Health ​“Instagram” Snags St(h)ealth Prize

Ben Pugh’s fiancée was making him breakfast, when a kitchen knife sliced through her pinky.

Panicked, they fumbled through insurance cards while googling urgent care facilities. Most information about cost, quality, even hours and location were inaccurate and difficult to find.

“I don’t care about the insurance. Just get me to an emergency room!” Pugh’s fiancée cried out after 10 minutes.

They ended up receiving low-quality treatment at one and half times times the cost the care should have been.

That gave Pugh an idea. It turned into an app called Haven. He calls it ​“the Instagram of health care” because of its easy use, with the goal of being as user friendly as Uber or Yelp. The app aims to help people to find the best healthcare provider for their insurance plan, save healthcare providers and insurance preferences, and do it all from your phone.

Employers are charged $14 a month to subscribe their employees to the app, with the idea that it will it free and easy for their employees to get taken care of and back to work quickly when they get hurt. Individuals can buy a subscription and create a profile as well. With every profile, the app has an algorithm to analyze the best cost and care facilities through active and passive recommendations.

Pugh’s Haven was among nine startups displayed at ​‘St(h)ealth City’ on Thursday hosted at the Yale School of Management. Students, researchers, investors, and entrepreneurs applied to pitch their startups in the healthcare industry to a panel of judges with a top prize of $1,500 awarded to the winning start-up.

Haven ended up winning the top prize.

The St(h)ealth City event was run by HealthHavenHub, a nonprofit co-working space in downtown New Haven that also programs and a global start-up network.

The objective of the St(h)ealth City event was to ​“create a forum for learning, networking, and developing business relationships.” Nine companies participated: Bonde Innovations, Clifford Beers, Eli Therapeutics, Gene Counsel, Haven, Health Lynx IQ, Pillnotes, QR Fertile, and Zenith Health had seven minutes each to outline the background, progress, and goals of their work and face five minutes of intensive questioning from the panel of judges. The five judges were Yale New Haven Hospital Innovation Director Margret Cartiera, Qualidigm CEO Timothy Elwell, City of New Haven Small Business Counselor of New Haven Gerry Garcia, Redrock Branding Founder and CEO Glen McDermott, and Yale School of Medicine Chief Strategy Officer Kimbirly Moriarty. They all asked tough questions.

Second place was awarded to QR Fertile, a startup selling a low-cost device for at home male fertility testing. The runner up award was given to an online platform for genetic testing called Gene Counsel.

Ben Pugh started Haven in August with a mission to ​“bring a unified user first experience for everyone with the same high quality care optimization for all.” The webapp is still in its beta testing stages.

“We’ll have to decide exactly where to put the prize money, but it will probably go to expanding digital markets and outreach,” Pugh said. He bases the company in D.C. but is looking to move it here to Connecticut.

Clifford Beers Works On Real Time

Also in attendance was a team from New Haven’s Clifford Beers children’s mental health outpatient clinic. CEO Alice M. Forrester and Project Lead Cynthia Rojas are working on creating a web based mental health platform to provide real time data and results. This information will be used for patient alerts, diagnosis, and tracking treatment over time. Rojas said the process of in-person appointments can take hours long, with fifty percent of the patient’s time used on filling out paperwork. Because the in person appointments are inefficient, Rojas said it can take weeks to diagnose disorders such as Autism.

Clifford Beers is creating this mobile software not only to increase efficiency, but also for greater accuracy. Forrester said, ​“with the stigma around mental health, we found patients were actually more truthful when inputting information themselves and not in a face-to-face meeting.”

The 105-year-old mental health organization has facilities in New Haven, West Haven, Hamden, and Guilford. The 160 staff members work both on an individual patient level and through a surveillance model to scan entire student populations at twelve schools in New Haven. Forrester said the main goals of the new software program are to ​“keep patients and counselors updated with realtime data and get parents more active in mental health treatment.”