Category: Austin (Page 166 of 318)

People Pattern Hires Former Facebook Executive Doug Wolfe

August 14, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Doug Wolfe, COO People Pattern. courtesy photo

People Pattern announced recently it has appointed Doug Wolfe as its Chief Operating Officer.

Wolfe, previously served as head of operations for Atlas at Facebook. He has a lot of experience in marketing technology and digital media.

As COO, Wolfe will oversee People Pattern’s product, sales, finance, partnership, recruitment and marketing.

“People Pattern is taking off as marketers look for new ways to find and activate customers,” Ken Cho, co-founder and CEO of People Pattern, said in a news release. “His operating experience, character and process-driven approach will further elevate our business, helping scale our technology and custom solutions to a global client base. Our evolution is taking place in days not years, and we are thrilled to welcome him to the team.”

Wolfe joins Cho and People Pattern co-founder and University of Texas computational linguistics professor Jason Baldridge in creating a new marketing paradigm centered in Audience Insight, public identity and data science. The company reports its revenue has quadrupled in the last year with customers like McDonald’s, Campbell’s, HP, Cisco, Planned Parenthood and Pernod Ricard.

“More than 90% of marketers say they don’t know enough about their audience,” Wolfe said in a news release. “I decided to join People Pattern because I wanted to be part of an innovative company based in Austin, and it fit my criteria for the type of company I want to be part of: a smart and fun team, products that create real value in a big market and a need for the kind of operating leadership I can provide. People Pattern has all of that, with incredible early clients who are re-thinking the way they market. It’s an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”

Wolfe started his career in the U.S. military, serving as a Captain in the United States Marine Corps (veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom) and assistant professor of Naval Sciences at Northwestern University before joining Morgan Stanley as an associate. He holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Silicon Hills News did this profile of People Pattern earlier this year.

Austin Wins “StartUp in a Day” SBA Competition

August 14, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Photo licensed from iStockphoto.com

Everyone who has ever run a small business can tell you there is a lot of red tape and bureaucracy to deal with to get the venture off the ground.

Now the City of Austin is aiming to make the process as simple as possible. This month, the U.S. Small Business Administration announced Austin as one of 28 winners in the first StartUp in a Day competition.

The program is designed to take the pain out of registering for permits and licenses on a local level and drastically reduce the time it takes to set up a business in Austin.

“The City of Austin continues to provide great assistance to small businesses in their local neighborhoods,” Yolanda Olivarez, SBA Region VI Administrator, said in a news release. “I am extremely proud of the leadership within this city, who continues to strive for more economic growth and job creation by supporting our small businesses,”

The City of Austin will receive $50,000 to support the development, implementation, and improvement of online tools that let entrepreneurs learn about the business startup process.

UT Spinout Capsenta Helps Healthcare Companies Harness Data

August 13, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By HOJUN CHOI
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Anyone familiar with the University of Texas at Austin is no stranger to the words “what happens here changes the world.”

To Capsenta, a spin out smart data startup from a UT computer science lab, that motto is more than just a rallying call to donors and fans of the university.

The company, which officially launched in July, seeks to change the way companies around the world mines databases for information. It offers a data translation and integration software allowing its customers to combine and analyze relational databases in a faster and more economic and efficient way.

Traditionally, when combining relational databases for analysis, businesses complete a three-step process involving extracting data from current locations, transforming the data so it is consistent and searchable and loading the data into a newly created warehouse or repository. David Arnold, Capsenta’s co-founder and CEO, said the tedious process, known as ETL, is costly and time consuming.

Capsenta’s patented technology replaces this process, using an application called Ultrawrap, software developed at UT’s Miranker Laboratory.

“There was a need to bring forward these tools, which whole industries were built on, to better weave and integrate with a new world of data,” Arnold said.

Juan Sequeda, who completed his Ph.D in computer science in May, developed the platform under the mentorship of Daniel P. Miranker, the lab’s namesake.

“The process of integrating databases could be done manually, but these were processes that turned out to be inefficient and vulnerable to human error,” Sequeda said.

Another weakness of the traditional process, Sequeda said, was not all relational databases were built to be easily combined with one another.

Using their collective knowledge and experience with what is referred to as “semantic web” technology, Sequeda and Miranker designed software to “wrap” around database warehouses from multiple sources so it can be analyzed and cross referenced without being moved.

What brings these databases together, Sequeda said, is a layer of “semantic” technology filling gaps between existing relational databases, which allows Ultrawrap to address specific queries companies may have.

Ultrawrap not only streamlines data integration through its automated process, it also saves users time and money by not requiring them to repeat the ETL process every time a specific question needs to be answered.

Miranker, who is listed as a co-founder of the company along with Sequeda and Arnold, had a hand in smoothing out the licensing process with the university, which owns equity in the company. He said Arnold and Darren Selsky joined the company in 2014 after first serving as advisors to the project at the Austin Technology Incubator.

“The Austin Technology Incubator was largely responsible for the matchmaking with our business team,” Miranker said.

Arnold and Selsky both have backgrounds with close ties to health information and technology. Selsky, who has spent his entire career in the health IT industry, said his work with information connectivity within hospital systems has helped him recognize Ultrawrap’s applicability in the healthcare industry.

“Data that big companies have always been stored, but aren’t necessarily available in a form can be shared and used to increase the quality of care,” Selsky said.

MedAxiom, an information resource and service provider for cardiology organizations, began using the startup’s data integration platform in April. Ryan Graver, president of MedAxiom Ventures, is responsible for creating relationships between its members and other industry segments, such as health IT, medical device and pharmaceutical companies.

“Consistently, we hear that ‘actionable intelligence’ is really probably the biggest area in which we see a gap in the industry,” Graver said. “A lot of that gap stems from the technologies we currently have and don’t have to unlock the data that is already out there.”

Actionable intelligence, in the world of big data, lets companies and organizations know whether or not they should make changes based on the copious amount of information in their data warehouses.

He said MedAxiom, which serves 320 organizations and more than 6,000 physicians in the cardiovascular health industry, provides a hub for sharing and benchmarking data to help these healthcare providers evaluate and improve upon their performance.

Though the company has used more traditional methods to combine and analyze large databases for more than a decade, Graver said the Ultrawrap solution helps create a marketplace in which these organizations and physicians can gain access to this knowledge in a more efficient way.

“We can use Capsenta’s technology to better pinpoint patients who have certain health conditions and ensure these patients are receiving the proper care,” Graver said.

The majority of the startup’s customers have been related to the health industry, many of which are in the medical device business. The software has, however, proved to be functional in other realms, such as legal and transportation.

“You try not to get distracted with going too broad too fast because it dilutes your focus and it dilutes your ability to build great examples of what your technology can do within a vertical market,” Arnold said.

Arnold said the startup, with seven employees, is preparing to raise additional funds. It has already raised about $750,000 in seed stage financing, Arnold said.

Because the company’s business model does not require a large customer service team, Arnold said it looks to add to its sales and marketing team, largely to expand into other markets in and outside the healthcare industry.

UnaliWear Makes Smartwatches for Older Adults

August 7, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Jean Anne Booth, founder and CEO of UnaliWear, maker of the Kanega Watch for seniors, photo by John Davidson.

Joan Hall worked as a model most of her life.

Now she’s 81 and lives independently in San Antonio.

Her daughter, Jean Anne Booth, who lives in Austin, wanted to keep tabs on her mom and make sure she is ok but her mom refused to wear one of those elder alert buttons.

“They’re just plain ugly,” Hall told her daughter.

And those emergency response help buttons are socially stigmatizing and limits people to their homes, she said.

That’s when Jean Anne Booth, an engineer and serial entrepreneur, decided to come up with a better solution. She left retirement to start Austin-based UnaliWear, maker of the Kanega watch for seniors. Booth sold her last company to Texas Instruments and the one before that to Apple.

“I wanted to build something that my mother and I both would be willing to wear to remain safe as we age,” Booth said.

Prototypes of the Kanega watch. Photo courtesy of UnaliWear

For the past few years, Booth has been working with a small team of engineers to create prototypes of a senior alert watch. And she’s been conducting focus groups. She created a classically styled watch that doesn’t require a smartphone to operate. Now they’re ready to begin a beta trial with the product, called the Kanega watch. It has built-in cellular, Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities. It also has an accelerometer for fall detection, and continuous speech to provide an active medical alert that works anywhere, in combination with data-driven artificial intelligence that learns the wearer’s lifestyle.

“We build the cell phone into the watch because less than 10 percent of seniors 75 and older have smartphones,” Booth said.

The Austin-based startup, previously known as LifeAssist, changed its name to UnaliWear because “Unalii” is the Cherokee word for “friend,” Booth said. And “Kanega” means speak, so were the “friend who speaks to you,” she said.

Focus groups have also called the Kanega watch an “OnStar for Seniors.” The watch’s built in voice recognition software responds to the name that the owner gives it and operates on voice commands instead of buttons. Booth’s mom named her watch “Fred Astaire.” It has all the features of a regular watch including time and date features in large print. The watch can also let a senior live an active lifestyle because it goes wherever they go and it works around the clock, Booth said. If the person wearing the watch has an accident, the watch monitors activity so it can call operators for help.

UnaliWear recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign. The company raised $110,000, 10 percent above its goal, from 306 backers.

The response to UnaliWear’s Kickstarter campaign shows a demand exists for easy to use monitoring devices for older adults. In fact, a Nielsen Co. report on aging last year showed the number one concern among older adults is about losing self-reliance to care for basic needs.

For a long time, the wearables market seemed to ignore the aging population. They created exercise monitors and other devices to increase fitness and health. But it wasn’t until recently wearables aimed at seniors began to appear.

Today, the Kanega watch faces competition from companies like Lively, Evermind and BeClose. The companies generally charge $50 to $300 for the device and then monthly monitoring fees starting at around $30 a month.

The market for monitoring devices for seniors is $1.5 billion annually in the U.S. at least, said Laurie Orlov, an aging in place expert and a longtime technology veteran and analyst.

“Consider that 46 percent of women aged 75 and up live alone – they would like to feel safe at home and when they are out and about,” Orlov said.

And many seniors take multiple prescription medications that can lead to confusion and other side effects if taken incorrectly, Booth said. So the ability to monitor medications is a huge benefit to the Kanega watch, she said.

UnaliWear’s Kanega watch is still in beta testing and isn’t yet available on the mass market. Those supporters who pledged in the Kickstarter campaign will get the first devices.

“We’ve recently built our fifth prototype,” Booth said. “We’re doing a friends and family test. That’s where we are today.”

UnaliWear is testing one more prototype and expects to be in the market in 2016, she said. The watch costs $299 for the device with activation fee and $35 to $85 a month in monitoring fees.

So far, Booth has raised just $1.1 million in seed stage funding. All of her marketing has been through the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. And she was recently featured in a Time Magazine article on smartwatches for seniors.

“What we’re building works,” Booth said. “We’re allowing seniors to have independence with dignity.”

Ten Life Sciences Companies to Watch in Central Texas

August 5, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Photo licensed from iStockphoto

Texas is one of the leading biotech states in the country, according to a 2014 report from the Texas Governor’s Office. In fact, it ranks second for employment of life and physical scientists nationwide.

The state has more than 3,600 biotechnology manufacturing and research and development firms. More than 92,000 people work for biotech companies in Texas. It has also become a hotbed of activity for startups tackling big problems like finding drugs to combat different types of cancer or medical devices to screen for cancer. San Antonio and Austin have dozens of innovative startups addressing big problems in the medical industry. Here are just ten to keep an eye on in the coming year:

Aeglea Biotherapeutics: the Austin-based startup develops variants on human enzymes to deplete key amino acids to fight cancer and other diseases. The company filed in June with the Nasdaq Stock Exchange for an Initial Public Offering to raise $86.2 million.

Aerin Medical: the company is in the process of relocating its headquarters from California to Austin. Fred Dinger, a serial biomedical entrepreneur, is heading it up as CEO in Austin. It also just filed a Form D with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $14.36 million in funding. The company focuses on solving breathing problems. It has created a device that opens up the air passages of patients so they no longer need breathe right devices or surgery to breathe easier. The procedure is done in the doctor’s office.

Bluegrass Vascular Technologies – the San Antonio-based startup relocated from Lexington, Kentucky. It raised $4.5 million in Series A financing last year led by the Targeted Technology Fund of San Antonio. The company makes the Surfacer, a central venous access catheter system. Gabriele Niederauer joined the company in September of 2014 as its CEO and President.

Chiron Health – the Austin-based startup provides telemedicine healthcare consultation for doctors with patients remotely over the Internet. With the Chiron Health platform, doctors can review lab results, adjust medication and answer other patient questions online. Founded by Andrew O’Hara, the company is working with 20 health care providers.

ENTVantageDX Diagnostics: the Austin-based startup is creating a test to detect bacterial sinusitis, which requires antibiotics to cure. The test is similar to a strep throat test administered in the doctor’s office.

Mirna Therapeautics, the Austin-based startup develops cancer-fighting drugs. Its drugs are currently in clinical trial testing with patients. It recently received $41.8 million in venture capital financing. The company has raised $82.8 million in four rounds from 11 investors, according to its Crunchbase profile. Dr. Paul Lammers is the company’s CEO and president.

Neurolink Medical: the San Antonio-based startup has created a brain implant system to monitor brain activity and to directly deliver drugs to treat brain seizures or epilepsy. It received $3.2 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

Savara Pharmaceuticals: the Austin-based pharmaceutical startup has created pulmonary therapeutics for cancer and other diseases. It received $1.9 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. To date, the company has raised $47.7 million in eight rounds.

Seno Medical Instruments: the San Antonio-based medical device startup has created laser optic technology to screen for cancer. It received $2 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

StemBioSys: the San Antonio-based startup develops proprietary stem cell technologies for the regenerative medical market. Earlier this year, the company closed on $8 million in Series A funding led by the Targeted Technology Fund, a San Antonio-based venture capital firm. To date, it has raised $10 million. The company is in research partnerships with the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Langer/Anderson Laboratories at MIT.

Plum Raises $5 Million and Plans to Ship its Lightpads Soon

August 4, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

Glen Burchers, co-founder of Plum, maker of WiFi-enabled smart light dimmers, courtesy photo.

Plum, maker of WiFi-enabled smart light dimmers, has raised $5 million in seed stage funding and is raising another $700,000 in funding before its round closes.

Plum reports the money will allow it to manufacture and ship its flagship product, the Plum Lightpad, which allows homeowners to control their lights with their smartphone from anywhere.

The Austin-based startup is using CircleUp, an equity-based crowdfunding platform to secure its investment. It has also raised funds from angel investors and convertible debt. To date, the company has raised $5 million from about 50 investors with investment sums ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 said Glen Burchers, the company’s co-founder and chief marketing officer.

In addition, Plum, formerly Ube, raised $307,600 from 1,308 backers in April of 2013 on Kickstarter, to create WiFi connected smart light dimmers. Plum reports it ranks in the top 5 percent of technology startups in the U.S. for raising capital on crowdfunding sites.

Plum’s Lightpad

It has taken longer than expected to get the product to backers because the company was overly ambitious and didn’t have all the funds it needed for engineering and manufacturing, Burchers said. But Plum plans to begin shipping its light dimmer switches to customers at the end of this month. Only about 50 backers have asked for refunds, Burchers said. Plum took its first orders on Kickstarter and then through Amazon. It has more than $1 million of orders received so far, Burchers said. That’s about 10,000 units which Plum plans to ship to customers shortly, he said.

“We expect our backlog to be fully shipped in the October time frame,” Burchers said.

The company has yet to spend any money on marketing or advertising, Burchers said. All of its sales have been online, but it plans to branch out into retail stores like Home Depot, Office Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond and Target next year, he said.

Plum WiFi enabled smart light dimmers have received Federal Communications Commission certification and they have also completed UL testing, Burchers said.

“That we just passed last Friday,” Burchers said. “Those were two things that were significant hurdles for us.”

Plum has a manufacturing partner with operations in Carrollton, Texas and Shanghai, China. The initial products will be made in Texas, Burchers said.

Plum, with offices on North Lamar, has 16 full time employees, of which 14 are engineers. Since its founding in 2012, Plum has participate in both the Techstars and Microsoft Ventures accelerator programs.

Lighting control today is a $4 billion annual market in the U.S. but it only serves the really wealthy since lighting control systems costs about $20,000, Burchers said. The Plum product is bringing lighting control to the masses or the 27 million people who have homes in the $300,000 range, he said.

Plum’s Lightpad comes equipped with smart meters that can tell consumers how much they are spending on lighting for each connect fixture. And all of the functionality that is in the mobile app, which controls the light switches, is also in the switch, Burchers said.

Two Austin Startups Featured at First White House Demo Day

August 4, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Photo courtesy of the White House

President Barack Obama is hosting the nation’s first Demo Day at the White House to showcase innovative technology startups from all over the country.

Among them, Jeanette Hill, CEO and founder of Spot On Sciences, will show off its portable and easy to use blood test kits. The company has created a product, HemaSpot, that lets people take a blood sample easily by pricking their finger and collecting a drop of blood in the special container and then sending it by mail to the lab. The product eliminates needles and trips to the lab. Spot on Sciences has received grants from DARPA and the National Institutes of Health. The company has also “announced a collaboration with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research to support a study for detecting infectious pathogens such as HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C, and mosquito-borne infections such as dengue, West Nile and chikungunya virus in deployed troops,” according to a news release from the White House.

Another startup from Austin, Student Loan Genius, founded by Tony Aguilar, is a program that allows companies to help their employees pay off their student loans faster through a company matching program. The company, previously known as Student Loan Benefits, pitched during Capital Factory Demo Day at South by Southwest. Aguilar, who graduated from college with more than $100,000 in student loan debt, created the program to give students the benefits he wishes he had, according to the White House press release.

More than 30 entrepreneurs are presenting at the first White House Demo day, which is focused on inclusive entrepreneurship.

Also, this afternoon, President Obama will announce new public and private-sector commitments to increase diversity in entrepreneurship, especially in the technology industry.

“America’s entrepreneurial economy is the envy of the world,” according to a White House statement. “But, we need to do more to make sure that we are tapping our full entrepreneurial potential – drawing on talented Americans from all backgrounds and locations.”

Women led just 3 percent of venture backed startups, and only about one percent are led by African Americans.

Only about four percent of U.S.-based venture capital investors are women. And that venture capital is only available in a few big cities.

“To maintain our lead as the best place on the planet to start and scale a great company, we must ensure that vibrant startup ecosystems emerge in every corner of America, and that all Americans, including those underrepresented in entrepreneurship like women and people of color, are both encouraged and able to fully contribute their entrepreneurial talents,” according to the White House.

On Tuesday, President Obama will announce 116 winners of two Small Business Administrative prizes. He also plans to announce the Growth Accelerator Fund for startup accelerators and a “Startup in a Day” initiative to cut red tape for local entrepreneurs. President Obama also plans to scale up the “National Science Foundation I-Corps program with eight new and expanded Federal agency partnerships, introducing hundreds of entrepreneurial scientist teams across the country to a rigorous process for moving their discoveries out of the lab and into the marketplace.”

In addition, President Obama is announcing more than “40 leading venture capital firms with over $100 billion under management, including Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, and Scale Venture Partners, committing to specific actions that advance opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

Institutional investors, engineering deans, and technology companies are also committing to focus on diversity in their investments, recruiting and hiring.

“Over a dozen major technology companies announcing new actions to ensure diverse recruitment and hiring, including Amazon, Box, Microsoft, Xerox, and others committing to adopt variations on the “Rooney Rule” to consider diverse candidates for senior executive positions,” according to the White House.

Spiceworks’ New Headquarters Opens, Expansion Planned Already

August 2, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Scott Abel, Spiceworks Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, photos by Susan Lahey

Spiceworks held an open house Friday for its new headquarters at 3700 North Capital of Texas Highway, in the same Hill Country-adjacent neighborhood as Bazaarvoice. The company, which provides a free network management IT community, reports 2,000 new members a day and has roughly 360 employees in its Austin headquarters.

Scott Abel, founder and executive board member, said Spiceworks modeled the new space after it’s previous space. “We cheated and replicated the old space because people really liked it. It’s very open. We experimented with a mix of open spaces and private offices. We played with high cubes and low cubes and no cubes and people really seemed to love the low cubes, so we stopped asking.”

Tour of Spiceworks’ new headquarters

About 300 people can fit on each of the 50,000-square foot floors and Spiceworks has two of the floors in the building with an option on a third.

“There’s a rumor we might accelerate that option,” Abel said. “We’re probably going to end up growing a little faster than we thought.”

In addition to the open spaces where various departments congregate in one section, there are private meeting rooms with names like Badger Den, Rawr, and Spice Spice. There are also several very small rooms that can let two people work together privately.

Spiceworks’ Kitchen

Abel was the one who recommended having a single communal kitchen for all departments on the first floor.

“If you don’t force people to interact they won’t,” he said. While each area has a little station with coffee and water, the food is all down in the kitchen. “There’s all this cross department pollination,” he said. Employees tell him often how much they like it because it introduces them to people in the company they would never have met otherwise.

“Culturally it matters immensely and employees tell me about it all the time. There’s this comfort level, feeling connected,” Abel said.

Spiceworks’ gong, because what startup doesn’t have its own gong?

Spiceworks, founded in 2006, has raised $111 million in five rounds from six investors, according to its Crunchbase profile.

eRelevance Creates DocWithMe App and Plans to Expand to Other Industries

July 30, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By HOJUN CHOI
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Robert Fabbio, co-founder of eRelevance, photo by John Davidson

Robert Fabbio and his band of seasoned entrepreneurs at eRelevance first envisioned a mobile application that would help doctors better interact with their patients after treatment, but, around this vision, developed a marketing strategy that could make ripples beyond just the healthcare industry.

“When we first started, we were all about a mobile application,“ said Michael Cohen, vice president of marketing. “What we realized is that that’s not always how the world works; an app might not be for everybody.”

Cohen said the team initially wanted to offer healthcare providers a better way to communicate with patients through a digital platform that would simulate some of the doctor-patient conversations that take place during an appointment.

After realizing the application’s potential as an interactive marketing tool, however, Cohen said the company rebranded itself from a patient engagement service into an marketing agency.

“What we found is that if you can engage people around the services of a practice when they’re choosing to have that particular conversation, the more likely it is that they go on to request care for that specific need,” Cohen said.

Because the mobile application, DocWithMe, only tries to engage users after they have selected to find out more about a specific health service, Cohen said the communication that the app fosters is a unique channel that other more traditional marketing solutions have not yet used to the best of its capability.

The company reached out to doctors and healthcare providers in the elective healthcare industry to find out what they were interested in finding out about their patients as well as how they have done in the past to engage former patients. Doing so, Cohen said, helped the agency design content that could best mirror a doctor-patient conversation.

The application, for example, may ask whether the user has recently been on vacation and move onto a conversation about sun damage to the skin. The user can then choose to learn more about offers that deal with treatments for sun damage, engage the subject at a later time or move on to a different topic.

Doctors using the marketing service can offer the mobile application to their patients, who can only use the application after a verification process. He said the interaction that takes place through the platform will not be shared with outside parties, recognizing the private and often sensitive nature of doctor-patient conversations.

“We don’t share what we’re learning about people to other marketing firms, but doctors can use our services to see what types of topics their patients are interested in,” Cohen said.

Though he recognized the importance of making impressions through social media and email notifications -services that the company now offers in addition to the mobile application, Cohen said that the company’s experience shows reaching out to patients through a conversation generated more leads than other channels.

“We’re doing all the creative work, we’re doing all the content as well as the technology to run that content,” Cohen said. “We’re doing all of that for them while they can sit back and focus on giving quality care to their patients.”

As a part of their service, the marketing startup also takes account of how patients are choosing to find out about services, whether they to do so through the agency’s texting service, email notification or social media posts. Doing so, Cohen said, allows their clients to have an easier time reaching out to these patients for future appointments.

Corina Ianculovici, who began using eRelevance’s service a year ago, said the company’s marketing strategy has been a “game changer” for her medispa clinic in New Jersey. Though she said she has yet to see the service generate new leads, Ianculovici said the multichannel approach is great at keeping her current leads active.

“Patient engagement through previous sources we used was ineffective because of the low email opening rate,” Ianculovici said. “Patients were aggravated when we used a text messaging application like CallFire.”

Ianculovici said she has seen higher patient engagement with eRelevance’s mobile application, and said that the company’s social media campaigns have been effective. She said the service has given her clinic a way to engage patients consistently.

Fabbio, the CEO of the company, realizes the service’s strength as a patient engagement platform. He said eRelevance, however, is a company that can take interactive marketing to new level.

“Ultimately what we have built is far more than a patient engagement service,” Fabbio said. “We have essentially built a next generation conversational marketing platform.”

Fabbio said that the agency, which launched in 2013, has closed more than 120 accounts in two quarters of selling. He also told Silicon Hills News that the company has raised about $2.7 million in seed funding, and has grown from its three original founders to 16 employees, mostly to expand its sales team.

The company currently targets elective health care practices in the healthcare industry across the country, a large number of them being medical spa clinics. Its interactive marketing service is offered through 6-month and 12-month contracts.

“We found that plastic surgeons, dermatologists and other health services that provide elective care are constantly looking to generate more leads for business,” Fabbio said.

Fabbio said the company plans on using this same conversational approach to reach different markets both in and outside the healthcare industry. He said with each new industry, the agency will use an application similar to DocWithMe to supplement its marketing campaigns.

“It’s a real basic white label app that is configured to look like as if these doctors or hospital systems have created their own app, so we’ll be able to configure a similar app for different industries,” Fabbio said.

Fabbio said it is still too early to estimate when the company’s expansion into different industries may happen. Tim Smith, one of the founders of the company and its director of products, said the company will be well prepared to adapt to a different market once it is ready to make the move.

“We have the science, we know what model to follow, we have the code and the back end that will run all this,” Smith said. “We just need to adapt the content and adapt the application a little bit and it will work.”

Fabbio, who has more than 25 years experience as an entrepreneur, has created over $1.5 billion in shareholder value at time of exit for the ventures that he has been a part of.

“I think there is great money to be made and great change to be had in the intersection of healthcare and information technology,” Fabbio said. “I have classically been an IT guy, and the ability to bring tech to healthcare is sort of my sweetspot.”

ePatientFinder is a Matchmaker for Patients and Clinical Trials

July 29, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Tom Dorsett, founder and CEO of ePatientFinder, courtesy photo

According to a study by Tufts University in 2014, 60-to-80 percent of the cost of any new drug or treatment goes to clinical trials, and most of that is money is channeled into luring in, then weeding out patients to test the drug. They have to have the exact combination of age, health status, family history and dozens of other factors to make the clinical trials valid. That’s what ePatientFinder, a startup in Austin, was created to deal with.

The ePatientFinder platform data mines physicians’ and hospitals’ medical records looking for keywords that would mark a patient as a good candidate for a phase III trial—the kind where people actually benefit from the treatment, rather than just being used to measure things like toxicity. If candidates are found, their primary physicians, who are signed up with ePatientFinder, contact the patients to tell them of the opportunity and further screen them to determine if they are, in fact, a good fit.

“I come from an academic institution where I had colleagues or friends doing research all the time, looking for patients to enroll in studies,” said Dr. Gary Goff, an internist in Dallas who is signed up with ePatientFinder. “There was no efficiency in it. It was like ‘Hey buddy, so and so, you have that disease. Would you be interested in talking to them? That was the mechanism of patient referrals– posters on a tripod all over campus. This is light years ahead of anything that’s been done before.”

The pharmaceutical companies pay ePatientFinder as well as the trial participants and doctors who screen and consult with patients. But it’s a lot more streamlined than trying to fish from the general population.

“If you look at areas like banking and communication it’s been a lot easier to automate because you’re dealing with less information,” said Tom Dorsett, ePatientFinder CEO and co-founder. Dorsett founded NuScribe, the market’s first health information exchange, in 1991 and sold it for $9 million. Dorsett used some of the proceeds of that sale to launch ePatientFinder.

ePatientFinder works with most of the technologies healthcare practices use to manage patient records. And, Dorsett said, it’s the only one that involves the primary care physician rather than appealing directly to the patients. While he said the company is focused on chronic illnesses right now, such as diabetes, which are the subject of a lot of research, Dr. Goff suggested that the platform’s data mining capabilities has other uses, such as monitoring preventive health measures for various patients with similar profiles.

Dorsett, who has had several jobs in medical IT consulting and management since the sale of his company, had been looking for another opportunity with friend and former business partner Tom Tauzin of Tauzin Consultants in Washington, D.C.. Tauzin’s father, and business partner, a former Congressman from Louisiana, also served as president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical association. They had discussed an idea Dorsett had years ago when his daughter was born with a large birthmark and was interested in what kinds of treatments were available. The idea for a clinical trial clearinghouse through primary physicians was initially created then.

“What we needed was a very large VHR (Virtual Health Record Clinical Portal) to access PHI (patient health information) efficiently,” Tauzin said. “We shelved it for some time…until the data showed that there was enough adoption that we could make a go of it from an investor standpoint…. Our model is solving big problems not that, necessarily, are unsolved but that could just be so onerous …that there’s a real cost barrier and hindrance to the industry.”

The cost of bringing treatments to market was one such problem. Tauzin and Dorsett had to consult with numerous attorneys and other consultants to ensure that the platform they were proposing was legal and met with regulatory restrictions such as patient privacy laws. Tauzin’s company is also launching an accelerator Impact Acceleration, a venture building incubator/accelerator focused on energy, healthcare, telecommunications and technology.

In addition to the exorbitant cost of finding patients, Dorsett said, “Most patients are completely unaware that these trials are going on. There’s a miniscule part of the population who will go out and look for clinical trials, and there are so many good treatments out there for diabetes, interesting things happening in Alzheimer’s, all the usual suspects drive the cost up in healthcare….” There are, he said some 17-odd-thousand trials running at any given point and they can be found at Clinicaltrials.gov. But ePatientFinder is able to sort out those that are showing the most promise in different therapeutic areas.

“Eighty six percent of clinical trials run behind because they’re looking for a diabetic, with another condition and 30 different data points,” he said. Researchers may ask a friend who is a physician if they can send patients over, but the physician, who is already busy, has no way of identifying the best patients other than combing through records. “What we do is automate all that so that community physicians can refer patients to clinical trials in their own community conducted by other physicians they know and trust in the community. Otherwise those treatments are completely inaccessible to those patients. We make it exist for them.”