Hexcite Final Pitch Goes Virtual and Names Rose as the Winner
The Johns Hopkins accelerator pivots its closing event to a virtual setting and draws nearly 200 attendees.
The Johns Hopkins medical software accelerator program, Hexcite, empowers clinicians with the resources they need to bring entrepreneurialism to their workspace. Healthcare workers often face unique challenges that vary from clinic to clinic, making the ‘one size fits all’ approach unsuccessful when it comes to digital health solutions.
Johns Hopkins clinicians come to Hexcite with a medical software idea that has the potential to impact patient care in positive way — and doesn’t currently exist in the digital health market. These change-driven clinical leaders participate in a speed dating event with top-notch talent specialized in business, design, and software development to form early stage start-up teams.
The 2020 Hexcite Cohort:
· Acute Cards- intervention education for NICU parent support
· Airz- an at-home mobile tool for sleep apnea prediction
· Consent Ready- a procedural consent form repository system
· Perfect Pass- a handover platform for physician shift changes
· Rose- an AI platform that collects and shares mental health data
Hexcite participants navigate the 16-weeks of business design programming as co-founders with the goal of securing grant funding for the development of a minimum viable product. Workshops are held on the Johns Hopkins medical campus, each beginning with intensive pitch practice critiqued by experts in the start-up community.
COVID-19 prompted 2020 Hexcite programming to go virtual and pivot from in-person to online workshops. Teams remained persistent, keeping collaboration alive while continuing customer interviews and perfecting their business model canvases.
Meeting style wasn’t the only pandemic-induced pivot that resulted from social distancing. Some teams saw an opportunity for innovation and discovered new features for their solutions to help bridge technological gaps during these unfamiliar times.
With 5 alumni cohorts successfully launched and completed, Hexcite typically celebrates the program’s closing with a large-scale Final Pitch event attended by members of the local digital health community. While there was no auditorium nor stage, the event continued through Zoom.
Hexcite staff collaborated with Chesapeake DHX and Anchor Ventures to launch an online Digital Health Huddle series aimed at convening the local digital health ecosystem. 190 attendees tuned into ‘Pitches & Polling’ to hear from the Hexcite clinical entrepreneurs.
An esteemed panel of judges representing the Maryland Momentum Fund, TCP Venture Capital, and Johns Hopkins Healthcare Solutions joined the conversation and provided feedback on the pitches. “I love simple solutions for big problems and they usually become the best investments,” said Chris College of TCP Venture Capital in response to a pitch by Airz.
Judges responded to virtual scorecards that ranked each of the start-ups in categories like solution novelty and pitch strength. At the end of the event, an anonymous poll was launched to the audience for a People’s Choice Pitch Winner.
Both the judges and the Chesapeake DHX audience voted team Rose presented by Dr. Matthew Peters as the Pitches & Polling winner. Rose is a remote patient monitoring solution that offers mental health support regardless of a patient’s physical location. Not long after their Pitches & Polling win, Rose also won a contract with the Baltimore Neighbors Network to connect volunteers and seniors during the pandemic.
If you missed Pitches & Polling and would like to hear from the 2020 Hexcite start-ups yourself, check out the livestream recording:
