At Tigerlabs’ Showcase, Another Group of Startups Demonstrate Their Progress

Princeton-based Tigerlabs invests in startups, some of which come to Princeton to participate in a digital health accelerator program. Twice a year, the company shows off its portfolio companies in a showcase. This fall’s showcase took place Oct. 2.

Here are some of the companies that were involved:

CredSimple: CredSimple (New York) offers solutions for credentialing and healthcare provider data management. With a focus on user experience and compliance, CredSimple helps healthcare organizations credential providers and maintain data freshness. Founded in 2013 by Mike Simmons, Sam Meyer and Garry Choy, CredSimple said it has helped organizations reduce credentialing turnaround time from the typical three-month period to just a few days.

The startup  said it uses innovative techniques to continuously monitor and maintain data quality. By reducing the administrative burden of current provider data management practices, CredSimple provides a positive impact on operations across healthcare organizations. The company works closely with healthcare regulatory organizations like NCQA, The Joint Commission and CMS to ensure compliance with credentialing guidelines. Tigerlabs is one of the investment partners that funded CredSimple’s seed round.

Navinata Health Inc.: Navinata Health (Princeton)  said it is optimizing two-way knowledge exchange between pharma and physicians. The company’s online and mobile platform allows physicians to share their insight and educational needs, learn about new therapies, and connect directly with experts all in a single platform. 

“By enabling brands to more effectively deliver focused and customized education and on-demand expert support to low and no-see oncologists or cardiologists via our knowledge exchange platform, we help this otherwise difficult to reach group of physicians more quickly adopt innovative therapies. In doing so, Navinata Health is optimizing pharma brand launch and performance trajectories,” the company said in its pitch.

WholesomeONE: WholesomeONE (Princeton) is a website that helps people find natural ways to heal from pain and illness. Speaking at the event, Founder and CEO Kevin Burke noted that the website came about during his own search for such products. Burke was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a disease that affects the spine, and had been using prescription drugs to treat it. Not liking that alternative, he found that a combination of yoga and nutritional supplements helped.

“I weaned myself off all drugs. And the doctors who prescribed them, whom I still see, agree that my approach has been more effective and safer,” he said.

WholesomeONE is an online marketplace for natural health products: supplements, homeopathic remedies, oils, yoga, and others. People can research conditions, learn about treatment options, and purchase related products.

“You can search for products, browse by category, and, most importantly, navigate by a particular health condition. This is just one way we are differentiating from the competition,” Burke said.

If users spend $50 on products they can speak to a holistic health coach, a nutritionist, a yoga instructor, a personal trainer, a meditation teacher, or a massage therapist, for free.

Nutrify: Jackie Arnett Elnahar, who is both an attorney and a dietician, presented for Nutrify (New York), a company that provides dietary help to patients who have been discharged from the hospital.

“Current diet education for patients is a sieve. It does not help improve patient outcomes and causes remissions for hospitals,” she said in her pitch.  Right now, she said, information provided as a patient leaves the hospital is paper-based, generic and largely disregarded.

Elnahar said she contacted the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics to see if it had a solution, but it did not, so “together we created Nutrify.” The company provides patient education that is digitized so patients can access their materials anytime, anywhere. It also includes “engaging curated content,” such as recipes, take out suggestions and diet tracking with dietitian feedback.

“Nutrify connects directly to the EHR so our recommendations as are personalized to the patient’s clinical condition, food and drug interactions, and even grocery store budget,” she said.

Elnahar said that the company was in final discussions to pilot Nutrify for NYU Langone Medical Center, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Montefiore Health System and Aetna.

Pathgather: Pathgather (New York) is an enterprise learning platform that helps employees improve their skills and learn from their colleagues. Most companies use a learning management system (LMS) to train their workforce, yet these systems have a 60 percent dissatisfaction rate.

“That’s a major problem because companies are spending billions on learning content, but getting dreadfully little return on that investment,” CEO Eric Duffy said. The LMS user interfaces are poor compared to tools employees like to use like Facebook and Twitter. Also, “there was a day when you could fit everything inside an LMS, but now organizations have dozens of places throughout their organization that contain valuable knowledge resources, there are countless places outside of their organization that contain important learning content, but it’s completely disorganized.” The result is that employees 99 times out of 100 will use Google to find the answer to their question instead of the LMS their organization is spending millions on, he said.

Pathgather fixes this problem by layering on top of a company’s entire learning ecosystem. That includes  the LMS and dozens of other sources of knowledge and learning content that exists within an organization, as well as third party learning providers. For the employee, there is just a single point of access to all of this learning, the startup  said. Everyone is going to the same place so they’re able to collaborate and learn from one another, and administrators have access to analytics across everything that is happening.

Wellth: Another presenter was Alec Zopf,  chief technical officer of Wellth, a digital health startup that helps insurers, private businesses, and healthcare providers reduce the cost of patient care by incentivizing people to take better care of themselves. Wellth’s goal is to produce verifiable behavior change when it comes to health and wellness. Using data, Wellth builds actuarial models of chronic diseases in order to predict future health and cost outcomes based on behavior change.

We profiled Wellth when  it appeared at last years’ Tigerlabs Showcase.