The new class of Cedars-Sinai Accelerator startups includes companies focused on medical coding, mindfulness and digestive health. (photo courtesy of Cedars-Sinai)

The Cedars-Sinai Accelerator has selected and welcomed seven startup health-tech companies from across the United States to its newest class.

This year’s startup companies are creating high-tech solutions to a wide variety of health care challenges – from making behavioral health therapies more accessible to using robots to free up clinicians’ time. This year, in keeping with COVID-19 precautions, it’s all virtual.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming the way we look at new technologies and the digital space,” said Darren Dworkin, senior vice president of Enterprise Information Services and chief information officer at Cedars-Sinai, who is one of the founders of the accelerator. “Now, more than ever, Cedars-Sinai recognizes the need for innovation, and as a community institution, we feel an obligation to invest in the future, to invest in technologies that improve peoples’ lives.”

Rather than operating out of the Cedars-Sinai Innovation Space in Los Angeles as previous classes did, teams from each company will spend three months working virtually with Cedars-Sinai’s network of mentors, including doctors, researchers and administrators.

Now in its fifth year, the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator provides businesses accepted into the program with a $50,000 investment and access to mentorship from some of the most respected health care leaders in the nation. At the conclusion of the three-month program, each startup CEO will share their team’s progress with an audience of investors, mentors, potential customers and members of the news media at Demo Day.

The new Cedars-Sinai Accelerator class includes Butterflly Health, which delivers behavioral health solutions – including mindfulness therapy, culturally sensitive cognitive behavioral therapy, coaching and teletherapy – for underserved children, teens and adults; Dieta Health, which developed an app to help people who suffer from irritable bowel syndrome to improve their symptoms by providing personalized digestive health recommendations; and Diligent Robotics, an artificial intelligence company creating robot assistants that help health care workers with routine tasks so they can focus on patient care.

Other accelerator participants include Dock Health, a task management and collaboration platform built to help health care teams work better together; Fathom, which uses artificial intelligence to take a first pass at certain medical coding tasks, allowing human medical coders to focus on the most critical charts; Repisodic, which generates a list of customized post-acute care provider options for the patient based on information such as insurance accepted, clinical services offered and driving distance, while highlighting providers the health system has partnered with, allowing the patient to receive quality care in the community; and Upside Health, which created a patient-facing platform called Branch to help clinicians monitor and manage patients’ chronic pain care.

For information, visit cedars-sinai.org.