Six startups selected for tech-based accelerator program

For the second year, The Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine are co-sponsoring an opportunity that prepares health information technology startups to present their innovative ideas to the world. DreamIt Health Baltimore is a four-month intensive boot camp program for entrepreneurs, designed to accelerate new product development for health IT startup companies. The program provides six new startups with access to top-tier legal and accounting services, along with opportunities to meet and pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists. Each startup also receives additional seed capital of up to $50,000.

The capstone event of the program, DreamIt Demo Day, will be held in Baltimore on May 13, 2015. It affords each team the opportunity to share its progress and plans for the future with an audience of investors, industry leaders and potential customers.

“Our partnership with DreamIt is a demonstration of our commitment to the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Johns Hopkins and in Baltimore,” says Christy Wyskiel, senior advisor to the president at The Johns Hopkins University. “We are excited to continue building on Hopkins’ tradition of innovation by helping entrepreneurs build promising health care technology startups from start to finish.” 

The six selected startups were chosen from among more than 100 applications submitted from around the globe. “This year’s applications were some of the best we’ve ever seen,” says Jason Hardebeck, the managing director of DreamIt Health Baltimore. “I am excited to see new technologies unfold that will shape health IT.”

This current group of startups is made up of entrepreneurs from around the world who seek to address health care challenges by developing technologies that resolve a specific issue not yet addressed in the marketplace. Concepts in this year’s group include patient-physician communication, simplified access to registered dieticians, mechanical devices for autotransfusion and others.

Among the companies selected is Baton, a Baltimore startup co-founded by Harry Goldberg, Ph.D., an assistant dean at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Stephen Milner, M.D., chief of burn surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and Zack Goldberg, a former investment banker. Baton will develop a mobile application that ensures the seamless transition of patient care between hospital teams to avoid preventable medical errors.

The remaining DreamIt Health Baltimore 2015 startups are:

• Decisive Health Systems (San Francisco, California) helps physician practices increase revenue, improve outcomes and enhance patient satisfaction with software that supports shared decision making.
• InsightMedi (Spain) is a photo-sharing network for health care professionals designed to enhance education and enable curbside consultations on a large scale. 
• REAL Dietitian (Chicago, Illinois) offers a next-generation telehealth platform focused initially on increased access to medical nutrition therapy for patients with chronic diseases across the U.S. 
• Redox (Madison, Wisconsin) enables software developers to rapidly integrate with installed legacy health IT systems through a modern application programming interface. 
• Sisu Global Health (Grand Rapids, Michigan) develops medical devices for the most challenging environments and markets. Its first product enables autotransfusion of hemorrhaging patients in the field with military and developing world applications.

Other partners involved with DreamIt Health Baltimore include the University of Maryland, Baltimore; the Abell Foundation; the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore; BioHealth Innovation; and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.