KidsX, the Largest Pediatric-Focused Digital Health Accelerator in the World, Selects 13 Startups for Inaugural Cohort

KidsX, an international consortium of pediatric hospitals focused on improving digital health innovation through collaboration, has selected 13 startup companies to be part of its inaugural accelerator cohort. Led by the Innovation at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), KidsX facilitates relationships between leading children’s hospitals and entrepreneurial innovators to build, test and deploy software solutions to make pediatric care exceptionally effective, safe, efficient and convenient for children and families.

“We’re proud of our inaugural KidsX Accelerator cohort and could not be more eager to lend our expertise and guidance as they create tangible solutions that will transform the pediatric digital health innovation landscape, which has suffered in the past from lack of funding and support,” says Omkar Kulkarni, MPH, Chief Innovation Officer at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Managing Director of KidsX. “We specifically sought out early stage companies focused in the pediatric space or companies who had found some traction in the adult market that were looking to enter the pediatric market. We believe that the KidsX model will accelerate each organization’s ability to source, screen, prioritize, test and deploy purpose-built digital health solutions at scale.”

“Pediatric patients make up 20 percent of the national patient population, and yet the pediatric health care arena is often overlooked as an opportunity for innovation,” says Lara Khouri, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “By directly collaborating with the world-class children’s hospitals in the KidsX network, companies will be able to validate product and market fit in pediatrics more quickly, saving valuable time and resources and bringing much-needed digital health tools to patient families faster than ever before.”

KidsX received applications from more than 300 companies, including over half with female or BIPOC founders. It selected the 13 finalists after hundreds of video interviews, a pitch competition and votes from KidsX’ 51 member organizations, located in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia and Israel. The largest pediatric-focused digital health accelerator in the world, the KidsX Accelerator is a 13-week virtual program designed to partner talented and promising early stage digital health companies with clinical and administrative leaders at leading pediatric hospitals. The objective is to determine if product/market fit exists within pediatric healthcare delivery. KidsX member organizations will partner with entrepreneurs who are building digital products to meet the unique needs of pediatric patients and their families, piloting the products to validate clinical efficacy and enabling the scaling of validated solutions to hospitals across the country.

The KidsX Accelerator 2021 cohort includes the following startups:

Augment Therapy, Inc.: (Chagrin Falls, OH) Augment Therapy is an interactive software that uses the medium of AR to provide virtual pediatric rehab and remote patient monitoring across the care continuum.

Curbside Health: (San Francisco, CA) Curbside makes it faster and easier to put effectiveness at the center of every clinical decision by way of their AI-enabled predictive analytics solution that provides institution-specific recommendations and best practice pathways to guide the provider to care for patients.

Dock Health: (Ridgewood, NJ) Developed and spun out of Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), Dock is a HIPAA compliant, task management solution created to help teams better collaborate for optimal patient care.

Embodied Inc. : (Pasadena, CA) A child development robot named Moxie that uses advanced AI/ML/NLP technologies and evidence-based therapy approaches to promote social, emotional, and cognitive skills for children.

Good Parents Inc.: (San Francisco, CA) Connected care platform for pediatrics (3+ yrs) with integrated remote patient monitoring and care management solution. Focused on kids with at-risk conditions requiring proactive and continuous care such as Autism, Asthma, CVS, and other conditions.

Kintsugi: (Berkeley, CA) Kintsugi uses voice biomarkers that score clinical depression and anxiety on the PHQ-9/GAD-7 instruments from less than a minute of free form speech for young adults 14+.The voice journaling application (iOS) provides 24/7 support to young adults and adults managing stress, anxiety, and depression.

Limbix Health, Inc.: (San Francisco, CA) Limbix’s mission is to improve adolescent mental health with accessible technologies by developing a prescription digital therapeutic (PDTs), starting with Limbix Spark, a mobile self-guided CBT intervention for adolescents with depression.

Pieces: (Dallas, TX) By combining artificial intelligence with deep clinical knowledge and expertise in community networks, Pieces quantifies risk for social barriers to care, enabling care teams to predict health outcomes and present you with real-time, actionable information to intervene accordingly.

ROSE: (Baltimore, MD) Rose is built around a patient-facing mobile application and a provider-facing, web-based clinical dashboard that helps detect and monitor mental health and wellbeing as well as connect patients to needed care.

Spellbound: (Ann Arbor, MI) SpellBound is an augmented reality (AR) platform that delivers 3D experiences via mobile device. ARISE is a full-featured digital scavenger hunt game which motivates critically ill and recovering pediatric patients to engage in movement-based therapy.

Vitls Inc.: (Houston, TX) Vitls is a remote patient monitoring wearable packed with sensors that continuously and remotely monitors a patient’s vital signs, reliably and undisturbed at home or in the hospital. Think of it as an incredibly clever band-aid that monitors body temperature, heart rate, respiration rate and SpO2.

WELL: (Santa Barbara, CA) WELL is the last mile of patient communication, unifying messages from multiple departments into single, familiar conversational bi-directional text thread.

Xploro: (Manchester, United Kingdom) Xploro uses AR, gamification and AI to reduce anxiety for children going to hospital.

CHLA was one of two organizations selected by the City of Glendale and the State of California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development to create start-up accelerator programs and is being awarded $500,000 over three years to bring KidsX to life. CHLA is already home to the West Coast Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP), an FDA funded MedTech accelerator supporting pediatric device innovators from concept to commercialization.

About Children's Hospital Los Angeles

Founded in 1901, Children's Hospital Los Angeles is the highest-ranked hospital in California and fifth in the nation on the prestigious U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll of best children’s hospitals. U.S. News ranks Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in all 10 specialty categories. Clinical care at the hospital is led by physicians who are faculty members of the Keck School of Medicine of USC through an affiliation dating from 1932. The hospital also leads the largest pediatric residency training program at a freestanding children’s hospital in the Western United States. The Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is home to all basic, translational, clinical and community research conducted at the hospital, allowing proven discoveries to quickly reach patients. Our mission: to create hope and build healthier futures. To learn more, follow us Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter, and visit our blog at CHLA.org/blog.