GE, StartUp Health Academy To Admit More Digital Health Entrepreneurs
By Jof Enriquez,
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GE Ventures and StartUp Health are expanding their startup program, which aids early-stage healthcare and medtech companies needing initial funding and mentorship towards maturity. The entrepreneurship program will admit a new batch of startups working in the areas of virtual health platforms and next-generation payment solutions.
Over the next year, StartUp Health Academy will accept at least ten startups into the program for a period of three years each, according to a press release. Each startup will receive $50,000 initial funding and business coaching assistance from GE Ventures and StartUp Health mentors and executives. The pioneer batch of 15 consumer health startups that joined the program in 2013 was deemed successful, and the program's backers want to duplicate the feat.
"Our initial program’s participants have hit some amazing milestones – including two follow-on investments from GE Ventures and one acquisition by a major healthcare company,” said Ruchita Sinha, Director of Healthcare, GE Ventures, in the release. “We look forward to extending the program to a new group of entrepreneurs, offering them StartUp Health’s powerful platform to gain traction, and GE’s global network to help them scale.”
In a separate interview with MobiHealthNews, Sinha elaborates, "The portfolio [from 2013] has grown tremendously. One company has already been acquired, Arpeggi. Two of the companies, Aver and Caremerge, we’ve participated in their follow-on rounds. We count that as a pretty big success for us… We wanted to continue that partnership with another class."
The new group of companies to be picked should have two areas of focus, namely, next-generation payment solutions and virtual health solutions. GE Ventures sees a need for new payment solutions because of the shift to value-based care and reimbursement.
“There’s a huge transition to value-based care,” Sinha said in an interview with Fortune. “It’s coming fast and furious, and we want to be right in the center of it. Our focus for these startups is defined by this transition.”
About 20 percent of Medicare payments used a value-based model in 2014, and this is projected to increase to 50 percent by 2018, according to Fortune. Startups that are ahead of the curve will reap the opportunities in the transformed payment ecosystem.
The academy’s other focus area, virtual health solutions, includes such sub-areas as virtual visits, store and forward technology, communication between physicians, communication between patients and doctors, second opinion services, specialist referral services, and remote monitoring, according to MobiHealthNews.
Additional innovation themes beyond virtual health and payment solutions will be announced within the year, states the press release. Applications for the startup program are open through November 2, 2015, and participants in the new class will be announced early in 2016.
The announcement of the startup program’s expansion by follows a recent industry report, which points to a dwindling pool of investors of early-stage medtech companies, a worrisome development that could slow down innovation.