Drew Schiller wants to check up on you, see if you’re OK, make sure you don’t need anything.
That gets a laugh, albeit more of a pity laugh. Which is OK, I’ve known Drew long enough that I don’t need his pity.
“The problem we want to solve is that mobile healthcare — healthcare outside of a physicians office, is growing rapidly,” he says. “Smartphones are pervasive, Fitbits are now for everyone. Physicians are starting to prescribe mobile heath devices. The problem is that there are all of these disparate vendors and nobody can access the data in any uniform way.”
As the CTO of Validic, Drew is responsible for bringing your personalized, accurate, structured, and up-to-the-minute personal health data from a multitude of apps and providers into one, easy-to-understand, standardized format to help others help you.
Those others are Validic’s customers. Health insurance companies, physican’s offices, employers, that sort of thing.
Mobile health is indeed a booming market, a statement underscored by the fact that there are nearly 100,000 apps and devices available to track everything from your workout to your sleep to your blood pressure to your environment (yes, what happens outside of you happens to be important to the inside of you) — all of which do this outside of the physician’s office.
Progress is only beginning to be made to make sense of all this disparate data — with different collection mechanisms, different measurement criteria, different delivery specs.
But it’s going to happen.
As standardization becomes the norm, brand new possibilities for utilization are already underway. mobile health data can be used to construct better wellness programs, fuel remote patient monitoring, even augment clinical trials.
“We want to motivate individuals to get healthier using these devices,” says Schiller. “But you can’t do the integration and maintain that focus. So we are providing the data for healthcare companies to make smart, actionable decisions. They can be device and app agnostic.”
Validic actually was trying to do both. Before a pivot back in April, Validic was Motivation Science, and they were trying to collect that data and devise and build incentive models on top of that data. They realized that doing both meant doing each poorly, and once they changed their model to just focus on data, things started happening.
Now, with over 80 apps and devices hooked into its system to date, Validic just announced the closing of a $760,000 seed round, with Mark Cuban, whom they got in touch with through a mutual friend, leading an array of angel investors.
With that momentum, Validic wants be at the forefront of mobile health data integration and aggregation. Now up to 15 employees with seven based out of its headquarters on Main Street in downtown Durham, Validic plans to double headcount and significantly increase the number of apps integrated into its system. They also plan on expanding their customer base, which is doubling monthly.
“There’s so much demand,” Schiller says. “Today we’re basically just taking orders. We haven’t started a sales and marketing process yet. We just need to scale to meet the demand.”
