What is the name of your solution?
Health Wallet
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
Providing any patient personalized matchmaking to the clinical trial most medically applicable for them, removing an obstacle that is particularly difficult for rare disease and underserved patients.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Health Wallet directly works to mitigate barriers to accessing clinical research, which disproportionately affect disinvested communities and historically underrepresented identity groups.
Rare disease research is too rare. Over 95% of rare diseases have no approved treatment, so we must expand and accelerate clinical research. The time to help rare disease trials is now. One-third of all approved drugs were developed in the past five years but not without great wasted time and effort – more than half of study sites fail to recruit even a single patient. Researchers face steep hurdles, including limited funding, the high cost of developing new medicine, and the risk of their clinical trials failing because they simply cannot recruit adequate numbers of rare disease patients, especially patients from underrepresented populations.
The stakes couldn't be higher: in a world of eight billion people, a “rare” disease can bring death and suffering to tens of thousands every year.
So how can we help rare disease patients? If we can reduce the costs and uncertainty involved in producing new treatments, we could dramatically accelerate rare disease research. And this is what Health Wallet does by connecting the right patient with the right researcher at the right time.
The success of clinical research, especially for rare diseases, often hinges on recruitment. For rare diseases, this means finding the relatively small number of suitable patients scattered all over the world. When recruitment goes poorly, costs balloon rapidly and can easily sink an otherwise promising study. Our team members have worked on rare disease research where recruitment has eaten up 40-70% of the total budget because outreach required so much time and effort. Even if a treatment works, the study will fail if researchers don’t enroll enough patients to properly test it.
Despite growing data showing the eagerness of people to participate in clinical research, there are many reasons why patients don’t participate, including structural barriers in our healthcare system, not knowing about the right studies, medical literacy challenges, language accessibility, and an endless gauntlet of duplicative travel and testing in order to enroll. These challenges help explain why rare disease studies spend so much money employing full-time staff to recruit: For any one study to succeed, its research team must overcome all of these barriers and more to find enough patient participants to make their study successful.
Reducing the cost of recruitment lessens the burden on individual study coordinators, and could allow us to effectively double the number of rare disease studies with the same budget and less environmental impact, bringing health and hope to so many more patients.
Too many good medicines fail because it’s too difficult to find patients to study. 86% of clinical studies fail to reach their enrollment goals on time, and this disproportionately affects rare disease studies, whose patients are by definition harder to find. Delayed research costs organizations $8 million each day, and the burden of that expense kills many studies before they even get off the ground.
Health Wallet can change that.
What is your solution?
Our patient and researcher matchmaking solution
Health Wallet is an app that easily connects patients with the clinical trial that is right for them through a smart matchmaking process. The concept and app design were engineered to empower patients, aid researchers, and exceed the effectiveness of any other clinical trial search or enrollment tool currently available.
We harness patient experiences, clinical trial and medical data, and researcher needs to equitably accelerate clinical research recruitment. Our design has been informed and iterated upon through collaboration with patients and researchers alike. This cyclical process ensures we are continuously solving the problems faced by both patients and scientists.
Our technology is conceptually simple and technically complex. We overlay seemingly incompatible data involving clinical trials, eligibility requirements, and medical records to drive our matchmaking. We leverage data collection from patients and researchers and apply AI with ongoing anti-bias protections to streamline this process and minimize patient burden. The end result is a short-list of studies the patient is eligible for that they can review.
While we are a technology company, we understand that technology is not a solution; it’s a tool. Our success comes through establishing partnership with communities that are already serving patients currently struggling to access clinical trials, especially rare disease patients who must invest excessive time and effort to find the care and information they need. By meeting patients where they are and providing a free, efficient, and unbiased tool offering new options, we can have impact where it is most needed.
How our solution will improve the lives of rare disease patients and underrepresented populations
Health Wallet expands access to clinical trials so that everyone can easily find and connect with the right trial for them. Doing this accelerates all medical discovery while providing the greatest benefit to rare disease patients and patients from populations that are underrepresented in drug development.
For most of us, our healthcare options are limited to those medicines that are already FDA approved. But thanks to Health Wallet, the medicines of the future can be made available to more patients who are interested in them. For rare disease patients, this access is essential and potentially life-saving. All too often, clinical trials represent their only treatment options.
For patients, we make the process simple: They enter some fairly basic information about themselves and their illness, and Health Wallet gives them a list of studies they should qualify for.
Connecting rare disease patients with clinical trials helps patients today by connecting them with the treatment options they need now. It also benefits them in the longer term by speeding up and multiplying approved treatment options. When researchers can quickly and easily find the right patients interested in their studies, they can redirect finite resources from recruitment to medical discovery.
The result of Health Wallet’s matchmaking service is simple but powerful: More patients access critical resources in the short term, and more researchers produce life-saving medicines in the long term.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Health Wallet serves two separate groups who have different but intersecting needs: 1) Patients suffering from rare or hard-to-treat illnesses – particularly those from marginalized groups – who might benefit from participating in a clinical trial but are impeded by the complexity and expense involved, and 2) Researchers seeking to study treatments for these illnesses, but who are too often stymied by the same factors that block patient access. These benefits reach not just individual researchers and their studies, but also the institutions they work for.
Patients who might benefit from participating in a study face multiple obstacles to learning about relevant studies and enrolling in them. I bring a personal perspective to this, having participated in and benefited from clinical research from birth through my early adulthood. My health today is a testament to the cutting-edge therapies that my family had access to during a critical and vulnerable time in my life. I was lucky -- my family had access to a well-informed doctor and lived near a major research institution with a renowned specialist in my condition. If I had not had access to that clinical research, I probably would not be writing this application today.
Information about clinical trials is not available in a form that’s simple and easy to understand for those without medical training. For those with the time and resources – which already eliminates millions from marginalized communities – it can mean many hours of reading and deciphering complex information, followed by travel to study sites that is often wasted if the patient doesn’t quite match the study’s enrollment criteria. It’s a difficult, inefficient process that wastes everyone’s time and resources, along with untold gallons of gasoline and jet fuel.
Researchers, meanwhile, struggle to enroll the patients they need and stay within budget, so we work with them on the individual, study, and institution level. For the individual researcher, we help clinical research coordinators find, screen, and enroll the right patients for their study. We define the “right patients” as eligible patients from diverse backgrounds reflecting real-world disease burden. Too often institutions place the burden of overcoming systemic barriers to diverse enrollment onto individual researchers, and we relieve them of this burden by providing a powerful system-level solution.
On the study level, we accelerate diverse enrollment. This allows studies to satisfy new FDA guidelines and generate more representative data for more reliable findings, and saves time and money in the scale of thousands to millions of dollars.
At the institutional level, Health Wallet changes the calculation of what kind of research is possible. By streamlining enrollment, the notoriously least predictable phase of research, we open the doors to conducting important research that otherwise would be economically and practically unfeasible.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Our team lead is immersed in the communities we aim to serve -- specifically patients, including those with rare diseases, and researchers -- which we share in more detail in the prompt describing our Team Lead. The rest of our team is well-positioned to deliver on this solution because we are bringing the right people to the table, both because of who they are and the skills they bring.
Our staff are majority people of color and many have personally experienced challenging medical events, all of which helps ground us in the racial justice and health equity goals of our work. In addition to their lived experiences, our staff together bring a wealth of expertise that includes design, marketing, communications, legal, operational, business, and engineering. Our technical specialties include human-centered design, AI/ML, cybersecurity, agile deployment, database management, complex algorithmic design, as well as entrepreneurial experience from multiple tech start-ups.
Our full team is a rich network that includes the volunteers, advisors, advocates, and champions supporting Health Wallet’s success. Our core supporters are about 30 people, all of whom are mission-aligned individuals with relevant personal and professional expertise, passionate about changing the paradigm of clinical research participation to include and empower those historically left out. The design and implementation of our solution is directly based on their past and ongoing feedback.
This expanded team is highly diverse, majority people of color and women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, of various disease communities, and from various socioeconomic groups. The lived experiences of these team members inform and guide the execution of our mission. This network guides how we improve our product and service, our social justice focus and impact strategy, and our equity-focused business model. We are in the process of formalizing those in our expanded team into two advisory boards – a business/mission advisory board and a patient advisory board – to help structure these relationships and provide value and recognition to our supporters.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
South San Francisco, CA, USAWhat is your solution’s stage of development?
Pilot: An organization testing a product, service, or business model with a small number of users
How many people does your solution currently serve?
After iterating on user feedback from our prototype, we have finished building our scalable product we will be using for our pilots starting this summer. Before we've even finished onboarding our pilot researcher users, we've already had 20+ patient users navigate our site to find study options.
Why are you applying to the Prize?
Health Wallet is a mission-driven company whose purpose is to maximize our value to patients rather than turn a short-term profit. For this reason, we do not accept traditional funding that focuses on maximizing profits and returns, rather than prioritizing social impact. Specifically, we have not solicited and will not accept venture capital funding, as we do not want any pressure to monetize the patient data that must be collected in order to make the system work. To be blunt, we have no interest in being a medical Facebook. We are confident that our unique model that puts patients first will be profitable and sustainable, but need bridge funding to get there. This is why we are applying for the Horizon Prize.
If selected as a Horizon Prize recipient, we will use the funds to support our operations while we stabilize our sustaining business model, which takes time. We are the first service of our kind, and demand for finding and understanding clinical trials options is very high, especially among rare disease patients and underrepresented populations. However, we need mission-aligned bridge funding to go through our pilot phase and become financially self-sustaining. We are currently scaling up our free service to help patients find clinical trials today, and have great potential for sustainability after collecting our pilot data, described in the section detailing our business model.
We would also find value in being part of the pitch forum with like-minded social entrepreneurs who are also helping rare disease patients. We are eager to network with others in this space and engage in peer support and learning, and to explore new collaborations to expand our collective impacts.
Horizon Prize funding will support Health Wallet in continuing to provide free, no-strings-attached access to our platform for all hospitals, patients, families, caregivers, and community leaders working to help people find the clinical trial right for them, as well as researchers actively seeking rare disease patients to accelerate their research. In short, winning the prize would provide catalytic funds carrying us through from the pilot stage to financial sustainability and scalability with our mission-first, rather than profit-first, approach.
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Tom Rico Pamukcu
How is your Team Lead connected to the community or communities in which your project is based?
My name is Tom and I am a career clinical researcher, technologist, and rare disease survivor. And while I had privilege accessing the right clinical trial for myself, my work and lived experiences have shown me that too many people don’t have this same level of access. I’ve professionally and informally helped lots of people find the right clinical trial, and finally decided to build software to automate and anonymize the process, and make it easy to access for people without a clinical trial expert to help them find the right study. And as a clinical researcher, I’ve seen the structural difficulties with expanding my studies to underserved populations, and the harm that difficulty causes both for patients’ well-being and the study’s success.
As CEO and founder, I bring experience from both sides of our two-sided marketplace, as a clinical researcher and a patient. I was born with a rare disease. By the time I turned 15, I had more major surgeries than birthdays. Yet I was luckier than most. I was born at a research hospital with one of the few doctors in the world specializing in my condition. If I did not have access to clinical research since birth, my life would be very different.
More than 30 million people in the US have a rare disease. And 95% of rare diseases have no FDA-approved treatment, so clinical trials are the only path to treatment for many.
I entered clinical research to help others the way I was helped. I began my career running clinical trials for KLS, a rare disease affecting 300 patients in the US that causes teens to sleep for days. Its rarity means there is no financial incentive to develop treatments. Patients have almost nowhere to turn for information and treatment.
I was one of the few researchers anywhere studying KLS. My patients’ struggles inspired me to help on a bigger scale than a trial. I rallied the world’s KLS experts to co-found the first-ever KLS conference to bring critical resources to this neglected patient community.
We convened 100 people from around the world – researchers, parents, and 50 patients. Patients found clinical trials and met others with KLS for the first time. Attendees said it was life-changing to find community after a lifetime of isolation. Our conference had an enduring impact and continues on, hosted by the KLS Foundation.
From KLS to children’s cancer to chronic pain, I saw that those from marginalized backgrounds were unjustly blocked from these opportunities.This inspired me to found Health Wallet, to help the clinical research field unlock medical resources for everyone, especially marginalized communities. By making it easier to enroll more patients from all walks of life, we make more medicines available today and advance medical breakthroughs tomorrow.
Being well connected in the clinical research, patient and patient advocacy, and technology spaces, my role is to be a bridge connecting those communities through collaboration. The end goal is an innovative solution truly addressing today’s needs for rare disease patients and others who are urgently seeking clinical trials.
What makes your solution innovative and sustainable?
Personalized clinical trial matching is not a new idea, and in fact the pandemic has done a lot to put drug development and the concept of matching patients and clinical trials in the public eye. But no one -- from start-ups to mega-companies like Alphabet -- has figured out how to make it work. We think the reason no one has succeeded in this space to-date is because the proposed solutions so far are led by people whose backgrounds are in technology and the private sector, rather than clinical research and patient advocacy.
Creating digital solutions in medicine requires more than a large database and fancy algorithm. It requires a deep understanding of clinical operations and the patient experience. Our founder is a rare disease survivor who has participated in clinical research and a career researcher whose professional expertise includes helping rare disease patients and families. Our platform’s design elements are based directly on input from our founder and these communities. This makes our solution more human-centered and mission-driven than anything we have seen in this space. We use cutting-edge technology but always in service of solving real problems faced by real people.
The innovation and sustainability of Heath Wallet is directly linked to our ethos and mission-driven business model. As a social enterprise, we prioritize meeting the needs of patients over short-term profits. By growing our business through paid partnerships with researchers (rather than through traditional start-up methods like VC funding), we can generate sustainable revenue that aligns with our values and ensures that our platform will always remain free to patients. We also have maintained small overhead costs so that we can quickly recoup our costs and become both profitable and sustainable, all without sacrificing our mission to help patients and accelerate medical research.
We are confident that our approach can catalyze broader positive impacts from others in this space since we are additive and complementary to many potential partners. Notably, there are many patient advocacy organizations that exist to connect their constituents to information and medical resources. We intend to partner with them to help underserved patients, including those with rare diseases who by definition have a harder time finding resources or locating the right clinical trial for their particular circumstances.
Last, our big-picture aim is to demonstrate to the clinical research field that finding patients does not have to be individualistic and competitive. By making sure patients have all their options available in a bias-free manner, we actually help all researchers, especially rare disease researchers who face steep hurdles in terms of both funding and finding enough eligible patients. This unified system lessens the cost and time burden on individual research teams while sparing patients needless confusion, complication, wasted time and unnecessary travel.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?
The following are our one-year impact goals: First, we intend to generate our initial revenue and at minimum, reach our financial “break-even” point so that our whole team can join Health Wallet full-time and be paid at a competitive rate. We are also hoping to assemble a more built-out advisory board representing priority populations, and would like to provide compensation for those participating on this board.
Our goal for the platform is to help 1,000 patients enroll into clinical trials. We will specifically be looking to understand whether we have successfully helped patients who, without Health Wallet, would not have access to clinical trials, and to assess whether these patients are from our priority populations of rare disease patients, people of color, women, and older adults. Last, we will launch our first community partnerships, working closely with patient advocacy organizations to ensure that hard-to-reach populations, especially rare disease patients, are able to find the right clinical trial for them.
For researchers, we are setting a goal of bringing on researchers for 100+ studies at 10+ institutions to our platform. We will be measuring whether we have successfully increased enrollment volume onto their studies, accelerated their recruitment rates, and shortened the recruitment phase -- and thus cost -- of their studies.
The following are our five-year impact goals: Financially, we intend to exceed our “break-even” point and become a profitable social enterprise. Our goal for patients is to have facilitated 1,000,000 enrollments into clinical trials and increased our number of community partnerships. For researchers, we will continue to measure the same milestones: whether we have successfully increased enrollment volume into their studies, accelerated their recruitment rates, and shortened their recruitment times and cost compared to historical performance. We will be collecting case studies from rare disease researchers to understand how we have improved their ability to find and serve rare disease patients and whether this has decreased the time, effort, and carbon footprint of patients seeking clinical trials.
And throughout this time, we will continue our cyclical feedback/design/build approach, to have great confidence that at our five-year mark our product is powerfully and precisely serving our users. Beyond that, we seek to have Health Wallet used widely enough that a measurably larger percentage of the population understands the possible benefits of participating in clinical research and no longer sees such participation as being a distant, difficult thing.
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
While our impact goals are ambitious, we have strong capacity to measure progress. Our platform is structured for equitable data collection that respects patients’ privacy while giving us aggregated information about our impact.
Evaluation will measure the direct impact of our work as a connector and the downstream impact of the connections we made. We’ll evaluate impact for patients and researchers independently, since success means different things for our two user bases. We are able to monitor, in real time, how many unique patients are on our platform and their demographic information. We can also pull similar data about researchers on our platform and assess how well our platform is assisting their recruitment efforts.
Quantitatively, for patients we’ll evaluate metrics such as enrollment conversion rates and total throughput. We want to understand how effectively we help patients find the right option. And, we want to understand the demographics of those patients, to ensure we are effectively serving our target communities. For researchers we’ll gather industry-standard metrics such as enrollment rates, plus mission-based metrics such as change in diversity of participants. Our hope is to collect compelling business data showing that, even if you do not share our ideals of accelerating health equity, Health Wallet is still the go-to tool to improve your study’s bottom line.
Qualitatively, we’re interested in quality-of-life improvements. For patients this means understanding whether we successfully removed barriers to participation and relieved the struggle of finding a clinical trial. For researchers this means reducing time spent doing inefficient recruitment and increasing time spent advancing their medical research while improving the quality of their research. This data is collected through surveys on our platform.
Describe in simple terms how and why you expect your solution to have an impact on the problem.
Putting the “curb-cut effect” into practice, for the benefit of everyone
Our theory of change is based on the “curb-cut effect.” This describes how solutions designed for the most marginalized benefit everyone. A sidewalk ramp that is most urgently needed for wheelchair-users also helps everyone from the stroller-pushing parent to the shopper with a cart. Providing access to clinical research for those currently underserved by medical research through a process that is far simpler and easier to navigate than anything now available will also facilitate pathways to health and hope for all people.
Health Wallet was designed to provide the greatest benefit to rare disease patients and underrepresented populations, who face the greatest hurdles in accessing clinical trials. And while these groups’ needs form the foundation of our solution design, this focus ultimately benefits everyone seeking clinical trials and, more broadly, everyone who conducts clinical research and everyone who uses medicine. Our simple, automated process reduces wasted time, expense, and travel, which ultimately benefits all of society in addition to patients and researchers.
By making it easier for patients and researchers to connect with each other, we reduce the cost of research for all conditions, which has a disproportionate benefit to rare disease research and patients. Health Wallet empowers patients by matching them to all of their possible options, for the good of all.
If your solution is tech-based, describe the core technology that powers your solution.
Health Wallet was created by patients, for patients. We bring an existing technology concept, the two-sided marketplace, to clinical trials in a uniquely innovative and equity-centered way. We do this because technologists in research don’t prioritize patients as they rush to build a new database or algorithm. Researchers alone can't overcome profit or self-interest to improve the ecosystem for all. We can, and we apply our values of racial justice and health equity for collective good.
Our platform is a technological feat. With one click, patients connect with the right clinical trial. We’ve overlaid massive, seemingly incompatible data sets and consolidated thousands of trials into a "smart survey," while translating medical jargon into plain English. Here are the core components of our technology:
1) Providing a web-based service: Our platform is cloud-based, leveraging traditional server plus serverless implementation to optimize for scalability and cost.
2) Making complex clinical trial data understandable and usable: We source our clinical trial data from public databases, notably clinicaltrials.gov, and private data provided by researchers. We then run it through our platform to synthesize and streamline the data, making it easily searchable in plain language. Our database of trials can be used to generate search results that can be readily understood by those at an 8th grade reading level and those with lower levels of medical literacy.
3) Leveraging patient data and keeping it secure: Our patient information is drawn from self-reported information as well as electronic medical records. This data is maintained with the highest standards of security, which exceed legal requirements under HIPAA and other relevant regulations.
4) Innovative matchmaking software: Our AI and matching algorithms leverage these data combined with our mapping patterns to evaluate and match an individual profile to the universe of clinical trials, to find the needle in the haystack that is the right trial for them.
5) Human-centered UX: Here’s what this looks like to our users: If you’re seeking a clinical trial, you have a user-friendly interface that lets you run technologically sophisticated searches for clinical trials, drawing results from more than 24,000 actively recruiting studies. You can create a profile for each person you are helping find trials, including yourself, keeping your options and searches organized.
When researchers also sign up to use Health Wallet, our platform becomes even more powerful and helpful. As a researcher, you can register your protocol information, screening questions and study sites, and open up your study for recruitment directly through the Health Wallet platform.
Researchers automatically receive requests from prescreened and interested participants, directed to the relevant study site. The automation at this point in the process avoids implicit bias based on demographic characteristics like a patient’s race or gender. Researchers can then enroll the interested patient into their study. If the patient is found ineligible, our review team analyzes the mismatch to continually improve our matching accuracy for future patients.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website, app, or social media handle, provide the link(s) here:
https://www.healthwallet.app/
In which countries do you currently operate?
United States
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
How many people work on your solution team?
We have a team of four full-time staff, four part-time staff/contractors, and about two dozen mission-aligned volunteers, advisors, and champions for Health Wallet helping us expand our impact.
How long have you been working on your solution?
We have been working on this solution for about four years. The first two years involved design and assembling the right team to execute on that design, which had several iterations both due to the pandemic as well as user feedback. The next two years have been spent moving from modular prototypes into a unified, scalable technology, leveraging continued feedback from patients and researchers.
What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?
As Health Wallet’s founder, I am proud to share some of the lived experiences of Health Wallet’s users, having been born with a rare disease and benefitted from clinical research as a child. And that said, I recognize that my perspective is necessarily incomplete and that it is vital to have a diverse team that represents the populations we seek to serve.
My team reflects many of the communities we serve, including rare disease patients, people of color, women, and older adults. We intentionally cultivate a work environment where we welcome people bringing their whole selves work, with the recognition that our team member’s lived experiences help us craft a better product that centers our priority populations. All members of our team are welcomed and respected, which is especially necessary on a small team where we succeed when people feel unafraid to try new things and wear different hats. We encourage experimentation and listening to all ideas.
Because we are a boot-strapped start-up, each team member is able to take a significant and hands-on role in shaping the team culture and opportunities for everyone to contribute however, wherever, and whenever works best for them. We have co-created various materials, including a culture guide document, to put on paper our commitment to DEI and an environment where everyone can effectively collaborate and authentically be their best self at work.
As we grow, we will continue to prioritize bringing relevant lived as well as professional experience onto the team, and continue to formalize our DEI practices and strategies.
What is your business model?
Typically, matchmaking tech companies operate on a model in which “users are the product” – that is, to provide free services in order to extract and profit from users’ data. Health Wallet rejects this philosophy, and has a strong path to profitability by entering into paid partnerships with researchers, who have already budgeted resources for the task of patient enrollment and recruitment.
Health Wallet is a free tool for anyone seeking a clinical trial for any condition. Health Wallet is also free for low-throughput research. This carefully crafted model is our approach to subsidize and expand rare disease research, and sustain our business through paid partnerships with better-funded, higher-throughput research. This model is designed for massive growth, so that patients and researchers everywhere can use Health Wallet without cost being a barrier.
Our revenue generation comes through paid-subscriptions by researchers to obtain matches at their study-sites. While individual studies can purchase this subscription individually for their study-sites, we seek to reach institution-level partnerships to provide Health Wallet services on a grander scale and lower costs. Patients still see all the trial options available, regardless of any trial’s subscription status, but our matchmaking data may be limited or less accurate for non-subscribed studies. When a researcher subscribes to Health Wallet we can verify and improve their specific trial data to maximize accuracy in eligibility for patients connecting with their study, which ultimately is what increases their efficiency and enrollment rates.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?
The key to Health Wallet’s long-term financial sustainability is that we seamlessly plug into existing clinical research recruitment budgets. We offer scaling pricing options for academic and for-profit research, ensuring that our service is free to all patients and affordable for researchers.
As we are launching our pilot, Health Wallet has strategically avoided all profit-driven investment to avoid jeopardizing our impact-first ethos. We keep a very low overhead, while also not having debt or an obligation to pay back investors. Consequently, Health Wallet does not need large amounts of money to become financially sustainable, although we do need time in order to obtain this revenue via paid partnerships.
While we will seek more partnerships to diversify, even a single institution-level deal would sustain Health Wallet. For pharmaceutical companies or contract research organizations this would likely be a portfolio of studies, and for clinical trial centers this may be to support a subset or all of their investigator-initiated studies. Additionally, we can sign up individual investigators of bigger studies, whose collective revenue will also add up to support us. All of these discussions are ongoing, and we anticipate some of them to land later this year (as described below).
Additionally, our recent partnership with the White House via CancerX, as well as our ongoing conversations with the NIH suggest high alignment and opportunity for grant support, given our mission alignment with federal goals. We have been requested to submit for this grant funding once we have our pilot data.
In summary, once we’ve finished collecting our pilot data, we have ample opportunity to sustain our company through a combination of revenue, federal grants, and/or mission-aligned non-VC impact investment. Receiving funding to support us through our pilot phase would be catalytic towards our blossoming into sustainability and maximizing impact.
Solution Team
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Tom Pamukcu Founder and CEO, Health Wallet
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What is the name of your organization?
Health Wallet