Cedars-Sinai adds 11 startups to its Accelerator program

Eleven healthcare technology companies are the latest class to enter the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program.

The Accelerator initiative is designed to help entrepreneurs bring their innovative health IT products to market. As part of the three-month program in Los Angeles, the vendors will receive an investment of $100,000 each, as well as access to Cedars-Sinai’s clinical expertise and information infrastructure, including hardware, software and digital health technical resources.

This is the fifth class to be accepted into the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program. According to the announcement, the companies will work in an “innovation space” directly across the street from the medical center which is designed to maximize interaction among the startups.

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The 11 startups accepted into the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program include the following:

• AMPAworks develops AI solutions to reduce costs and increase efficiency in healthcare, specifically the challenges of missing inventory and the time-consuming task of taking inventory. The company has a small cube that fits on any shelf and uses image recognition to count inventory as well as provide a real-time video feed of the count.
  
• ClinicianNexus provides health systems, schools and students with a transparent, people-centered platform that facilitates better clinical rotation management, from start to finish. The information is shared with the schools so that students can apply for rotations as efficiently as possible.
  
• Feedtrail offers a simple patient survey prior to discharge that takes seconds to complete so hospitals can find out what they did right, what they did wrong and what they can improve. The vendors contends that currently administrators are limited to gathering that information via surveys conducted by mail or phone after a patient is discharged, making response rates low. However, with their solution, they contend that providers are receiving an increase in feedback as well as more actionable insights.
  
• FocusMotion Health has developed a smart knee brace as well as an app and dashboard platform that capture how much orthopedic patients walk and exercise. The solution also measures a patient’s range of motion and flexibility for 20 exercises and sends the data to the provider, enabling daily guidance and almost real-time intervention.
  
• Hawthorne Effect has created a virtual platform for clinical trials to better track patient data and in the process lower patient withdrawals while improving their experience. In addition, the vendor trains investigators to visit patients in their homes to bolster engagement and to certify data, which is securely transferred to the principal investigators.
  
• Health Note provides a simple-to-use platform that patients sign into before a physician appointment to simplify the process of documenting every physician-patient interaction. The platform asks all the questions a physician would normally ask at the start of a visit, which is formatted into a physician’s note and sent to the electronic health record system.
  
• Lantum has a workforce management platform that enables hospitals to simplify the scheduling of shifts of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals, which often involves multiple phone calls, emails and spreadsheets. Using the platform, staff can book and swap shifts, negotiate rates and complete time sheets, as well as arrange for next-day payments.
  
• Notisphere is a digital platform that enables suppliers to announce recalls and also ensures real-time communications between product suppliers and providers, who can get bogged down with product recalls and efforts to prevent patients from being harmed by a recalled item. The company’s platform replaces a mostly paper-based, slow and cumbersome process for recall notices that often come with dozens of pages of instructions and are sent to numerous personnel at the same hospital.
  
• OMNY offers a platform that facilitates real-time sharing of data so that hospital teams know exactly where drugs are located and when they are utilized. This data sharing enables hospitals to better align the supply of a drug with the demand for it and to significantly reduce cost and waste.
  
• Parker Isaac Instruments has developed a tissue-separation instrument that automatically isolates lymph nodes from the surrounding fat, resulting in higher lymph node yields. Once separated, the nodes are studied under a microscope to detect the spread of cancer. The instrument is currently being tested in the Cedars-Sinai Pathology Lab.
  
• Virti leverages virtual and augmented reality combined with artificial intelligence to transport physicians and students into stressful clinical environments, such as an emergency department dealing with a traumatic event. The technology helps reduce anxiety by creating virtual hospital experiences and assessing participants to help improve their performance.
  

“It’s exciting to see our innovation community grow with each new class of companies, and these founders and their teams bring a remarkable breadth of backgrounds and experiences,” says Anne Wellington, managing director of the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator. “I’m looking forward to seeing how our fifth class transforms care at Cedars-Sinai and beyond.”