Healthcare is a booming industry where new methods are applied to old problems. The healthtech sector is rife with innovators that use the latest tech capabilities to more quickly detect diseases, give patients access to the right care and in general make it easier for doctors to do their jobs.
Even in a developed country like the U.S., healthcare has issues — two major ones in particular: expense and accessibility. According to a Deloitte estimate, people in North America spent $3.3 trillion on healthcare in 2015 and are predicted to spend $4 trillion in 2020. But a lot of that money is wasted. In 2009, the Institute of Medicine has reported, roughly $750 billion was eaten up by “unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems.”
The situation is also grim when it comes to healthcare access. A recent Gallup poll indicates the number of uninsured Americans rose by 3.2 million from 2016 to 2017 — meaning about 12.2 percent have no health insurance, which can sometimes be the difference between life and death.
Here are some ways healthtech companies are using new technology to improve America’s healthcare system.
Companies Making Use of Technology in Healthcare
- Merck
- 23andMe
- PatientPoint
- Jabra Hearing
- DearDoc
- DispatchHealth
- Blink Health
- Flatiron Health
- Level Ex
Patient Services
These companies are working on improving the patient experience by facilitating interactions with doctors, making it easier to get medication and steering people toward the right resources.
Location: New York, New York
Alma’s platform works to streamline access to quality, affordable mental health care. It provides therapists with financial incentives for accepting insurance, enabling them to provide in-network care. Alma’s platform equips providers with tools for managing their businesses and fueling sustainable growth.
Location: New York, New York
Garner Health provides a healthcare services app that gathers information from prospective patients concerning their medical needs. The app then provides a scored ranking of local doctors for them to choose from, equipping patients with insights into cost, quality of care and patient feedback. Garner Health offers its services through employer benefits packages.
Location: New York, New York
Spring Health partners with employers to give employees access to adaptable mental healthcare resources. Its solution consolidates individuals’ data and compares it to numerous other data points. Spring Health’s machine learning platform then matches people to the appropriate specialist to suit their needs.
Location: New York, New York
Chapter’s online platform enables people over 65 to connect with advisors and advocates who can help them navigate Medicare. The company’s team members offer guidance on enrollment, picking the best-suited coverage options and maximizing one’s Medicare benefits.
Location: Dedham, Massachusetts
Healthtech firm DoseSpot provides safe and compliant e-prescribing software to clinicians. Its electronic prescription verification tools are certified by the gold standard health intelligence groups Surescripts and EPCS, which are able to certify electronic prescribing for controlled substances. Because clinicians can prescribe remotely, they are able to serve patients who otherwise would struggle to access care, while reducing long waits for appointments and prescriptions.
Location: Menlo Park, California
Carrot Fertility offers a fertility navigation and care program that clients access through their employee benefits packages. The program is provided by employers as a supplement to standard health plans, many of which don’t typically offer comprehensive fertility services. By using data to drive care decisions like embryo screening at scale, the company offers far better than average outcomes for IVF. It boasts a single embryo transfer rate of 93 percent, which is well above standard predictions.
Location: New York, New York
Grow Therapy operates a telehealth platform that networks independent mental healthcare providers with clients in need of care. Through referral systems, admin support and credentialing services, Grow functions as a middle ground for clinicians who are between working as an employee and fully branching out into private practice. It also provides clients with badly-needed services in a high-demand industry.
Location: Austin, Texas
Findhelp works with businesses, governments and community organizations to create social care solutions. Its Marketplace program lets customers deliver goods and services, providing direct care to people seeking help. People can order things such as rides, GED materials and medically-tailored meals. Findhelp’s software equips its partners with tools for screening and closed-loop referrals, outcomes tracking, health equity insights and more.
Location: New York, New York
Pharmaceutical company Pfizer aims to deliver innovative therapies to modernize healthcare, including developing the next generation of cancer treatments. The company works to accelerate patient care by applying the latest healthcare innovations to its drug development process.
Location: New York, New York
Ro is a telehealth company giving patients access to treatment for conditions like obesity, erectile dysfunction and hair loss. Ro’s network of providers give personalized treatment recommendations, and patients can use Ro’s platform to have their prescription medications discreetly shipped to their homes for free.
Location: Fully remote
Cohere Health specializes in building technology solutions that enable intelligent, efficient prior authorization processes that are intended to result in better health outcomes for patients. The company’s offerings include automations powered by AI and machine learning that streamline workflows for accepting prior authorization requests, conducting reviews and making decisions.
Location: Bellevenue, Washington
Healthcare Management Administrators, also known as HMA, has been around since 1986, working with employers to build health plans that are affordable and customized to meet their needs. The company says its solutions for medium- and large-sized employers cover everything from telehealth services to population health strategy.
Location: New York, New York
Nourish is a telehealth platform that connects patients with dietitians covered by their insurance plans. Users start by answering questions about themselves and providing their insurance information and then can arrange a virtual appointment with a dietitian that matches their needs so they can undergo a comprehensive nutrition assessment to establish their health goals and care plan. Patients that work with Nourish see outcomes like decreased cholesterol and improvements in their overall mental and physical health.
Location: New York, New York
Healthee’s technology is designed to help employees navigate their healthcare benefits options. Its app comes with AI-powered features like a virtual assistant known as Zoe that provides users with information about their coverage options. The platform give HR teams the tools to improve health literacy throughout their organizations and boost employee satisfaction.
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Takeda’s patient-centered research and development efforts extend to building technology solutions meant to directly impact the patient experience. For example, the company tested out a program in Japan that deployed robots to safely retrieve medical waste from hemophilia patients as a way to reduce the burdens associated with home treatment. Takeda also participated in the development of an app for monitoring Parkinson’s disease symptoms.
Location: Santa Monica, California
GoodRx runs a digital healthcare marketplace that connects consumers with cost-reducing resources for prescription medication, lab tests and doctor visits. Its tech facilitates processes that cut costs, like real-time benefits checks that allow customers to see what coverage they have for specific services and medications. GoodRx also serves healthcare providers, like patient experience software and clinical management tools.
Location: New York, New York
Zocdoc offers a digital healthcare marketplace that enables users to connect with medical providers and helps practices attract new patients. As patients search the database through Zocdoc’s website or mobile app, they can see a provider’s specialty, location, reviews and appointment availability, as well as what insurance they accept.
Location: Fully remote
Jabra Hearing makes medical-grade over-the-counter hearing aids and enhancements that are engineered to support improved hearing for patients who are hard of hearing. Its Enhance product, a hearing enhancement earbud, uses recent hearing healthcare tech but is priced at about half the national average cost for similar products.
Location: Fully remote
Rula uses technology to connect people with providers for virtual mental health appointments. It maintains a network of more than 8,000 treatment providers who represent a broad variety of specialties, such as anxiety, medication management, depression and anger management. The company works with major insurance providers like Blue Cross Blue Shield and United Healthcare to ensure its services are affordable to patients. Though specific appointment costs vary depending on insurance, Path says many patients pay $15 per appointment.
Location: New York, New York
Firsthand uses technology to connect with and serve individuals living with serious mental illness. For example, the company uses data science to identify the individuals in need of its medical and social support services. Firsthand also provides its team members with mobile-first tools that give them the capabilities to serve their target population on a broader scale. The company says its tech-enabled solutions have resulted in a 70 percent reach rate, allowing firsthand to make contact with individuals that other groups have been unable to engage in the past.
Location: New York, New York
Cedar’s technology is designed to improve the healthcare billing process for providers and payers. It offers a platform that can give patients cost estimates ahead of an appointment, provide bills that clarify any differences compared to the estimate and serve as a single place for patients to resolve their bills with their benefits provider and submit payments. The company says healthcare organizations that implement its solutions have been able to collect payments faster while also enhancing patient engagement.
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Healthtech company PatientPoint makes digital patient engagement platforms that are designed to improve communication between doctors and patients. Its products for patient acquisition, in-office visits, hospital engagement and remote care bring digital health education content to the patient experience via screens in waiting rooms, interactive anatomical models and whiteboards in exam rooms and info hubs for support staff. The platforms also enable doctors to “prescribe” reading for their patients to take home with them, and to remotely monitor patients. PatientPoint says its solutions have been deployed across 38,000 physician offices.
Location: Denver, Colorado
DispatchHealth is essentially an urgent care center on wheels. You can make a call, submit a request online or use the app and DispatchHealth will send over help depending on the medical service needed, including stitches and on-site blood tests.
Location: New York, New York
Blink Health lets you order your prescription medication online. It has a nationwide network of 30,000 pharmacies to make sure you have access to your prescription while keeping the price low.
Services for Doctors and Researchers
Healthtech is about more than enhanced patient care; it’s also about giving doctors and researchers the tools they need to excel. From big picture projects (like trying to find a cure for cancer) to more detail-oriented ones (like finding new ways to train doctors), these companies are helping the people who help the patients.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Laudio offers a platform to help frontline leaders in healthcare recognize and support their team members. The company works to foster productive team engagement and encourages leaders to intervene early to solve any team issues. Laudio’s goal is to help frontline leaders build high-performing teams.
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Greenlight Guru makes SaaS products for medtech companies. Its quality management systems, product development overviews and clinical electronic data capture help clients modernize and optimize operations. Greenlight Guru’s tools also guide companies through regulatory processes of bringing SaMD (Software as Medical Device) products to market.
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Software company Medtelligent specializes in developing and providing solutions for senior living communities. Its flagship platform, ALIS, Assisted Living Intelligent Systems, offers tools tailored to the unique needs of assisted living communities, such as eliminating paperwork, communicating with families, visualizing data, as well as billing and revenue tools.
Location: New York, New York
Headway is building a national virtual network of therapists who accept insurance, rewiring the mental healthcare system for access and affordability. Its platform helps practitioners expand their practices and enables individuals to find affordable care. Founded in 2019, Headway has raised funding from venture capitalists and healthcare entrepreneurs alike.
Location: Louisville, Colorado
GHX pioneered healthcare’s cloud-based supply chain network, connecting tens of thousands of healthcare organizations around the world. The healthcare business and data automation company connects over 4,000 healthcare providers and 600 manufacturers in North America as well as 1,500 providers and 350 manufacturers in Europe. GHX was founded in 2010 and employs 1,300 people across the globe.
Location: Framingham, Massachusetts
Definitive Healthcare offers software for business intelligence and data in the healthcare industry. Its SaaS platform is designed for healthcare companies that use data to guide decisions about what markets to enter and how to strategically access them. It delivers detailed information and financial data about existing healthcare organizations and providers.
Location: Chicago, Illinois
IMO Health serves the healthcare industry with clinical terminology management and healthtech tools. In medical contexts, ensuring that all stakeholders in an organization are charting, coding and billing according to a consistent system is critical to patient care and financial management. Hospitals, healthcare software vendors and clinics rely on IMO’s software to ensure everyone is speaking — and charting — the same language.
Location: Fully Remote
Inato takes the complex task of recruiting and screening patients for pharmaceutical clinical trials and streamlines it with organizational software. It also facilitates site selection and performance tracking, turning research and development into an optimized, efficient system. By matching appropriate research opportunities with community-based research sites, it is able to increase access to trial drugs and increase trial enrollment.
Location: New York, New York
Formation Bio is a biotech research and development company that has taken a novel approach to the process of bringing new pharmaceutical products to market. By divesting from human work wherever possible and instead deploying AI agents, data stacks and large language models, it turns every stage of drug development into an optimized, tech-enabled protocol.
Location: Los Angeles, California
Consensus Cloud Solutions makes tech for healthcare stakeholders to share documents and data. Often, the combined challenges of incompatible systems and strict privacy laws make transmitting clinical data and HIPAA-compliant patient information an arduous undertaking. The company’s background is in digital fax technology, which it adapted for use in the cloud-based healthcare information transmission context.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
1upHealth offers a digital platform that provides fast healthcare interoperability resources-enabled health data to organizations like health plans and state Medicaid agencies. The company works to connect customers with the tech and resources needed to compute the value of care, outcomes and cost. Its solution helps providers and payers manage and compute on patient data at the individual and population level.
Location: Santa Monica, California
SimplePractice equips private health and wellness practices with a cloud-based, HIPAA-compliant platform that assists with client intake, integrated billing, online booking, telehealth services and other functions. More than 185,000 professionals leverage its solution to gain better control over their businesses, grow as entrepreneurs and provide effective service to clients.
Location: Corona del Mar, California
Tebra’s technology gives medical practices the tools to grow, provide quality patient care, streamline billing and payments processes and access data analytics that can help them optimize their operations. Its cloud-based platform has features for securely messaging with patients, for example, and simplifying patient charting.
Location: Santa Monica, California
TigerConnect’s suite of digital tools are designed to improve communication, collaboration and productivity in the healthcare industry. Its offerings include physician scheduling software that streamlines shift and on-call planning and a patient engagement platform that enables secure communications over video, voice or text. TigerConnects says its solutions support thousands of healthcare organizations and care team members in achieving better patient outcomes.
Location: Fully remote
Optimize Health offers a remote care platform that empowers medical providers with data and tools that help them ensure patients receive quality care and stay on track with their personalized treatment plans beyond in-office visits. Its technology covers remote patient monitoring, chronic care management and principal management with features like a dashboard that’s optimized for viewing patient vitals and communications tools for centralized call and message tracking.
Location: Fully remote
Arcadia specializes in data analytics for healthcare organizations. Its cloud-based data platform gives healthcare providers, healthcare payers and state and local government agencies access to insights that inform their decision making. Clients report that Arcadia’s solutions have helped them quickly deliver quality, proactive care to their patients.
Location: Bagsværd, Denmark
Nearly a century old, biotech and pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk is in the business of developing new treatments, technologies and solutions for severe and chronic diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The company’s work largely centers around using a range of technologies in the creation of protein- and peptide-based drug therapies.
Location: Evanston, Illinois
ZS is a management consultancy that serves a range of industries, but maintains a focus on healthcare. Its health plan strategy services include solutions like growth analytics for boosting Medicare Advantage plan performance, for example. The company also has expertise in areas such as launching digital health products and integrating solutions to speed up research and development processes for new therapies.
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Avaneer Health facilitates connections among payers, providers and other organizations across the healthcare industry. Its secure network and platform connect participants so they can exchange data and develop care-focused solutions, and then users can commercialize solutions through the Avaneer Solution Exchange, a digital marketplace that allows them to find customers on the Avaneer Network.
Location: New York, New York
DearDoc’s healthtech products use AI and automation to optimize the more tedious parts of running a medical practice, like handling appointments and doing deep research for diagnostics. With the high-level goal of a streamlined medical experience for both doctor and patient, the company uses tech to help doctors grow their practices, improve patient experiences and ease the burden on support staff.
Location: Rahway, New Jersey
Merck, a global biopharmaceutical company, has been developing medicines and vaccines for over a century. The company pairs robotics, AI and machine learning with high-throughput screening and high-throughput experimentation to develop new drugs for patients in need. Founded in 1891 with over 70,000 employees worldwide, Merck is a giant in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry.
Location: New York, New York
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center works to be at the forefront of cancer diagnosis, care, treatment and education. It is working on the next generation of cancer treatments via biomedical technology like new mRNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer that are in clinical trials and new precision treatments for prostate cancer that target structural proteins. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has more than 500 inpatient beds and its doctors are involved in hundreds of clinical trials.
Location: New York, New York
Flatiron Health uses technology to advance oncology, the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of cancer. Its database of 2.2 million active patient records makes it an asset for oncology research. It also offers a suite of OncoCloud programs that oncologists can use, including Electronic Health Records (EHR) management to clinical trial data. Flatiron Health works with more than 15 of the top therapeutic oncology companies to fight cancer. It also recently renewed its partnership with the FDA's Information Exchange and Data Transformation (INFORMED) program to provide cancer research.
Location: Chicago, Illinois
If training to become a doctor involved playing video games, would there be more doctors in the world? Level Ex taps both surgeons and game developers to create realistic video games that aim to imitate actual medical procedures. There’s Airway Ex for airway specialists, Gastro Ex for gastroenterologists and Pulm Ex for pulmonologists.
Personal Genetic Testing
Thanks to advancements in technology and biology, researchers and physicians are now able to link certain genes to various human traits and conditions. With the onset of consumer DNA kits and personal genetic testing, that information is becoming readily available to everyday folks. Want to know if you’re at risk for a degenerative disease like Alzheimer's, or if you’ll pass a certain trait to your children? The answer may lie in your DNA.
Location: Mountain View, California
23andMe makes consumer DNA kits that people can use for home genome sequencing. Spit into a tube, mail it off and 23andMe will send you information based in DNA analysis. Learn things like where your ancestors came from, whether you’re a carrier of certain heritable diseases or even if you’re likely to go bald. More than 5 million people have used 23andMe, with 80 percent opting-in to participate in research.
Location: San Francisco, California
Modern Fertility makes finger prick-based fertility tests that women can take at home instead of at a doctor’s office. The tests measure hormone levels, ovarian reserve and a woman's personal Fertility Measurement Index (FEMI) number.
Detection and Diagnostics
The sooner you detect a disease, the sooner you can treat it. New technology gives doctors a clearer picture of patients’ issues, which prompts more accurate diagnoses. Just as German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s X-rays revolutionized treatment of broken bones, companies are using technology to pinpoint health problems that are far less visible.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
WHOOP develops wearable technology that enables users to track their sleep, fitness and recovery constantly. The company’s data-driven platform provides insights to help users improve their health and lifestyles based on metrics like heart rate, blood oxygen and skin temperature.
Location: Denver, Colorado
Strive Health aims to transform kidney disease care through early identification and engagement. The company leverages comparative and predictive data from local providers to identify at-risk patients and develop care plans for them. Strive Health’s technology platform works to provide timely responses that help lower overall costs.
Location: San Mateo, California
Evidation Health’s data and analytics platform captures and analyzes passive, continuous behavior data and quantifies health outcomes on an individual level. This data analysis helps develop patient-centered understandings of the impact of different diseases, and creates algorithms that can predict disease progression and regression.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Linus Health is a healthtech company in the life sciences space that offers an early-detection platform for cognitive impairment. Through assessments that use AI to catch subtle, sub-clinical signs of mental deterioration, the company seeks to revamp the way neuroscience and brain health approaches degenerative cognitive conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Location: Menlo Park, California
GRAIL builds technology for early cancer detection. Its Galleri test is a multi-cancer early detection, or MCED, test that analyzes patients’ blood for the presence of a signal that’s indicative of more than four dozen types of cancer. Used in conjunction with other routine screening processes, GRAIL’s technology is meant to increase the likelihood of diagnosing cancer in the early stages and improve survival rates.
Location: South San Francisco, California
Verily uses machine learning to screen for diabetic retinopathy (DR) and diabetic macular edema (DME), preventable diseases that can cause blindness if allowed to progress. Other Verily projects include the development of a smart contact lens that can detect glucose levels in diabetics (that one's currently on hold) and the use of sterile male mosquitoes to stop the spread of diseases like Zika and dengue.
Location: Beverly, Massachusetts
LexaGene uses genetic analyzers (which sequence DNA) to detect pathogens like viruses or bacteria. The company's LX6 genetic analyzer simultaneously detects up to 22 different pathogens (like Influenza and MRSA), then produces data that shows which pathogens were detected, their quantity and whether they have drug-resistant genes. The whole process takes about an hour. In 2019 Lexagene formed a Scientific Advisory Board to determine the ways LexaGene's machines can be used in food safety, veterinary diagnostics and biodefense markets.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Pathologists study human samples for signs of disease. But spotting evidence disease isn’t always a black-and-white process. PathAI uses artificial intelligence to more accurately spot potential issues, making it easier for pathologists to diagnose diseases. Working with partners like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the company aids researchers with the development of drugs that can benefit regions in need around the world.
