HTA and U of A Partner for NWA Health System Innovation

HealthTech Arkansas and the University of Arkansas have teamed up to create an innovative new program to focus on the challenges within the healthcare industry and create new solutions to bring to the marketplace.

The Northwest Arkansas Biodesign Sprints (NABS) program is a partnership with the university’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (OEI), the U of A Department of Biomedical Engineering, HealthTech Arkansas and four major regional healthcare systems.

Housed at the Collaborative in Bentonville and inspired by the successful Byers Center for Biodesign at Stanford University, NABS will leverage existing partnerships to:

  • Build a community of people trained in innovation methodologies,

  • Expose clinical and healthcare system needs and

  • Yield early-stage ideas and prototypes for the marketplace.

“The NABS program was born out of our experiences working intensively with Arkansas Children’s Hospital and Research Institute over the last 18 months,” said Sarah Goforth, executive director of the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. “With the benefit of partners at Arkansas Children’s who were willing to be out front in the creation of new ways of driving innovation, we learned that problems and ideas often lie dormant in the minds of busy clinicians who may not have avenues to advance them. This is fertile ground for innovation.”

NABS will initially partner with four hospitals and health systems: Arkansas Children’s, Washington Regional Medical Center, Mercy and Northwest Health.

Two types of sprints — brief, focused meetings designed to identify challenges and offer solutions — will be held within partner hospitals and led by administrators from HealthTech Arkansas. OEI, which has supported the development and success of multiple medical device and diagnostic startup companies over the last five years, will connect student talent from across business and engineering disciplines with the sprints, strengthening the capacity of the teams and deepening the healthcare innovation culture on the U of A campus. The Department of Biomedical Engineering will support the prototyping and testing of new innovations that emerge from the program.

“NABS will bring the infrastructure, resources and focus needed to help these four health systems develop innovative solutions to their own challenges and create their own intellectual property,” said Jeff Stinson, director of HealthTech Arkansas. “We’re very excited to leverage the relationships we’ve built with our state’s hospitals and health systems to build upon the good work we’re doing with them.”

The sprints that NABS programming will focus on are: (1) challenge sprints, which are department-level exercises to identify challenges and problems that lend themselves to new innovations, and (2) design sprints, which bring together internal and external subject matter experts to brainstorm solutions to known problems. For each, NABS administrators will bring post-sprint resources to continue developing the innovations towards commercialization.

“The programming content builds off our recent NIH grant focused on incorporating design, entrepreneurship and service learning within the biomedical engineering curriculum. The innovations developed by NABS teams will be directly informed by the needs of patients and clinicians, resulting in a greater likelihood they will improve clinical outcomes,” said Raj Rao, Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. “NABS will provide outsized value in the development of talent, market-ready innovations and scalable startups by creating a mechanism for clinicians, engineers and entrepreneurs to partner in an immersive context.”

NABS is funded by a $685,330 grant from the Walton Family Foundation and is the second of three verticals (the first being outdoor recreation and the third being software) planned for the Greenhouse, OEI’s product and business incubation facility at the Collaborative in Bentonville.

The Rise and Challenges of Female Founders

It’s no surprise to anyone that female founders have historically lacked the same access to startup capital as their male counterparts. In a 2018 BCG article, it was noted that when females pitch their ideas to investors, they receive $1 million less in funding, but their companies generate more revenue than companies founded by men. And a 2019 BCG article indicated a staggering $2.5 to $5 trillion (yes, with a “T”) could be added to the global economy if females participated equally as entrepreneurs.

There are some positive data points, though. Eighty-three of the 595 (or 14%) of the new “unicorn” companies (those with a valuation exceeding $1B) added in 2021 were founded or co-founded by women, according toCrunchbase. When the 30-year average for the amount of venture capital received by females is 2.4% — which has flatlined in recent yearsaccording to a Harvard study— that means females are adding companies to the roster of unicorns at a disproportionately higher rate than men.

At HealthTech Arkansas, we’re proud of the women founders of our cohort companies. Since we launched in 2018, 29% of our cohort companies are female-founded or co-founded. And we do everything we can to promote and encourage women innovators in our Arkansas-based health systems. It’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s also good for our investors!

HealthTech Arkansas Cohort Companies in the News

2018 cohort company Ejenta spoke at HIMSS on Health Advancements and Human Spaceflight. The Space Exploration road map now includes planning for missions that are increased in duration and distance from earth and with more diverse crew members. This has dramatically increased the demand for advanced augmented, autonomous supportive technologies. Learn more here. 

2018 cohort company Explorer Surgical has expanded its presence in the pediatric orthopedic medical device space with the announcement of its newest customer, Pega Medical. Specializing in the design, development, evaluation and manufacturing of medical devices for pediatric orthopedics, Pega Medical was founded in 1996 and its implantable devices reach children living with orthopedic conditions in more than 70 countries, including within multiple top-tier children's hospitals. Learn more here.

2018 cohort company Lapovations recently participated in the prestigious Texas Life Sciences Forum in Houston, Texas, and was selected as one of the “10 Most Promising Companies.” The Texas Life Science Forum is the premier life science event in Texas that brings emerging life science companies together with academics, investors, and industry professionals. Learn more here.

2019 cohort company Droice Labs conducted a webinar to discuss ways to effectively harness patient data for real-world impact. Real-world patient data was not collected with the goal to personalize patient care, yet many attempts to repurpose this data for finding optimal treatments focus on fitting messy, noisy, and biased real-world data into pristine data models. This not only requires expensive and time-consuming cleaning processes but also strips away potentially valuable signals. Watch the webinar here.

2020 cohort company Raydian Oximetry won the Platinum Award at the UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium Accelerator Pitch Competition. Learn more here. 

Meet Dr. Steffany Benton, Clinical Director for HealthTech Arkansas

Dr. Steffany Benton is an indispensable component of the team at HealthTech Arkansas. She works one-on-one with our cohort company founders in administering their pilot projects with Arkansas healthcare providers and developing national relationships for potential partnerships with the program. She uses her healthcare knowledge to evaluate new healthcare technologies to make a determination as to which of those technologies have the ability to enhance the quality of care, improve clinical outcomes, improve provider efficiency, and generally add value to the healthcare system. For entrepreneurs, Steffany helps these inventors and startup company founders understand how their technologies and innovations can benefit healthcare organizations.

As a Nurse Practitioner, her experience is extensive, with more than fifteen years working in clinical leadership positions, healthcare innovation, project management, and quality improvement. She understands the complexities of the healthcare system and the synergies found at the crossroads of innovation and clinical care. She has dedicated the last ten years of her career to leading initiatives that improve healthcare accessibility.

Steffany earned a Doctorate of Nursing Practice and a Masters in Nursing Science from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, graduating with distinction. She is board-certified in Family Practice. She has been recognized as one of 40 Nurse Leaders Under 40, Arkansas’s Best Women in Health Care, and Best Healthcare Professionals by AY Magazine for her role in healthcare innovation. She serves on the Arkansas Nurse Practitioner Association’s Board of Directors and is an active member of the Society of Nurse Scientists, Innovators, Entrepreneurs & Leaders, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, and the American Nurses Association. 

“Working for HealthTech Arkansas is collectively the most rewarding experience of my career. I am able to improve patient outcomes and provider experiences outside of a typical clinical setting. At HTA, we work with high-caliber startup companies with disruptive tech from across the globe. By introducing these companies to our Arkansas provider coalition, I am able to positively impact more patients and providers than ever before. Arkansas is truly unique in its healthcare needs, and working with both our provider organizations and startups to develop pilots and research studies that meet those unique needs has broadened my perspective of how powerful innovation can be.”

Health Innovation Continues To Draw Investments

If you need data behind the overwhelming amount of dollars flowing into health innovation, look no further than the recent article from our friends at Startup Health. In 2021, a combined $44B was invested in health innovation, representing a 2X increase from 2020 and a 20X increase from just 10 years ago. This investment represents capital rounds completed by early-stage healthtech companies.

Both the number of deals and the average deal size are increasing dramatically, along with M&A and IPO activity. Even with this “boom” of the past two years, Startup Health believes we’re on the front edge of this wave. It’s a great time to be in this industry, and we’re so glad HealthTech Arkansas is part of the conversation. Read the full article here.

HealthTech Arkansas Cohort Companies in the News

2018 cohort company Macro-Eyes has been awarded a grant by the Vaccine Confidence Fund to build and test a novel machine learning system to predict local vaccine hesitancy among diverse communities in South Africa. Learn more here.

2018 cohort company Ejenta presented at CES on the Future of Healthcare Driven by Spaceflight, discussing how technologies like AR, Extended Reality, and biosensors are being used to effectively diagnose and treat medical needs in space. Learn more here.

2018 cohort company Lapovations recently received approval from the Arkansas Economic Development Commission for the Equity Investment Tax Credit Program and will now begin fundraising efforts for their Series A round to support the national launch of their AbGrab product. Learn more here. 

2018 cohort company Day Zero Diagnostics announced the completion of a $21M venture equity financing. To date, Day Zero Diagnostics has raised over $33M in venture capital financing and over $10M in non-dilutive funding. Learn more here.