The Helpsy Online Platform is an all-in one automated care planning, referral, and patient engagement platform which leverages several supportive-care modalities.
All
Team
Company
Patients
Physicians
Hospital
Partners
Mission
Innovation Details
Investor Info
Due Diligence Docs
Supporters
Comments
Updates
About our project
The problem we solve: Hospitals and cancer centers struggle to provide meaningful, continuous follow-up care cancer patients need to manage side effects, follow-ups, and continuing symptoms. Since 2015, the Commission on Cancer has mandated cancer centers provide some sort of survivorship care. However, hospitals lose over $50,000 per year to maintain such a care program. Insurance companies only cover one hour for care planning; putting together a complete care plan can take much longer. These roadblocks to a successful survivorship program are detrimental to cancer survivors’ lives.
About our solution:
Helpsy’s platform provides the online, customizable, comprehensive survivorship care program that cancer patients have been struggling to find, and cancer centers have been struggling to provide. Helpsy’s platform also allows independent health care professionals such as nutritionists and PTs to get involved on the care platform, improving the patient experience by providing supplementary, supportive care at the touch of a button. In turn, these experts receive a platform to promote and expand their practice.
Progress to
date:
We started our customer outreach with a successful NIH funded pilot that showed improvement in symptom management in cancer survivors at the UCSF Helen Diller Cancer Center and Kaiser Medical Center in San Francisco. After building our technology, we conducted a pilot with 42 patients in a cancer center in India - where we validated that the product met the needs of both clinicians and patients. Our product is currently used by some nurses at community cancer centers as well as directly by patients. We are currently in conversation with UCSF’s pediatric and adult cancer centers for offering our solution at their cancer centers. We are in the process of rolling out our solution at Sutter Health’s Alta Bates location. For a larger scale roll out, we are partnering with the Oncology Nursing Society, the governing body for all cancer nurses, to further increase the reach of our product. Our founder, Sangeeta, serves as the national chair of education for ONS as well as several other professional groups (SIO, IM4US, Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot) that have helped her to build relationships and reputation with teams at health care centers all over the country. We already have several patients who have found our app and are using it on a regular basis.
About Our Team
Creator: Sangeeta Agarawal
Location: California
Bio: Sangeeta Agarawal is a true holistic nurse, engineer, and entrepreneur - she strives to bridge the gap in healthcare by leveraging the best of eastern and western medicine and educate her patients on leveraging technology to empower themselves. She is currently CEO and Founder of Helpsy, a company providing cancer survivors quick and easy access to healthcare practitioners from all healing modalities. Prior to her current life as an entrepreneur, Sangeeta was a Clinical Ayurveda specialist, a registered nurse, researcher, author, and computer scientist. She was an oncology nurse at The Mayo Clinic, Stanford Hospital, and UCSF Hospital and a Clinical co-ordinator at UCSF, in-charge of an NIH-funded study which looked at the use of Ayurveda in improving the quality of life of cancer survivors. She was the founder and practitioner at My Holistic Nurse, a low cost Holistic Clinic serving the Bay Area.
She serves as a board member leading innovation and integrative medicine areas for NIH, Society of Integrative Oncology, Oncology Nursing Society, Annie Appleseed and on some health care startups. She has co-authored several papers in Integrative Oncology and has been an invited speaker at national conferences. Prior to entering healthcare, Sangeeta led a successful startup and worked as a computer scientist at multinational organizations including IBM and Motorola.
Title: CEO and Founder
Advanced Degree(s): RN, MS
About Team Members
Gregory Chin
QA, Operations, Pilots, and Research Lead, MS Biography: Greg holds advanced degrees in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley. At Helpsy, he heads our Q/A effort as well as the coordination and execution of our operations, funding, and clinical pilots.
Title: QA, Operations, Pilots, and Research Lead Advanced Degree(s): MS LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-chin-9834357/
Gurgen Gharibyan
Technical Architect, BS Biography: Gurgen has over 6 years of experience and technical leadership in software development projects for small to medium-sized companies. As the technical architect, Gurgen ensures that we are building a solid and scalable product.
Title: Technical Architect Advanced Degree(s): BS LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurgen-gharibyan-49933174
Lekshmi Raveendranathapanicker
Mobile App Lead, M. Tech Biography: Lekshmi has over 4 years of experience in software development and iOS app development for small to large-sized companies. She is responsible for development of the Helpsy mobile app.
Title: Mobile App Lead Advanced Degree(s): M. Tech LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/lekshmiraveendranath/
Sasha Stepanyan
Database Lead, Ph.D Biography: Sasha brings over 9 years of web development experience to Helpsy. He is responsible for the database of the Helpsy software platform.
Title: Database Lead Advanced Degree(s): Ph.D LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-stepanyan-88571a151/
Helpsy’s vision of the future is one where patients, experts, and cancer centers are able to perform to their full potential in the most efficient manner possible. By leveraging technology, we can enable people to have choice, a higher quality of life and access to experts/resources. Our Helpsy platform enables people to search and work with healthcare professionals from over 30 different health care modalities. Our platform allows our patients to search for options based upon their condition and our platform is 100% customizable based upon a patient’s individual needs. Furthermore, our HIPAA-compliant platform allows the patient and his/her healthcare team to collaborate securely to ensure effective results are achieved.
How We Help Physicians
For nurses and cancer team ..... automate the careplan .....
For providers, we enable them to increase visibility and referrals (revenue generation), save time through value add services such as automated recommendations, booking, and payment, and increase customer retention and satisfaction.
How We Help Hospitals
For hospitals, centers, and clinics, we enable them to meet the accreditation needs and prevent getting a fine, save time for care delivery (hence make money), free up oncology experts to higher valued tasks, increase patient satisfaction, and provide recurring revenue by ensuring patients go to surveillance visits.
How We Help Partners
For Pharmaceutical companies, we enable them to advertise to clinicians at the point of care and to patients, achieve maximum value they can generate from a patient by supporting their side effects and tracking drug use, and compile long term patient data.
Challenge Mission
Affiliation(s)
Our CEO is the national chair for education for ONS, on board of Society of Integrative Oncology, and on the board on NIH NCI integrative medicine. She is well known and respected in the community as an innvoator in the symptom management and leveraging technology. We recently recieved good press coverage as we were honored by US state dept and India as a US entreprenur delegate for GES and as Stanford Medicine X entreprnur 2017. We have engaged several of them throughout our startup journey as advisors and guides - as a result many are rooting for our success and open to supporting us.
We are live at Sutter hospitals cancer centers and they are looking to expand using our solution in other areas and also earlier in the patient journey. We have 23 hospitals interested that we are pursuing further this year. In addition, we are getting endorsement from ONS as a standard solution for cancer symptom management. We are in ongoing conversation with some large cancer foundations to make our solution accessible to their community. Through all these methods, we are confident that we can reach 70-80% of cancer professionals and cancer patients in United states.
Our payment model has a freemium componenet with a tiered payment model. This decreases the resistance to get our solution in the door. As we continue to show value, our customers use our paid tiered models as it results in cost savings and better outcomes for them.
Key Milestones Achieved and Planned
Our total target market in $12 billion in symptom managment with $2b in cancer symptom management. For cancer symptom managment, we expect our revenue to be approximately $60m-$100m in three years with a gross margin of 50-60%. In addition, we are already in the process of developing and deploying a solution for non-pharma options for pain management with Health and human services department and other govt. and private agencies (to address opioid crisis).
Our Competitive Advantages
We generate revenue from referrals, from cancer centers, and from Pharmaceutical companies.
From referrals, we will take 15% of the initial consultation fee and 5% of the consultation fee from ongoing consultation with the patient.
While we provide our basic care plan to cancer centers for free, we charge for higher tier models where we offer more survivorship care on behalf of the hospital. In addition, we charge for value-add services such as compliance reports, analytics reports and reminders for diagnostics, as well as nursing education and our enterprise-level survivorship care plan.
Pharmaceutical companies with non-generic treatments and drugs are willing to pay a high price to advertise to clinicians at the point of care and to patients. In addition, currently, the lifetime dose of a drug is not met because patients discontinue in between. Also, there are wars to capture market for same drug type from various companies - the symptom management profile is the deciding factor in which drug is most acceptable . By supporting their side effects and tracking drug use, we help pharma companies achieve maximum value they can generate from a patient. In addition, pharma companies are interested in long term patient data. Several pharma companies are very interested in opportunity with us and we are in ongoing discussion with them.
Barriers to Entry
Our primary competitors are NurseNavigator (http://nursenavigation.com/) and SurvivorPlan (http://survivorplan.io/). Both of these lag our solution because of their limitations: neither product is fully digital, neither has HIPAA compliance, and neither has EMR integration. We also differentiate ourselves through our patented algorithms. In addition, neither was designed by an oncology nurse--neither was designed to address the needs of clinicians and patients.
Funding, Partners and Alliances To Date
We are launching pilots with 2 major hospitals and are already rolled out in smaller community cancer centers. We are in conversation with several major pharma companies who are interested in very lucrative partnership for advertising and symptom management once we finish these pilots and reach a certain number of clinicians and patients on our platform. We are partnering with about 1 major cancer center per quarter. In addition, on our consumer app, we are getting about a 10% increase in new users every month.
Revenue
As an oncology nurse leading education initiatives at ONS and SIO, I am connected and aware of the local as well as national challenges faced by the cancer community in New Orleans. For example, New Orleans has a large impoverished community with limited resources, and diets tend to be unhealthy. I have worked with local clinical teams to customize plans and materials to better serve the community of New Orleans.
At HHS Opioid code-a-thon, I had an opportunity to meet MDs, Govt. officials and hospital executives from New Orleans. I am deeply impressed with their welcoming attitude and infrastructure to invite innovation, as well as their dedication to empowering their community for better health. I cannot think of a much more ripe and ready community. If we win this challenge, we will commit to making sure that we work closely with all stakeholders and ensure that we improve lives of cancer patients in a practical and feasible way that leads to cost savings.
Innovation Details
Intellectual Property Summary
We have filed our provisional patent applications for methods and algorithms, and plan to file design patents.
Clinical Information
At Helpsy, we have performed a series of research studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our software and symptom management approach on real cancer survivors.
Our two studies, a three-year clinical study performed in conjunction with UCSF and the NIH and a two-month study performed in conjunction with the EMC Super Specialty Hospital in Amritsar, India, have shown significant improvements in quality of life and chronic symptoms with increased patient engagement.
UCSF Study:Qualitative Analyses from a Prospective Clinical Study of a Whole Sys. Ayurvedic Intervention for Breast Cancer Survivorship, Lapedis et al., J Altern Complement Med, 2014. Link: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2014.5196.abstract
EMC Study:Manuscript in progress.
Regulatory Status
My project does not require FDA compliance. My project is HIPAA-compliant.
How we will use the funds raised
With an investment, we can increase our marketing and sales effort through the funding of more conference appearances and sales trips, we can purchase additional HIPAA-compliant servers and other software as we gain accounts, and we can ramp up our engineering effort for development and maintenance of our software.
Thank You
As an oncology nurse, I saw my brave patients endure so many physical, emotional, financial, and social scars during their fight against cancer. These scars continue to haunt them and impact many aspects of their lives. At Helpsy, we map out the cancer journey and prepare cancer patients for the challenges ahead. We provide access to the best treatments and best providers from all reliable health care fields. We save clinicians time and money by automating this care planning process so that clinicians can focus their time on what is most important, caring for patients. Join us in providing better care to cancer patients and better tools to cancer clinicians!
Investor Info
Market Size
The cancer symptom management market is a $2 billion market, while the chronic out-of-pocket symptom management market is an almost $12 billion market. Helpsy is currently in talks with UCSF and Sutter Health, so we have positioned ourselves to gain approval from major hospitals and tap into this cancer market. Opportunities for further expansion are just as abundant as hospitals and cancer care centers are!
Projected 3 Year Growth
Our total target market in $12billion in symptom managment with $2b in cancer symptom management. For cancer symptom managment, we expect our revenue to be approximately $60m-$100m in three years with a gross margin of 50-60%. In addition, we are already in the process of developing and deploying a solution for non-pharma options for pain management with Health and human services department and other govt. and private agencies (to address opioid crisis).
Revenue Model
We generate revenue from referrals, from cancer centers, and from Pharmaceutical companies.
From referrals, we will take 15% of the initial consultation fee and 5% of the consultation fee from ongoing consultation with the patient.
While we provide our basic care plan to cancer centers for free, we charge for higher tier models where we offer more survivorship care on behalf of the hospital. In addition, we charge for value-add services such as compliance reports, analytics reports and reminders for diagnostics, as well as nursing education and our enterprise-level survivorship care plan.
Pharmaceutical companies with non-generic treatments and drugs are willing to pay a high price to advertise to clinicians at the point of care and to patients. In addition, currently, the lifetime dose of a drug is not met because patients discontinue in between. Also, there are wars to capture market for same drug type from various companies - the symptom management profile is the deciding factor in which drug is most acceptable . By supporting their side effects and tracking drug use, we help pharma companies achieve maximum value they can generate from a patient. In addition, pharma companies are interested in long term patient data. Several pharma companies are very interested in opportunity with us and we are in ongoing discussion with them.
Competitors
Our primary competitors are NurseNavigator (http://nursenavigation.com/) and SurvivorPlan (http://survivorplan.io/). Both of these lag our solution because of their limitations: neither product is fully digital, neither has HIPAA compliance, and neither has EMR integration. We also differentiate ourselves through our patented algorithms. In addition, neither was designed by an oncology nurse--neither was designed to address the needs of clinicians and patients.
Traction
We are launching pilots with 2 major hospitals and are already rolled out in smaller community cancer centers. We are in conversation with several major pharma companies who are interested in very lucrative partnership for advertising and symptom management once we finish these pilots and reach a certain number of clinicians and patients on our platform. We are partnering with about 1 major cancer center per quarter. In addition, on our consumer app, we are getting about a 10% increase in new users every month.
Due Diligence Docs
Please note that access to the company's confidential materials is limited. Click this button to request access from the Company and its representatives.
Help us find best new ideas to fund by telling us what you think. Your feedback goes
straight to the team behind this project in private, so tell them what you really think.
Sangeeta Agarawal is a true holistic nurse, engineer, and entrepreneur - she strives to bridge the gap in healthcare by leveraging the best of eastern and ...
