Where is Pediatric Innovation Making an Impact?
Pediatric innovation in mental health is the theme of the INVEST Digital Health Pitch Perfect contest at Pegasus Park in Dallas on September 18, held in collaboration with Health Wildcatters. In interviews, executives from The Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics and KidsX accelerators shared some of the challenges of pediatric mental health and some of the exciting developments in this space.
To view the agenda and register for INVEST Digital Health, click here .
Deepa Shah is the head of operations and strategy at KidsX , an accelerator run at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles with a network of 47 member hospitals that help with the applicant vetting process and validating new tech. Shah describes the accelerator’s sweet spot as pre-seed stage to Series A. Mental health is one of the areas of interest in addition to hospital-at-home tech, care journey navigation and triage, health literacy and AI automation.
KidsX, launched in 2020, works with member hospitals to refine and validate startups’ technology. Teleo , a telemental health platform for children aged 5-18, is part of the 2024 cohort. It seeks to improve access, quality, and efficiency of mental health care delivery to children. Another cohort company is Welfie , which helps pediatric mental and behavioral health providers to deliver health equity through health education, care planning, monitoring, and wraparound services to improve pediatric population health.
Shah noted that last year, KidsX added a research track. “We previously focused on operational pilots but hospital systems wanted to be part of the validation process for early stage companies,” Shah said in a phone interview.
Dr. Juan Espinoza is a director and principal investigator with the Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP). He also serves as Chief Research Informatics Officer for Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at Lurie Children’s Hospital and Associate Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. In addition, he’s a clinical adviser to KidsX.
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Espinoza called attention to the mental health crisis in the U.S. and the longstanding taboos around conditions such as ASD and ADHD. “That stigma impacts both patients — their sense of self and their desire to seek help. But it also impacts the healthcare system and what we prioritize.”
Espinoza identified depression, anxiety, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and screening for developmental delays as the mental health priorities for pediatrics from a clinical standpoint. Beyond that, wellness and resilience tools are critical to providing children and teens with tools to deal with stress in their lives.
“Pediatrics is massively underserved and underfunded, so we look for opportunities to drive pediatric healthcare forward, where we can use our networks, resources and knowledge to catalyze the advancement of a given technology that’s addressing a real need for pediatric populations,” Espinoza said. “That means that our portfolio has everything from Class Three interventional cardiac devices to Class One products that are intended to improve the way that families manage cables and connections with their devices.”
One challenge in pediatric innovation is that many of the pediatric health tech and medtech companies KidsX and CTIP work with are relatively young — barely 10 years old at most. Another complexity is identifying the best?go-to-market model for these kinds of technologies. Self-pay isn’t a scalable option but it can also be challenging to predict which technologies payers will reimburse. The concept of prescribing digital solutions is still a relatively new one, after all. And self-pay isn’t scalable. Vertically integrated hospitals that have a vested financial interest in making effective low-cost and scalable solutions available to their patients offer one path forward. It can also be tough to generate evidence beyond the research stage because there just hasn’t been enough adoption of pediatric tech. Value-based contracting could also be a promising way to advance the future of pediatric tech adoption.