CPR Wrap captures two wins in yesterday’s NHCC “Inspiring Innovation Pitch Competition”
It’s difficult to believe so much time has passed so quickly, but some very insightful leaders decided 25 years ago that it was critically important to the future of Music City that an organization be founded to focus on the rapidly growing healthcare sector in the community.
Yesterday, the Nashville Health Care Council – the organization that was launched – hosted the inaugural event in its silver anniversary celebration with an “Inspiring Innovation Pitch Competition” that featured five alumni of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s “Project Healthcare” program.
PYA, the power behind teknovation.biz, is one of the premiere sponsors of the year-long celebration including yesterday’s competition where $20,000 in prize money was up for grabs – $15,000 as determined by three judges and $5,000 based on audience voting.
And, the winner of both was CPR Wrap, the Chattanooga company founded by Felicia Jackson after the trained medical professional froze in 2003 when her then two-year old son was choking in the back seat of the family car. “He was blue, and I had forgotten all I had learned,” Jackson told us in this teknovation.biz article that we posted in early 2017 when the start-up was named CPR LifeWrap. Fortunately, her husband swung into action and removed the piece of food that was the problem, and a lifetime journey began to make it as easy as possible for individuals to perform CPR.
In addition to Jackson, other start-ups in the competition, in order of their pitches, were:
- Advocatia Solutions, presented by Ryan Brebner, is focused on helping address the $30 billion annually in uncompensated care that is expected to grow even more as the result of disruptions in coverage and other economic factors due to COVID-19. The start-up is working with 91 facilities and has assisted more than 150,000 patients, many of whom are eligible for Medicaid but are not enrolled.
- Canopy is a company we met last year during the inaugural edition of Chattanooga’s “HealthTech Accelerator.” As Founder Bill Tan told us for this 2019 biz article and repeated during yesterday’s pitch, there are 26 million individuals in the country who have limited proficiency in the English language. That results in longer times in hospital emergency departments, more days in the hospital, and higher costs. His answer is the Canopy360 Solution Suite, a four-part offering with one component – training of hospital staff – now available.
- GreenLight Medical, presented by Austin Dirks, provides a cloud-based platform to effortlessly align supply chain leadership, physicians, and vendors as the first two evaluate new technology offerings for health systems across the nation. Describing it as a technology management tool, Dirks said the company has added 500 COVID-19 products alone in the last few months.
- OMNY was described by Mitesh Rao “as a safe harbor” for hospitals and others who want and need to use the data that health systems are generating. The start-up currently houses data from 26 million encounters, drawn from electronic health records, billing information, lab results, and unstructured data. “Our data partners have full control over their data,” Rao said.
Judges for the event were: (1) Jason Moore, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Stratasan; (2) Sandra Morgan, Senior Vice President for Provider Relations at HCA Healthcare; and (3) Saurabh Sinha, CEO of emids. Brynn Plummer, Vice President for Inclusion and Community Relations at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, moderated the pitch event.
