Ten top entrepreneurs exchange ideas at Boston mHealth Congress

By: Rebecca Coelius, MD
On July 25^th ten mHealth entrepreneurs, selected from applications from across the United States and Canada, pitched and spent a day learning and networking with provider, payer, and private equity experts.
As part of the inaugural World Congress mHealth Innovation Exchange held in Boston, Massachusettes, the selected entrepreneurs also attended an invitation-only “Deep Dive” collaborative session with national decision makers, including the Qualcomm Life Fund, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and several prestigious hospital systems.
Per Mark Stevens, the Senior Director for eHealth Innovation at World Congress, “this innovation acceleration event is designed to speed the adoption of cutting-edge solutions in the healthcare marketplace.” World Congress is a global provider of health care conferences, with a flagship World Health Care Congress held each April in Washington, DC.
The ten companies represented ranged from products to connect patients undergoing stressful or life-altering medical diagnoses and treatment, to a mattress overlay that monitors the bed-ridden patient to reduce the development of pressure ulcers. The people’s choice award went to Bant, a Canadian company that supports self care for diabetic patients. You can see some of the research underlying Bant, as reported on iMedicalApps by its primary author Dr. Joseph Cafazzo.
Below is a full list of the highlighted companies.
The Top Ten mHealth entrepreneurs are:
Aidin (New York)
Aidin makes discharge planning easy by creating an online system to manage discharge planning coordination and billing with nursing agencies.  www.myaidin.com
Ayogo Games (Canada)
GoodLife is a customizable platform that uses a proven fusion of tailor‐made gamification components, incentives, and social features that entice and motivate people to take the necessary steps towards real world health benefits, such as managing their chronic disease. By using a game design approach that will be familiar to players of popular casual social games, Healthseeker uses achievements, virtual prizes, and gifting to create instant rewards for healthy behavior, bridging the gap between intentions and action.  www.ayogo.com
Bant (Canada) *People’s Choice Award Winner
Bant is the next generation of diabetes management for patient self-care. It frees patients from the dependence on institutional care, cumbersome diabetes technology, and facilitates decision making on the management of their condition. It also pushes the envelope on new modes of self-care, including social media for support, gamification for behavior modification, and simple wireless transfer of blood glucose readings from the patients’ personal meters. All of this is saved in a secure personal health record, Microsoft HealthVault. www.bantapp.ca
BettrLife Corporation (Iowa)
BettrLife is a health and wellness technology firm committed to aiding individuals and families in their effort to live healthier lives. They offer a mHealth platform (web and smart phone app) that empowers patients/consumers to improve their health and well being through an integrated suite of personal coaching and life-management tools. In addition, they offer a robust portal interface for health coaches to manage patients/consumers under their care through the BettrLife system. www.bettrlife.com
Inquisit Health (New York)
Inquisit Health is a web platform that is sold to hospitals and patient support communities, which allows them to facilitate and scale one-to-one phone conversations between their patients with serious medical conditions. They are then able to aggregate and make accessible the large number of patient communities scatted across the United States. www.inquisithealth.com
One Doc Way (New York)
Provides rural and community hospitals with telemedicine services to extend their coverage area.  Currently focused on tele-psychiatry. www.1docway.com
PrescribableApps (soon to be RxApps) (Massachusetts)
PrescribableApps is developing customizable SMS and mobile [web] apps for users to track a chronic illness longitudinally using their own experiential vocabulary. This information is stored on HIPAA compliant servers and easily accessible by a patient’s physician(s), reducing the reliance on subjective recall to make treatment decisions.
Patients and doctors both learn more about the daily fluctuations of the illness and can more appropriately make adjustments to treatment. The initial market is going to be patients living with a psychiatric diagnosis, which annually cost the US economy $190 billion in lost productivity and $112 billion in healthcare expenses. www.PrescribableApps.com 
SensiMAT (Canada)
The SensiMAT is a non-intrusive mattress overlay device designed to measure pressure, temperature and moisture of a bed-ridden patient. The SensiMAT is installed on top of the existing bed mattress and underneath the linens. Data is continuously acquired from sensors in the mat and is wirelessly transmitted to a central server where it is stored and analyzed. Utilizing a proprietary algorithm, the system is able to alert the caregiver to when a particular patient is at risk of developing a pressure ulcer.
The system specifies how and when the patient needs to be repositioned in order to alleviate the built-up pressure, whether the temperature in the bed has exceeded a prescribed threshold and alerts the caregiver in circumstances of enuresis. SensiMat
SwipeSense (Chicago)
The SwipeSense device is a portable hand-­sanitation dispenser that makes hand washing “as easy as wiping your hands on your pants”. It clips onto the scrubs of a caregiver and dispenses a consistent dose of FDA-approved alcohol based hand gel, with the simple wipe of a hand.  www.swipesense.com
Zeel (New York)
Zeel.com is the best way for customers to connect online via tablet, mobile phone, or PC with highly-qualified practitioners in the complementary and alternative healthcare space. Zeel makes it simple to find and book practitioners online or on their mobile-enhanced website.
They help consumers answer questions about alleviating certain health conditions (such as migraine, shoulder pain, fibromyalgia, and stress), learn about health & wellness treatments, and create transparency in pricing and insurance coverage around those treatments and services.  For providers, they generate customers for their small businesses.  www.zeel.com

Rebecca Coelius, MD received her Medical Degree from the University of California – San Francisco. She is an independent consultant and writer who speaks frequently on emerging opportunities at the intersection of medicine, technology, and evolving business models in healthcare. Follow her on Twitter @RebeccaCoelius