About our project
The problem we solve: Our mission is to change the way we practice medicine. We want to improve the health and wellness of patients living with autoimmune diseases, particularly Lupus by giving practitioners better insights into what is triggering their symptoms. Currently the standard of care is to put this population on immunosuppressant drugs mitigating the symptoms while creating a cascade of side effects.
About our solution:
Our SaaS platform provides patients and providers with better tools to track and understand the non-obvious lifestyle triggers that impact disease symptoms. Our trained health coaches work with this data to adjust behavior and support innovative technologies and drive creative solutions to improve the way people access and manage healthcare.
Progress to
date:In an initial observational study on 23 Lupus patients 100% experienced an increase in their quality of life and 50% reduced their pill burden. There are also dozens of case studies with other non-specific health issues where partial or total disease reversal has been achieved.
The picture above is Baby Lea, a child who was conceived to a mother, Charlotta Norgaard, Founder and CEO of Lupus Friends and Family Foundation, who had been extremely sick with Lupus but due to intervention was able to get her health and quality of life back.
About Our Team
Creator: Daniel Rothman
Location: New York
Education: Brown University, UC Irvine
Bio: Daniel Rothman joined Mymee first as an advisor. He soon fell in love with the product and mission and decided to come on board full time. While finishing his undergrad at Brown University, he co-founded Zeo, a sleep technology company. While completing his Healthcare Executive MBA; he launched another business, PeraHealth, a life-saving EMR application that identifies patient health trends. Since he joined CityMD in 2012, Daniel has grown it from 4 locations to 56 and secured $95M in funding.
Title: Operations
Advanced Degree(s): ScB in Cognitive Neuroscience, MBA Healthcare
About Team Members
Mette Dyhrberg
CEO/Founder, M.Sc., Economics / Aarhus School of Business
Biography: Mette Dyhrberg is a Digital Health Innovator and a serial entrepreneur. She has a Masters in Economics, and graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. In her twenties she became severely ill. She went from earning top grades to being unable to read a book, from working as a model to being overweight and heavily medicated. She hacked her own health and soon began helping others do the same. Mette is a speaker at medical conferences internationally including Doctors 2.0 & Stanford Med
Title: CEO/Founder
Advanced Degree(s): M.Sc., Economics / Aarhus School of Business
Twitter:
@mettedyhrberg
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mettedyhrberg
Christine Raby
Business Development, Arizona State University Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Sociology
Biography: Christine comes to Mymee with over 8 years of experience working in Hospital systems around the world. Most recently, Christine focused on improving public Health within Mount Sinai Hospital System. While there she gained NCQA accreditation for Diabetes Care, met HEDIS standards for HIV care and implemented the National Diabetes Prevention Program. In 2014, Christine joined Noom where she won key enterprise accounts and secured over $30m in funding. Christine leads Business Development at Mymee
Title: Business Development
Advanced Degree(s): Arizona State University Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Sociology
Twitter:
@christineeraby
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christineraby
Benjamin Stein
Medical Advisor, Brown University BA, Computer Science / Georgetown University School of Medicine MD, Medicine
Biography: Founder and CEO of Healthix, one of the most successful Health Information Exchanges nationally, CMIO of Lenox Hill Hospital
Title: Medical Advisor
Advanced Degree(s): Brown University BA, Computer Science / Georgetown University School of Medicine MD, Medicine
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbenjaminstein
Mara Babin
Advisor, Washington University in St. Louis BA, Economics / University of Michigan JD
Biography: Lawyer, 30+ years in Venture Capital & Private Equity, Managing Director at Golden Seeds
Title: Advisor
Advanced Degree(s): Washington University in St. Louis BA, Economics / University of Michigan JD
Twitter:
@marababin
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marababin
Farid El Nasire
Software Engineer, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA)
Biography: Full-stack software engineer, sold his first technology company and joined because he wanted to work on a product that improved lives.
Title: Software Engineer
Advanced Degree(s): Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA)
Twitter:
@faridelnasire
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/faridelnasire
About Our Company
How We Help Patients
Our starting point for exploration is the understanding that we all are very different. We help patients understand how their lifestyle impacts their health on a very specific, personalized basis. Your blood work might give an indication of what’s wrong, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the environment that goes into producing your condition. Through beta testing and working with patients we have gained significant understanding of autoimmune conditions—and we have seen that when identifying disease triggers we can reverse disease symptoms. That means that through diet & lifestyle changes we can guide you to improved health.
We want to help lupus patients take back control of their health. In order to get there, we need to prove the validity of the intervention within the framework of a rigid IRB reviewed lupus study.
How We Help Physicians
Traditional medicine’s approach is to prescribe symptom-suppressing drugs. The current healthcare system is lacking tools to help people get to the root cause of autoimmune disease.
With a blood test you get a snapshot of some feature of interest. The test might indicate what's wrong but they don't tell you much about the behaviors and environment that go into producing the individual condition. People’s lives happen between doctor’s visits, wherever they are: so as physicians you need to help patients truly understand the lifestyle factors that go into producing their health problems.
Practitioners have no handle when patients are not successful today—Mymee offer the insight needed for the practitioner to see why interventions fail. We talk about lifestyle diseases and yet, most patients still expect their doctor to “fix them”. It seems fair that the doctor has a window into the lives of people if that’s the problem he or she is expected to fix. Patients need to be active participants to get to the root cause.
People are tracking. All sorts of things. Calories. Heart rate. Steps. Biometrics. The reality is that your patients will bring this data to you. It’s now evident that we have to dive into the tracking as a tool for rapid change in an area of self care that is historically difficult to shift. Providers of the future will need this critical wrench in their toolbox.
How We Help Hospitals
We already have some potential clinical partners working with us to scope out trials but we would love to work with more groups. Currently our focus is Lupus as a first disease category but the platform has a wide array of potential applications. It has been used to optimize health in multiple autoimmune diseases, chronic pain, even high performance athletes. We encourage you to reach out to us and discuss options to collaborate.
Note: We don't expect clinical partners to contribute cash, we are hoping for a contribution of time/resources as well as brainpower and creativity.
How We Help Partners
We are looking for investors in an early round. Details to be discussed in person. If you are interested in learning more please contact us at info@mymee.com
Challenge Mission
Market Size
There are 1.5M Lupus patients in the U.S. according to Lupus.org. We think that the Total Market is the sickest 10% of Lupus patients which would be 150,000 per year x $5,000 per patient in shared savings = $750M TAM. That is the number for Lupus patients alone, if we expand to all autoimmune diseases we estimate the market 10% of the sickest 24M autoimmune patients is 2.4M people per year x $2,000/year as $4.8B.
Projected 3 Year Growth
By the end of 2019 we hope to be at roughly 7% market penetration with our SaaS platform which we are selling to Functional Medicine Practitioners. This adoption will also drive our ancillary Direct Coaching business. Between these two revenue channels we hope to be grossing about $12M in 2019.
Our main business which is generating Shared Savings by demonstrating longitudinal value to risk bearing entities will take longer to gestate. We are hoping that during 2019 we will earn our first revenue from this business line in several pilot studies with different insurance companies. While we are only hoping to gross $2M in year 3 as a proof of concept this will position us well for rapid expansion to our $750M TAM.
How We Will Make Money
The long term play is to generate revenue by negotiating shared savings contracts with at-risk entities (Payers, Self-Insured Employers, & CMS) and then take on their sickest Lupus patients and reversing their disease state dramatically reducing their cost of care. This is a business model that has been postulated for years but the National Diabetes Prevention Program was the first initiative to make it a reality. The difference is that the NDPP encourages patients to lose 5% of their body mass and is projected to save an average of $860/year over the course of a decade, most of which is backloaded. The average Lupus patient costs $15,600/year most of which we project to be achievable savings. If we target the sickest patients for a Payer's population then the number is even higher so the shared savings can be north of 18x what the NDPP has been able to generate.
About our Competition
There are dozens of health tracking apps and devices on the market today. Our product has three key differentiators:
Almost all of the apps in the market are targeting weight management/diabetes or hypertension.
All but two of the products on the market are in the disease prevention/mitigation/wellness side of the line meaning that they want people who are mostly healthy to stay mostly healthy.
Every other product on the market has a standardized set of interventions which they administer to all patients.
Mymee goes after some of the sickest most costly patients and attempts to mitigate or completely reverse their disease and the protocol is customized for each patient by a trained health coach.
Examples of competitors include: DEARhealth, VetaHealth, Arivale, twine health, Vida, Omada, MBody360, noom, Lark, NUDGE COACH, kurbo, Rise, Canary Health
Innovation Details
Intellectual Property Summary
We have one patent issued and another one in review for extensions on the product. Our patent has been cited by FitBit and other corporations more than two dozen times. We are also developing proprietary algorithms based on our growing repository of patient data which will add to our trade secrets.
Patent Link
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/9189668.html
Clinical Information
We are raising money partially to pay for a formal clinical study. Initial case studies on 23 Lupus patients have shown that 100% of patients see an improvement in quality of life and 50% of them had their pill burden reduced by their clinicians (a metric for improved health). We also have case studies of improved health in a broad array of autoimmune patients, even a few with cancer. Interestingly the person who goes through coaching doesn't have to be sick, we have some stunning results with ultra-athletes who just wanted to perform better.
NB: The claim is not that we cure diseases, just mitigate the symptoms by identifying patterns in the data. The first cancer patient was the best friend of our founder and she went through chemotherapy, the mymee app + coaching protocol just helped her live better and her doctors commented that they had never seen someone come through so much chemotherapy as healthy as this patient.
Regulatory Status
For now we believe that as a health tracking app our product would not be regulated by the FDA. If the FDA chose not to regulate a FitBit which makes contact with a patient and passively collects data we view our product as less interventional and therefore fairly safe. Of course we are monitoring changes in regulation.
How we will use the funds raised
This 6-month round will give us time to refine our platform, complete 2-3 clinical trials, and build a base of reference customers for our SaaS platform.
Thank You
Modern medicine has done some amazing things, we can bring people back from the brink of death through surgeries that would have been thought impossible even a decade ago, but we still miss the details of patient treatment. It is far too common that patients with non-specific issues see a rotating list of doctors only to find that their condition isn't getting fixed. Our goal is to give hope to these patients who historically fell through the cracks of the system by giving each person customized tools to track their health and show them how small changes in lifestyle and behavior can improve their health and quality of life. Join us in bringing this to the world.
