The seven new startups in the Mayo Clinic AI accelerator

Mayo Clinic startup acceleration

In March 2022, Mayo Clinic launched Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate, a 20-week acceleration program for health technology startups providing a $200,000 benefits package for each participating company. As a condition, Mayo Clinic Platform will receive an equity stake in each startup.

The acceleration program initially supported a cohort of four startups. The program recruited seven new healthcare firms last week in order to assist them in developing and validating their AI-based healthcare products. 

Here’s the rundown.

• AESOP Technology offers decision support and reporting that flags inappropriate prescriptions, where the medications prescribed do not match the diagnosis, age, or gender of the patient, enabling users to enhance patient safety and medical billing accuracy.
• Biotia develops laboratory technology designed to provide tailored sequencing to reduce hospital-acquired infections. 
• Delfina is a maternal telehealth company that created a fetal monitoring software solution offering a personalized prenatal care system that keeps mothers and babies safe during pregnancy. 
• Dynocardia offers a non-invasive wearable optomechanical sensor to measure blood pressure continuously and with accuracy, enabling users to get an accurate measurement of respiration, heart rate, and cardiac hemodynamic parameters.
• ImpriMed works on an AI-driven personalized drug response prediction technology designed to offer veterinary information against lymphoma. 
• Predicta Med has created an AI-based platform designed for the early detection and treatment of undiagnosed autoimmune diseases. 
• Soap Health offers an AI-powered, EHR-integrated, conversational, interface-driven patient data collection and risk assessment tool that gives physicians a point-of-care interpretation of their family cancer history to identify patients meeting referral guidelines for hereditary cancer predisposition assessments. 

Corporate-startup collaboration

Digital disruption is rarely just about technology. It is the root of a systemic change of business models, market conditions, and economic ecosystems. 

Startups represent this socio-technological paradigm shift. Therefore, it is obvious for an established company like Mayo Clinic to exchange ideas with startups—to cooperate with or even invest in them. They can offer incumbents access to new technologies, enrich and accelerate innovations, build digital competencies and qualities, develop new customer-centric products, or help with the adaptation of typical startup methods (Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Scrum, etc.).

In the context of Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate, the package enables startups to enhance their AI models using de-identified datasets from Mayo Clinic and receive input from subject matter experts, such as physicians, researchers, and product development professionals. It also allows entrepreneurs to attend workshops and talks on a variety of topics ranging from FDA approval requirements to AI ethics.

Benefits of startup partnerships

A well-run program like Mayo Clinic's accelerator can be rocket fuel for startups as well as for patient-centric  innovations. 

Particularly noteworthy is that in the case of Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate, the focus seems to be not only on financial interests, but also on the clinic’s responsibility to its patients. Such a balanced attempt is of course always a tightrope walk, but when it succeeds, the impact is particularly strong. 

Startups get necessary access to data and expertise, and they can expand their services and help patients. Clinics, on the other hand, can improve themselves and their services with a certain degree of permeability. In the end, everyone wins—especially the patient.