered by the right people, served up in actionable ways. Listen in to learn more. --- Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

At StartUp Health we’re all about what’s new and what’s next in health, and that often means talking about cutting-edge technology. But sometimes the most radical way to improve is also the simplest. One example? Our food. This week, as we head into Thanksgiving in the United States, we’re talking about the role food plays in managing not just our weight and fitness, but actual chronic diseases. Some people use the term 'Food as Medicine,' and the more research we do, the more ways we find that tuning our nutrition can sometimes be superior to taking more pharmaceuticals. While the idea of seeing food as a legitimate healthcare tool isn’t new, per se, there are some exciting new tools and platforms that leverage nutritional information and make it more accessible to the world. And that’s what we’re going to talk about on this episode. Our first guest is Shireen Abdullah, CEO & Founder at Yumlish, who joined the StartUp Health community in 2019. Shireen’s platform puts a virtual nutritionist in your pocket, with a strong emphasis on boosting health literacy. She’s also worked very closely with the Air Force on workforce readiness. Turns out there are so many young people who are overweight and inactive that it’s hindering military recruitment and becoming a national security threat. After Shireen we’ll hear from Victor Penev, CEO & Founder of Edamam, a Health Transformer since all the way back in 2013. Victor has made the world’s food knowledge more searchable through Edamam's API so that users of platforms like NOOM and Virta Health can get personalized meal recommendations. We’ll also hear about their brand new integration with Open AI that brings a ChatGPT experience to the process of finding personalized meal plans. Enjoy the episode! Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

When Adonica Shaw founded Wingwomen, it was to address a very specific, personal need. Shaw had experienced a difficult pregnancy – preeclampsia turned an otherwise healthy pregnancy into a medical emergency. Afterward she looked around and there was no one to talk to about what she’d been through and nowhere she felt she could go for advice. So she built a safe space to talk about issues around women’s health and maternal health. It was all virtual at first and provided curated communities of support. But one day Shaw realized that there were services she wanted to provide to her customers that just couldn’t be handled on an app. There were also services she wanted to provide that couldn’t get reimbursed without a physical component. So she made a leap that very few health tech founders make: she decided to open up a physical clinic. She found suitable space in South Boston, fitted it out to her specifications, and put out her proverbial shingle. As we discuss, in this StartUp Health NOW podcast episode, this has come with serious challenges. There’s a reason why many founders prefer SaaS business models over bricks and mortar. Dealing with local zoning, difficult neighbors, staffing... it’s a lot. But designing a physical space also allows Shaw to lay the foundation for a new way for women to get care and to support one another along the way. Let’s get into the conversation. Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

According to some estimates, out of the HHS, nearly 50% of kids have experienced some kind of mental health challenge. And not just anxiety about an upcoming test or depression over a breakup, but persistent feelings that interfere with daily activities. Health innovation companies have been on the case for years, including many from the StartUp Health community. They're tackling the science – like what's the best way to treat mental health challenges in teens – and they're also tackling engagement. You can have the best tools in the world after all, but if a young person doesn't want to get help, it'll never go anywhere. Enter Katherine Grill, PhD, CEO & Co-founder of Neolth, one of our guests on this podcast episode. She's taken her doctorate in behavioral neuroscience and her experience as a clinician, combined with hundreds of interviews with young people, in order to build a platform that meets kids where they're at – offering self-guided mental health support in a variety of forms and flavors. Joining the podcast with us is former pro basketball player, Kenny Thomas. After spending 11 seasons in the NBA, Thomas became an entrepreneur and community advocate, with a focus on youth experiencing financial hardship via his own foundation. And now he's throwing his influence behind Neolth in order to help young people, particularly those involved in sports, gain access to mental health services. On this StartUp Health NOW episode, we’ll cover the ins and outs of the Neolth platform as well as some of Dr. Grill’s strategy behind working with a brand ambassador, which is somewhat unique in the world of early-stage health startups. Let's get into it. Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

Our episode this week was recorded during our StartUp Health Studio interviews at the recent HLTH conference in Las Vegas. At the event, a hot topic was how artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, is going to fundamentally shift healthcare delivery. AI can help us comb through mountains of information and take action on data points that were previously hidden from view. But many people have a serious concern – even a fear – that AI will degrade the doctor-patient relationship and effectively dehumanize healthcare. Our two guests today both joined the StartUp Health community earlier in 2023. They are pushing back against that narrative and suggesting with their companies that AI and big data can be leveraged to re-humanize healthcare delivery. First we’ll talk with Nicole Cook, the CEO & Founder of Alvee, who is on a health moonshot mission to use AI-driven solutions to promote health equity and improve health outcomes for all. Cook reminds us that doctors are spending an inordinate amount of their time with a patient tapping away at a screen. The status quo is not working, so can new patient data tools help? Can they bring the right information to the surface at the right time and the right way, so healthcare providers can get back to making eye contact with patients? What’s Cook is building at Alvee is resonating, as she went on to win the HLTH Startup Pitch Competition. Next, we hear from Chris Turner, CEO and Co-founder at HealthBook+, who is attempting to create a fuller, more human picture of each patient using all available data including data from some nontraditional sources. HealthBook+ provides a simple-to-use, digital-first care platform which consolidates health data and keeps it private, as well as predicts conditions and recommends the next best health actions. If the top line story for this episode is how data and AI could be used to create a more human electronic health record, the secondary story is about who can benefit from this technology. Everyone's talking about social determinants of health. This idea that we need to address the non-medical drivers of health, like access to fresh food and transportation. Healthcare providers care about these issues but don't have the time or resources to analyze the data. That's where Alvee Health and HealthBook+ can come in. Providing a fuller, more human analysis of patient data means taking into account important barriers to care and getting smart about how to overcome them. So let's get into it. Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

This week’s StartUp Health NOW podcast episode is a conversation with Health Transformers Alexandra Dantzig and Erin Frankel, the co-founders of Jetsweat. As you'll hear, their company started out as a fittech marketplace for boutique fitness brands, helping these small independent fitness companies create high-quality digital content and reach new audiences. Recently, however, Jetsweat – which joined StartUp Health in 2022 – has made moves into the realm of value-based, whole person care. They've launched what they call Jetsweat Health and they have their sights set on helping large employers and insurers keep their people healthy. The idea is instead of offering your employees or members a simple discount to a couple of national fitness chains, offer them access to a marketplace of hundreds or even thousands of unique high-quality boutique fitness brands that meet their specific needs and desires. Jetsweat is also stepping into mental health with new offerings around emotional fitness. They're making very clear connections between preventative physical fitness and preventative emotional fitness by treating mental health more like a daily workout that everyone can benefit from. They're lowering the barriers to care and decreasing the stigma attached with seeking help. Listen in for their journey. Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

There's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in business: “You can't manage what you can't measure.” It's a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, the famed management consultant.‌ If business leaders such as Peter Drucker are right, not being able to measure the effect of an action would make it impossible to know if we should be doing more or less of that action – or if we should be doing it at all. But if the saying is true in management, it's even more true in clinical medicine in most areas of healthcare. Despite this seeming to be self evident, you’ve got to measure it to manage it yet there are still swathes of care that are delivered by some version of trial and error.‌ Our guest this week is Bechara Saab, PhD, CEO, Chief Scientist & Co-founder of Mobio Interactive, a company that joined the StartUp Health community in 2022.‌ Dr. Saab started as an academic researcher. It's safe to say he loves measuring, loves gathering hard data and proving that he has found causation not just correlation in his work. So when his research introduced him to the modern world of mental health diagnosis and mental healthcare, he was taken aback by what he saw as a lack of solid objective measurements.‌ How could you help someone with anxiety, for instance, if you couldn't accurately measure their anxiety before and after a treatment?‌ That is the thorny challenge that Dr. Saab is tackling with Mobio Interactive. As you’ll hear, he’ll explain just how his research led to a solution that provides those objective measurements. His company, based in Singapore, came up with an accessible tool that provides clinically-validated therapy within a platform that objectively quantifies how a patient’s mental health is affected by therapy in real time and without a wearable, thereby allowing personalization of mental health therapy at scale. Enjoy! Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

Our StartUp Health NOW guest this week is Amir Bozorgzadeh, CEO & Co-founder of Virtuleap, a brain health company that joined StartUp Health in 2019. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, and expanding to Barcelona, Spain, Virtuleap improves brain health with VR. In this chat, Amir will walk us through their new platform – Cogniclear VR – that combines neuroscience with virtual reality games and activities to detect cognitive disorders. He’ll explain how VR can play an important role in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's and other dementias, why VR needs to be applied with care in health, and where virtual reality is going next. Enjoy! Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

Our StartUp Health NOW guest this week is Ole Kjerkegaard Nielsen, PhD, CEO & Co-founder of GO-Pen, a company in our Type 1 Diabetes Moonshot community. As you'll hear, Nielsen and his team based in Denmark have built a new kind of insulin pen, one that is affordable and accessible to all while also adhering to the absolute highest standards of quality. This more accessible insulin pen could change millions of people's lives. We'll also get a glimpse into the uniquely challenging startup journey of developing a physical medical device. Nielsen and his team have been winning awards and grants on a regular basis, but the road is still steep. Whether it's negotiating with a manufacturer across the globe or getting FDA approval, bringing a medical device to market as a startup with limited funds is a challenge that could intimidate even the most market-tested CEOs. Nielsen pulls back the curtain and lets us see that challenge from the inside and shows us where GO-Pen is going next. Enjoy! Innovators:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.

We’re back with a new season of the StartUp Health NOW podcast! This week we’re chatting with Richard Hirsch from UnaliWear. UnaliWear, under the guidance of CEO & Founder Jean Anne Booth, is a long-time StartUp Health community member that is changing the game in medical alerts for seniors. UnaliWear built the voice-first Kanega watch that provides discreet support for falls, medication reminders, and a guard against wandering – and allows seniors to call for help if they need it. It gives seniors independence without making them wear a stigmatizing alert button around their necks. And, now, after years of other awards and accolades, the Kanega watch was just named by The New York Times Wirecutter as the best medical alert device for people on the go. That's the kind of market validation that startups dream about. Listen in as Hirsch shares insights on how UnaliWear grew into a "10-year overnight success." ------ Founders:Health Transformer Universityfuels your health moonshot Funders:Become a Health Moonshot Champion Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates atstartuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Looking to break down health barriers?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourHealth Equity Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes?If you’re an entrepreneur or investor,contact usto learn how you can join ourT1D Moonshot.