A Dallas company that allows blood to flow where it's needed — in a geographic rather than circulatory sense — has been selected as a winner in the Harvard Health Acceleration Challenge.
The awards are hosted by Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School.
Bloodbuy capitalized on the fact that blood is a core commodity of health care and built a cloud-based platform that addresses the uneven geographic distribution of available blood supply, in real-time.
Evening out the supply and demand leads to price transparency and greater efficiency in the critical health care market,Christopher Godfrey founder & CEO of Bloodbuy, tells me.
The cost and supply of donor blood varies with geography and season. Bloodbuy allows hospitals to choose a location and bid for the supply they need, then matches them with blood centers that qualify.
The result of Bloodbuy's cloud-based platform is a price-matching system, similar to Priceline, that links hospitals with blood banks, Godfrey explains.
Bloodbuy beat out Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, MD Anderson and many other leading health care innovators, Godfrey notes.
Bloodbuy, initially known as BloodSolutions, was the subject of my July 2013 centerpiece "The business of blood: A Dallas startup tries to change the industry."
The four Health Acceleration Challenge finalists will split $150,000 — it works out to about $37,000 apiece — and the winner will be the one who makes the best use of the cash to scale up, Godfrey said. The winner will be announced in a health care forum in April.
"The challenge is to identify, through innovations that are already deployed, which ones have potential to grow and have maximum impact on health care," Godfrey told me. "It's a really neat opportunity."
Bloodbuy, I-PASS, Medalogix and Twine Health emerged as finalists from a group of nearly 500 applicants from 29 countries and 43 states.
I-PASS, based in Boston Children's Hospital, uses a multifaceted approach to improve the exchange of information among health care providers by standardizing the patient hand-off process at every change of shift.
Nashville-based Medalogix's goal is to help provide better quality of life as patients approach death by using predictive analytics to identify patients that are eligible for hospice then implementing a workflow that allows clinicians to help patients better manage the hospice decision and transfer process.
Twine Health, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is an app that allows patients and their doctors to co-create treatment plans for chronic disease, including access to motivational coaches and virtual support.
