Planning for the end of your life is probably not high on your list of things to do right now. In fact, you probably don’t want to think about it at all. The idea of death makes us naturally squeamish and uncomfortable, so we put off even thinking about it. This is where Cake comes in. The Boston-based digital health startup aims to make planning for the end of your life as easy as, well, you know.
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, innovators like Rendever CEO Kyle Rand are developing new ways to help seniors stay connected in their later years. Kyle and his team have developed a virtual reality (VR) platform that gives seniors the ability to experience new places and revisit cherished memories. The company’s goal is simple, yet critically important one: to make seniors feel happier and less isolated.
Virtudent is changing the way consumers receive oral healthcare through their mobile dentistry service. In just a few short years, the Newton-based company has grown from an idea housed at the Harvard Innovation Lab to a 17 person company focused on delivering high quality dental care in a unique way.
Virtudent provides on-site dental screenings and preventive dental care services to businesses and their employees via state-of-the-art pop-up dental clinics. Offered as a healthcare benefit by employers, Virtudent is making going to the dentist easy and stress free for consumers by bringing the dentist to their place of employment.
In 2014, Howard Bornstein found himself tired of the time consuming hassle of going to the optometrist, so he set out to change the experience by creating 2020 Onsite. The Boston-based startup eschews the traditional brick and mortar storefront for a fully stocked and staffed optometrist-mobile that brings the doctor to patients.
A 2016 survey from RN Network, showed that nearly half of current nurses are considering leaving the profession for a variety of reasons including exhaustion, burdensome paperwork, and not spending enough time with patients. Rebecca Love, Director of Nurse Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Northeastern University, founder of HireNurses.com and a nurse herself, is trying to address that with the Nurse Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative.
Dan Beeler and his team at SyncThink have developed technology to quickly evaluate the specific symptoms of a head injury. Originally designed for use by the military in Afghanistan, the technology is now making its way into the consumer realm as awareness about head injuries and concussions grow. Mass Tech sat down with him at the firm’s Canal Street office not long after the firm won the grand prize at the PULSE@ MassChallenge Finale.
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One of the more unique players in the Massachusetts digital health ecosystem is the Bedford-based MITRE Corporation. The not-for-profit organization oversees numerous federal research and development centers focused on finding solutions for a wide range of public problems on behalf of the U.S. government. We recently sat down with MITRE COO Peter Sherlock and MITRE Associate Department Head, Open Health Services, Jason Walonoski at their Bedford headquarters to discuss what MITRE does and some of their current projects.
BOSTON – The Massachusetts eHealth Institute (MeHI) at MassTech has awarded nearly $200,000 to four qualified electronic health record (EHR) vendors to build efficient pathways for Massachusetts behavioral health providers to electronically submit reportable data to the Commonwealth’s Children’s Behavioral Health Initiative (CBHI). The grants, the result of an open procurement process under MeHI’s CBHI CANS (Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths) Interface Development Grant program, incentivize the four vendors to build new electronic interfaces and connect 12 Massachusetts behavioral health providers, allowing the providers to efficiently submit CBHI reports, replacing a manual process for the roughly 40,000 reports they submit to the Commonwealth annually.
Boston – June 13, 2017 – The Baker-Polito Administration today awarded $250,000 to Digital Health Innovation Labs in the Massachusetts Digital Health Initiative, a second round of funding that will provide $170,000 to support the PULSE@MassChallenge digital health hub in Boston and $80,000 for Baystate Health’s TechSpring technology innovation center in Springfield. Both organizations received previous state funding through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s (MassTech) eHealth Institute last year and provide support for digital health start-ups, including mentoring, strategic partner matching, targeted education, co-working spaces, start-up accelerators, and other programming.
As the head of a rapidly growing Massachusetts digital health startup, Gardner sees parallels between Beane’s approach and the solution that Kyruus has built – a software platform that helps health systems connect patients with “the right provider, the first time.” Its KyruusOne platform creates a centralized provider database for health systems that includes the medical conditions, procedures, insurance products, languages, and scheduling rules that define each provider’s schedule.
