12 Health Apps that will Rock the Industry

Yesterday was Rock Health’s first Demo Day. Rock Health is the hip, cool, incubator for health care startups in San Francisco, and I was fortunate enough to mentor many of the young companies. Almost to a person, they don’t come from health care backgrounds, so they are able to look at things with fresh eyes.

But to a person, they don’t come from health care backgrounds, so when I first saw them, they had differing degrees of market knowledge.

And that is why Rock Health is even more valuable than a plain vanilla tech incubator. Health care is a very difficult industry to penetrate, but these founders have had access not only to capital, but to strategic partnerships and mentoring from some of the major players in the industry, like United Health Group, Aetna, Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School, and Genentech. (And me.)

As they begin to penetrate the market with their brave new ideas, they may not hit the same walls as their less well-connected predecessors. In their favor. they also have health care reform efforts, a generation that is accustomed to getting services online, and a new generation of docs as anxious to change the model as their patients. Hospitals and insurance companies will have to come to the table, or they will be…disrupted.

Since I had seen six of the companies before, I was delighted to see how far they had come since the summer, and how many of them had revenue, partnerships, or pilots in progress. I believe their moment is now, and that we are truly about to see health care shift.

At long last.

Just a peek at the first graduating class:

Cake health. The average family spends $10-20k a year on health care. Cake Health says it has the best free way to manage those health care expenses. You enter your provider, and It pulls in all your costs and tells you where they went. It also tracks the claims that were denied. Cake Health is already funded.p

OmadaHealth attacks the costly problem of chronic diseases, beginning with diabetes. It is a social support, shared experience and trust network to ”treat” a diagnosis of pre-diabetes. Since the net present value of avoiding a single case of diabetes is known to be $55,000 insurance companies are interested in this.

Big Evidence has found a better way to get medical evidence to clinicians and the point of care, so they can make better decisions on how to treat. For the physician finding specific answers Is challenging and inefficient, and they are often too busy for evidence-based medicine. They already have a grant from the Nationsl Stroke Association.

Skimble, a wellness application already available on Android and iTunes, provides expert coaching and with follow- along multimedia workout instructions. It already has had over a million downloads.

Genomera is a consumer health collaboration platform that grows the number of people who organize and participate in health studies, which amounts to crowdsourcing clinical trials. Users can organize their own trials, advised by experts. There are already 17 trials under way

WeSprout provides an ultra-simple user interface to connect parents to each other to crowd source children’s health information

BitGym wants to turn cardiovascular exercise into video games so people who hate exercise can have fun while riding the exercise bike.Their research showed that households often have More than 1.15 exercise machines per household, but never use them. Their first app is already in the Apple queue and they expect to be a producer of MMOGs for cardiophobics.

Pipette Is a tracker to reduce complications and improve recovery times for people who are discharged from hospitals. It fills the education gap between the hospital’scryptic discharge instructions and what is necessary to prevent costly hospital readmissions. Pipette is developing content with Harvard Medical School and piloting with Mayo Clinic

Heartbeat is an enterprise solution for the one-person business that empowers people to do what they love by combining all the business functions into a single social platform..

CellScope uses Smartphone imaging for diagnosis of ear and skin infections via an otoscope, dermatoscope – allowing magnification, illumination, calibration, and computer vision for decision support.Its pilot will be funded by the FDA at Emory University.

BrainBot. Stress weakens the immune system, and costs the economy $300 billion a year.Thus, stress management programs are being taught in 250 hospitals, and 10% of Americans use meditation as a stress management tool. Brainbot uses technology tools to provide feedback for beginning meditators.

Chronology is the next generation of a concept started by PatientsLikeMe, It is a social app for people who have poorly understood autoimmune diseases with terrible treatment options, such as Crohn’s disease, colitis, and fibromyalgia. Its simple interface encourages relationships and information sharing, connects patients to each other, and gathers information for future research and clinical trials.

Taken together, this group of startups, and the partners and funders who have bet on them, will start the process of health care transformation. Will they all succeed? Probably not, but they will have a much better chance than the generations of entrepreneurs who have broken their picks on this recalcitrant industry.