Care Thread named a finalist in BWH ‘shark tank’ challenge

BOSTON – Care Thread, a Providence-based alumnus of the Betaspring accelerator program that provides secure mobile messaging for hospitals, has been named a finalist in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Innovation Hub Pilot Shark Tank Challenge along with nine other health-tech startups.

The competition will be held Monday, April 28, as part of a new initiative at the hospital to match early-stage health-tech companies and entrepreneurs with clinical partners at BWH in Boston to address challenges in outpatient and inpatient hospital engagement with patients and families.

The 10 startups selected as finalists will pitch their solutions to a panel of “sharks” including Karen Conley, associate chief nurse for the Connors Center for Women and Newborns; Dr. Jessica Dudley, chief medical officer for the Brigham and Women’s Physician’s Organization; Dr. Allen Kachalia, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School; and other physicians, medical experts and researchers.

BWH said in a news release that the hospital hopes the “Shark Tank”-style challenge will provide a “testing ground” for local health-tech entrepreneurs. The winners of the BWH iHub Pilot Shark Tank Challenge will have the opportunity to pilot their technologies for up to six weeks at BWH and work toward improving health care delivery in the process.

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If implemented at BWH, Care Thread’s secure mobile platform would allow each patient to invite family and friends into their Care Thread Circle, connecting patients and their loved ones with the patient’s care team, so family and friends would always know who is taking care of the patient at BWH and could receive updates from the care team while the patient is in the hospital.

Care Thread, which last year received a $250,000 investment from Slater Technology Fund, already has secured its first commercial contract with Eastern Connecticut Health Networks and plans to go live with a pilot program there in about a month, according to Care Thread Co-Founder and President Nick Adams.

The other nine finalists in the BWH competition, most headquartered in the greater Boston area, included:

  • Constant Therapy – Provides tools for personalized and 24/7 brain rehabilitation via iPads to patients who have suffered a stroke or brain-injury, and software tools to clinicians for evidence-based care.
  • Healo – Enables clinicians to remotely monitor their patients’ post-operative wound healing, decreasing the need for clinical follow-ups.
  • Home Team Therapy – Uses doctor-designed workouts to help physical therapy patients and athletes exercise at home, delivering customized exercise programs, progress tracking and secure messaging tools directly to patients.
  • MySafeCare – Allows patients and families to rapidly and electronically report safety concerns while in the hospital, to communicate those concerns to clinicians and hospital staff, and to facilitate a response according to each patient’s preferences through a mobile-patient-centered application.
  • Revvo – Guides users to work out on the world’s first bio-adaptive bike at just the right intensity to trigger a rapid improvement in fitness and metabolic health.
  • Tenacity Health – Uses unconventional incentives developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to change patient behavior outside the clinic through a peer-coaching platform, improving satisfaction and keeping patients healthy and out of the hospital.
  • Twine Health Inc. – Allows patients and clinicians to work together toward improving chronic-disease management using synchronized apps that work across devices.
  • VerbalCare – Uses a mobile, cloud-based platform for better communication between patients and their care teams, providing insight to clinical teams by empowering patients to have their needs heard in real time.
  • Vital Score – Improves doctor-patient communication about unhealthy behaviors that cause chronic illness.

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