Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across 11 major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. You can check out last quarter’s NYC round-up here.
* * *
Research reports an estimated 35 million Americans struggle with access to basic health care due to cost and lack of access, among other reasons. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, telehealth doctor visits that can help combat the gap in American healthcare access were rarely utilized. But that all changed during the pandemic.
Data shows that telehealth visits were used 78x more in April of 2020 compared to February of 2020, prior to the initial pandemic lockdown. So far this year, telehealth visits are still up 30x more than pre-pandemic numbers.
Telehealth and providing patient-first digital health services are nothing new to Healthie, a pre-Series A, NYC-based startup that has been operating in the field since 2016. Healthie helps companies offer digital health services and asynchronous engagement with patients.
Additional Healthie services include processing insurance payments and building patient backlogs of journals, goal settings and metric loggings that help patients build closer relationships with their providers.
I didn’t enter business school intending to become an entrepreneur. Healthie truly came from wanting to solve a really big gap in the healthcare system in order to make healthcare more accessible.”
When the company was founded, “tech platforms fundamentally ignored the importance of building relationships between providers of care and receivers of care and didn’t put clients at the center of the healthcare experience,” Erica Jain, co-founder and CEO of Healthie, told Built In via email.
Because of that, Jain and her co-founder Cavan Klinsky, who serves as the company’s CTO, joined forces to build the Healthie platform while the two of them attended the University of Pennsylvania. Jain was earning her Master’s of Business Administration with a focus in healthcare management and Klinsky was pursuing an undergraduate degree as a freshman.
“I didn’t enter business school intending to become an entrepreneur,” Jain said. “Healthie truly came from wanting to solve a really big gap in the healthcare system in order to make healthcare more accessible. [In] 2016 digital health did not have nearly the footprint that it does now.”
By 2018, Healthie had become a profitable business and was backed by $1.9 million in funding from a friends and family round, according to the company.
Today, Healthie serves customers in 25 countries and has processed $350 million in payments. Some big-name customers include Columbia College and the California Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants,and Children.
With telehealth on the rise post-pandemic, Jain believes that this is a unique moment for digital health.
“Consumer expectations for healthcare are evolving with [patients] looking for long-term, recurring, preventative, personalized and friendly experiences within the healthcare system,” Jain said. “These demands are fueling a new wave of innovation and Healthie is at the center.”
To meet the growing demand, Healthie plans to continue scaling with aims to double in size this year and hire for its engineering, product and customer success teams.
