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And The Startup Weekend Health Winner Is…

Lauren Silverman
/
KERA News

Teams at Startup Weekend Dallas had less than two days to come up with an idea for a product and present a business plan. The group with the most successful pitch, according to the five-judge panel, was Virtual Visit. Virtual Visit provides a way for families to stay connected with the day-to-day care of family members living in skilled nursing facilities.

Dozens of engineers, makers, students, designers and entrepreneurs gathered over the weekend to come up with health-related business plans. It’s part of Startup Weekend Dallas.

A Little Startup Weekend Background:

Startup Weekend events take place in cities across the country, and they follow a basic format:

  1. Anyone can pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers
  2. Teams organically form around the top ideas
  3. “And then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation.
  4. The weekends culminate with pitches, generally around five minutes, in front of local business leaders with an opportunity for feedback.

The Standout Pitch

Coming in at number one is Virtual Visit. 

As Startup organizer Matthew Taylor describes it:

Virtual Visit provides a new way for families to track and understand the day to day lives of family members living in skilled nursing facilities. Whether it’s keeping track of doctor visits, meals or just general satisfaction, through the use of an end-user focused mobile application.

Rather that looking to the facilities for revenue, Virtual Visit is giving an incentive the facility employees who use the app, then transferring the cost to the family. Doing this allows the app to be included in various packages that the facility may offer to new residents.

For winning, Virtual Visit has access to $24,000 in hosting credits with SoftLayer, $1,000 of production credits with True Vault (a HIPPA compliant data storage API), one month of residence at the Addison Treehouse, Consulting time with lawyers at Stewart Courington and will be presenting at Dallas New Tech in October.

Credit Lauren Silverman / KERA News
/
KERA News
Cloud Consensus presents their business pitch.

2nd Place: Health Record Trust

Health Record Trust provides a software service to remove personally identifiable information from EHR health records and deliver HIPAA-compliant data to meet your research needs.

3rd Place: ReLyf

Also making their pitch was Cloud Consensus, a medical imaging platform focused on helping doctors provide better diagnoses. As creators John Henri Liberty and Rob Monday explain it, it’s a platform that takes the same x-ray and sources it to multiple doctors to arrive at a diagnoses.

Lauren Silverman was the Health, Science & Technology reporter/blogger at KERA News. She was also the primary backup host for KERA’s Think and the statewide newsmagazine  Texas Standard. In 2016, Lauren was recognized as Texas Health Journalist of the Year by the Texas Medical Association. She was part of the Peabody Award-winning team that covered Ebola for NPR in 2014. She also hosted "Surviving Ebola," a special that won Best Long Documentary honors from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. (PRNDI). And she's won a number of regional awards, including an honorable mention for Edward R. Murrow award (for her project “The Broken Hip”), as well as the Texas Veterans Commission’s Excellence in Media Awards in the radio category.