Irish start-up in finals of US health-tech competition

11 Apr 2012

(From left) Three of the co-founders of Cara Health (formerly Patient Journey Record), Kevin Smith, Dr Carmel Martin and Enda Madden, at Healthbox in Chicago

Irish health-tech start-up Cara Health, which we featured in February as a tech start-up of the week, has made it to the final three start-ups in a US healthcare competition.

When we featured the start-up in February it was called Patient Journey Record, but was in the process of being renamed to Cara Health. At the time, the new Irish venture was preparing to engage in the first-ever Healthbox accelerator in Chicago as one of 10 new med-tech ventures.

Cara Health has developed a cloud-based hospital re-admissions platform for the care management marketplace. Its platform combines voice data gathered from phone calls to patients conducted by non-clinical call operatives with artificial intelligence (machine learning) algorithms.

The company is now one of three finalists in the Connected Care Challenge that’s being run by pharma giant Janssen.

Co-founder Enda Madden said Cara Health will get US$50,000 for having made it to the finals of the competition. He said the start-up will also be pitching in New York on 10 May for a Demo Day as part of the finals.

“The eventual winner will get an additional US$100,000 to develop their solution,” he said.

Madden said the competition would hopefully be a good boost for the company as it’s hoping to roll out its system in 50 US states.

Cara Health is aiming to set up eight test sites in North America this year. It has also opened a US$1.2m funding round. Madden indicated that US$300,000 had already been committed to the fund.

The start-up project itself was transitioned out of the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) last September, having completed the Catalyser programme there. The team then went on to form a new Trinity College Dublin (TCD) campus company with Dr Carmel Martin, Prof Carl Vogel, Prof Lucy Hederman, Kevin Smith, Brendan Madden and Madden as its co-founders.

Carmel Doyle was a long-time reporter with Silicon Republic

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