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Today we have a special episode featuring three startups that went through the Cedar Sinai Accelerator. This three month program is based in LA and provides companies with funding and mentorship access to cedar staff, which is invaluable. Uh, And exposure to a broad network of entrepreneurs and investors.

It is a phenomenal program. Love talking to these investors. Plus, I got to play around with some virtual reality headsets, which is always fun and look forward to sharing with you. Here are the three leaders sharing their startups and their innovative technologies. 📍 Here you go.

Thank you. I'm looking forward to it as well.

And you have the new one here.

This is like the brand new

Well, this is the Quest too. Yes. So there's another one that just came out, but we that one's came out like a week ago, so Oh yeah.

Fantastic. So tell us a little bit about Shift and what do you guys are doing in healthcare?

Yeah, so we use this very powerful tool to train nurses.

So we're looking at the problem now of nurse onboarding and the turnover rates at an all time high and growing. And so they need to bring in new nurses, and those new nurses are being asked to jump into a new role, a role they aren't experienced with, and their training isn't meeting the need. So they're leaving because they get.

You, you talk about nurses like right out of school coming in. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that's the target.

Yeah. And then nurses just being onboarded. So I don't know if you're aware, but nurses in every state perform different procedures. So if you come from New York to California, you'll be asked to do a procedure you've never done before.

And we are hearing from nurses that they go to YouTube to figure out how to do that. And that's a little scary as a patient. And so with using the virtual reality, because it's completely immersive, they can learn those skills. Play.

So why is YouTube scary, but immersive virtual reality? Not scary. I just, by the way, I just got one of these for my birthday.

Oh, congratulations. And spent some time in there and I was giving a talk to a group of people. Mm-hmm. And they were younger, about 20 somethings, whatever. And I was talking about the change in technology and I told 'em, I said, look, I think you're all gonna have virtual reality. Some aspect of virtual or augmented reality is part of your life in the next decade.

And they laughed. And I'm like, no, I look, I mean, it's, it's immersive. It is what you do with Zoom. I think when in immersive you can really be there Yes. With the person and really feel like you're sitting across the table. Absolutely. What does that mean for nurse training? What does it look like and feel like?

So for example you have a nurse who's trying to learn how to put in an iv and now they're probably gonna go through a PowerPoint. They might stick a needle in a mannequin, and then they go and need to do that. A patient. And so let's say the patient , gets agitated or the family members do, or there's a code.

And so now the nurse is distracted and stressed trying to perform this thing they've only performed in a static environment, but in virtual reality, we can put them doing 16 different technical skills all while other things are going on around them and they can stick the patient in VR wherever they want and there's no harm done.

So it's a safe to fail. So they can do it over and over again. So when they're with the actual patient and something goes awry, there's not a blip on the radar, right? Their heart rate stays the same. They keep going cuz now they know how to do that really well.

So shift, are you developing the world, the environment or like the courses?

What, I mean what are you developing this for them?

All of it. So we do the world, because the important thing, when you learn in virtual reality, it comes down to the. So my background is in getting the most out of adult learners and understanding the psychology of behavior change. And so if you want a nurse to focus on a particular skill set or a particular aspect of the patient care, there're things like lighting and texture that go into this.

So that's part of it. But then we partner with universities and hospitals to make sure the content is gold standard. So the best in the industry translated into the most effective tool in the industry, and then we make it available. So we are very much mission driven and started the company to disrupt bias at the point of care.

And so part of that is making sure training of this quality gets out to hospitals that don't have access to that.

So, so these devices are already pretty inexpensive? Yes. I think that surprises people. When I said, the Quest two was 400 bucks, which is pretty amazing. And you think.

How many nurses can you train? How many can you put through

thousands of hours on one headset? So it's, it's a very reasonable cost. And then, so we've done some studies that show that if we take 2% of a hospital's training and put it in vr, it'll save them 1.3 million a year, just 2% of their training.

That was my next question. What are the success stories and where have you seen the most progress , with utilizing the,

I think primarily the nurses. Absolutely. It. And so you know, when we go out and say, all of your nurses are going to enjoy taking the training and they're going to remember it much time, and they laugh at you and then, and then they put it on and they're like, oh my gosh, this is incredible.

And then we say, okay, also, not only that, your nurse onboarding is more enjoyable. They're more likely to stay because they're better prepared and they feel equipped to handle it. But then we've got the cost savings that goes on top of that. So that's very important.

So where do you go from here? Where do you go?

I mean, is there an expansion. Nurse training , or,

well, there are 28 million nurses in the world, so we don't necessarily There necessarily need too. Exactly. But I mean, you've got nurses that are working in hospitals and a lot of other settings, but when we're looking at the baby boomers aging out and the chronic illness on the rise, then home health is a huge growing industry.

And so making sure that the nurses that go into homes have the just in time training that they need. So,

you know,

you carry this around as part of. And you encounter something that you're not familiar with, pop this on 20 minutes later, you know what you're doing. So that could be a place to go.

Fantastic.

Wendy, thank you for your time.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure brother.

So Candle It is meant to be used as an intervention that offers moms

uh,

color. Specifically we're looking for screening education and coaching to help them journey through their pregnancy so they don't have to worry about their mental health going array while.

Always wondering about all these other aspects of their pregnancy. So it's a really a way to keep everyone mentally well while they're pregnant or even thinking about having children or postpartum periods.

So it's mental health. During the pregnancy and post-pregnancy and post-pregnancy, what, what drew you to that challenge or that problem?

So, when I was pregnant with my oldest, I personally experienced postpartum depression, and I didn't have an outlet at all. I wasn't screened, no one had ever asked, I had a traumatic birth. And black women are more likely to have these traumas that surround their pregnancies and their births. And so that happened to me.

I experienced post depression. It took me a while to even seek therapy. And then once I did, I was like, this is amazing. Why didn't, where were you like two years ago? When I was postpartum. And that's when I got the idea for the company. And yeah. And it's been, it's been really helpful to hear different stories from black moms and just moms, moms in.

Who have struggled during their pregnancy, but like they were silent or no one asked, and they're like, oh, wow. Like I experienced the same thing. So it's been very nice to know that I'm not alone still to this day and that I, I wasn't alone all those years ago.

So,

the stigma of seeking mental health we saw the barriers really come down during the pandemic, but it still exist in pockets,

I would say in certain subsets of populations.

Yeah.

You know,

Like communities. For sure there's still a stigma. It is waning, but there's, in the lack of education and the lack of knowing, like that you have options. So you don't have to suffer despite any of these sort of like different like having family members letting you know that, you can push through or persevere through certain things.

It's nice to know that what you're experiencing isn't normal, normal, but you don't have to stay there. Like, is normalizing the fact that everything's not gonna be okay. But there is help just for, so it's really. Normalizing and also pioneering the connection between maternal health and mental health.

So, I'm gonna switch hats and go to the VC side of it and say, tell me about the business. I mean, what is, is it services? Is there technology? Is there, what does it look like?

So we're offering virtual care as a main option right now, just for moms who may have, you name it, social determinants, but like transportation.

Where they can't make it to their visits. So really wanting to be accessible to multiple moms who are going through multiple sort of things. So it's virtual care and we're looking more like a technical service these days. We so far have received a quite a few grants, not grants and we've gotten interest in any sort of like initiatives that are centering around health equity.

So that's been really helpful to us. And as far as the business case, we're looking to sell to health systems to health. Really be baked into health systems so that we can be introduced to mom as early as eight weeks when she learns she's pregnant. And also just kind of guide her through whether the pregnancy isn't successful, is successful, and then all through up to a year postpartum when we know that there's just a vulnerable period of having a mental health issue, having depression, experiencing anxiety just letting her know that she's not alone at any of those points because it's

now, I'm excited as VC because every health system is talking about health.

And they're also talking about mental health. I mean, so it's like, it's, I say it's, yeah, we're right the intersection, so baking it into the program. But what is, what does your growth look like? I mean, you're, part of the Cedars Accelerator? Yes. So are, you focused on the LA market or others?

So we are actually are piloting sort of a portion of our screening, our triage tool in the Indiana market.

So we're in Fort Wayne, Indiana right now. And yes, we're looking to. Create a footprint in California. As a state, we have really set our sights out being like regionally focused. Cause we wanna make sure that we capture moms who are insured through Medicaid and who are usually like underserved or their symptoms are underdiagnosed and undetected.

We really wanna speak to moms who are not being heard or not having any sort of access to this sort of support today. So yes, we are willing to help moms , in every sort of pocket of the country, but really where we're seeing the disparities.

So last question. Who's the person you want to talk to at a health system, and what's the conversation you want to have?

The Chief Patient Experience Officer. Okay. I would say we, I think we are very aligned with increasing patient satisfaction, patient engagement, overall care delivery.

Wants to be driven or sort of like channeled through health equity. So I think those are the folks who want to be speaking with chief patient experience officers, chief diversity inclusion officers, and maybe chief nursing officers who want to have their nurses be more culturally competent, culturally sensitive, because we know nurses are huge partners sort of in the effort to helping moms go through these sort of emotions when they're actually going through the prenatal stage.

You the postpartum.

So I lied the name. Yeah, . So what's the story behind the name?

Yeah, so, candle it, so it's off of a quote that is a candle never loses its flame by lighting another. So it's really meant to be symbolic of the fact that I'm a mom, I'm looking to help other moms so they don't experience what I experience of not being a screen, kind of just falling through the cracks.

So it's very symbolic of that and it's literal. And then off the fact that whenever you're pregnant, you're always being told you're. So it, it's all encompassing of those, of those sort of definitions.

That's fantastic. Lauren. Thank you.

Great to meet you, bill. Thank you for having me.

Yep, that's correct.

Welcome to show. Tell me a little bit about cto. What it is that you guys do.

Yep. Yeah, so my name is Vim, founder and CEO of. And we really see that we are in the middle of the digital revolution and data driven solutions like software, business intelligence and artificial intelligence are about to change our entire world. But those data driven solutions are only as good as the data that they can utilize.

And yet this is challenging because a lot of data, 50% of the data is locked due to strict privacy regulations. And especially in healthcare, is challenging because healthcare data is the most privacy sensitive data with even stricter privacy. Regulat. And yeah. Hence we are on a mission to make sure that yeah, organizations that build needs and have an ambition to realize data driven innovation have access to the data they need to to actually build and deliver them.

So how would you define the problem that you're solving for healthcare? So, as a cio Yeah. What's the problem you're gonna solve for me?

So the, problem is that healthcare data is privacy sensitive. Therefore, the data cannot simply be used, shared. And therefore, yeah, organizations miss data opportunities and cannot realize data driven innovation.

So is it, the fact that the data's in silos, is it the fact that if I'm going to utilize it, I need to secure it? And how are you securing it?

Yeah, so both, so data silos internally, externally takes a lot of time, paperwork, effort and we really aim. In lockdown data with our platform. We do that with so-called AI generated synthetic data.

So how does it work? We have a synthetic data generation platform by the use of artificial intelligence that learns all statistics, pattern relationships that are in the original data, and then the platform is able to completely generate completely new and artificially generated data points.

So it's fake data and therefore we do not have privacy risk cause individuals simply do not exist.

But it's based on my data.

Yeah. But that's a, yeah. The key difference is we model that new data in such a way that we reproduce the same statistics, patterns and relationships in the synthetic data. So we basically generate a synthetic data twin that is statistically identical to the, original data.

So you can do analytics on that while it is based on fake data. So yeah, that's the, that's, that's how we'll look at

So there's de-identifying it because

Yeah. Yeah. It's basically a new way , to de-identify data. In a way that it's still suitable for analytics.

Wow, that's really interesting. So who would you have conversation with, like at a health system?

Like who's your target conversation and what's the conversation you wanna have?

Yeah, so CTO is based in Amsterdam and Netherlands. We serve customers in Europe, Japan, and the us. Typically we work with the teams that work with the data, the data science teams. So typically we talk to the data scientist or the head of the data science.

And within healthcare system, we focus on hospitals. Uh, For hospitals, it is typically around research, the electronic health record system. Within pharma it's typically around clinical trials. And within health tech organizations it's typically around data sharing, making data available.

So around the world success stories at this point.

Yeah, so we work of course with seed. On. Yeah. Making sure that the research team have access to the data that they need to, do research, build new solutions, deliver and explore new data opportunities to, of course, improve healthcare because that's of course the end goal.

So I think that's an important success story. Yeah. And I think the fact that we are now in the middle of internationalization. , we have of course, many customers in Europe and we are now making. To the United States. That's why we are also here to really learn and share how we add value in healthcare.

It's interesting cuz when I talk to data teams and I talk to CIOs, they're talking to me about these national data models are not, what they need. What they need is local data models. What you're saying is essentially you're gonna come into the health system, you're gonna look at that data model.

You're gonna create digital twins around that data set that they can then utilize. So it will absolutely mirror Yeah. The populations that they have in those communities.

Exactly. Yeah. Our synthetic data really mimics, mirrors the original data and yeah, that allows that local data can be shared, utilized by yeah, by many more organizations that actually need the data.

Because yeah, without data, it's difficult to build data solutions.

Fantastic. Love the solution. Thank you for taking the time.

Thanks And hope inspired you all.

Appreciate it.

Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it is Phenomen. That they have taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community, which is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors one more time, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. They are Olive, Rubrik, trx, Mitigate, and F5. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.