A month ago, Healthbox launched a new accelerator class in Nashville, Tennessee. This week, the program announced the Nashville-based Hospital Corporation of America, a healthcare service provider, has joined as a sponsor. Because of the announcement, Healthbox extended the Nashville application deadline three more days, to August 7th. Founded in Nashville in 1968, HCA currently operates 161 hospitals and 114 freestanding surgery centers across 20 states and London.
Healthbox Nashville's current sponsors include BlueCross BlueShield in Nashville, the Nashville Health Care Council and the Entrepreneur Center.
Nashville, home to 31 hospitals and more than 250 healthcare companies is "the Silicon Valley of healthcare," according to Healthbox Founder and CEO Nina Nashif. In 2011, Nashville's venture capital community invested $104 million in healthcare services and HIT startups.
Healthbox's Jacksonville, Florida program also made news this week when it announced its inaugural accelerator class. The startups were broken into two categories, wellness, which has three startups, and consumer engagement, which has four.
The four in the consumer engagement category includes Carespotter, eTect, eHealthCoach, and Robauto.
Carespotter is an online community that offers families a way to research and hire local senior care professionals. The US Census reports home care is an $84 billion dollar industry projected to grown 70 percent by the year of 2020, according to a presentation from CareSpotter founder Darren Wendroff. The service offers background checks, client reviews and ratings, and certification checks.
eTect, founded in 2009, is developing ID-Cap, a solution that allows companies to sell real-time clinical trial adherence information to pharmaceutical companies, clinical research organizations and others. eTect tags the medication and gives patients a patch to wear as well. The patch communicates with the pill and a mobile platform records the information.
mHealthCoach aims to create solutions for health adherence development. Their app, Flor'nce is a messaging app that personalizes content by patient segment, medication therapy and demographic data points.
Robauto utilizes "crowd sourcing and open source development to manufacture innovations in robotics," according to the website. The startup plans to create personalities for robots to bridge the gap between humans and machines in the healthcare industry.
The three wellness companies are Fitzeal, Rostr and Yo-Fi Wellness.
Fitzeal helps consumers book private appointments with independent health and fitness experts. The program asks for the user's fitness goals and then provides a list of nearby experts with pictures, prices and reviews so that the user can choose whoever best fits his or her needs.
Rostr helps high school athletes connect with and market themselves to college scouts. The app gives advice on how to be a better athlete and gain attention of college scouts.
Yo-Fi Wellness offers healthy living advice to corporate programs through video content. The instructional videos cover topics such as yoga, fitness, nutrition and meditation.
