Healp- Your Health Community

Diagnostic errors cost the U.S. economy $750 billion each year. 1 out of every 20 adults seeking outpatient care have been misdiagnosed. This is leading to 12 million misdiagnoses, and 400,000 preventable deaths. 

When the medical world dismisses patients, patients have no one to turn to, so they seek FB groups and patient  groups for answers, but the information is not regulated,  yet 80 percent of internet users have searched for a health-related topic online.

 Elizabeth Tikoyan, founder of Healp, was given a terminal diagnosis at 19 years old, when all her friends were starting their new lives in college. As a desperate last resort, she scraped the web to find anyone or anything that could help, and alas, slowly but surely crowdsourced her way to a cure. 

 Given the COVID-19 pandemic, it gave the world a glimpse into what Elizabeth and many patients have faced. Isolation, fear of the unknown, questions about life after a diagnosis, and how can anyone help with  questions about COVID and other conditions when doctors themselves don’t know? 

However, the problem goes deeper than being misdiagnosed- 133 million people in the US alone live with a chronic condition, and 25-30 million live with rare diseases, and these patients live the rest of their lives with medical needs and want to know how to cope, so they seek other patients who can relate to their unique needs, but where can they find each other in a world with so much stigma and shame about being "sick". 

Patients have typically not been able to contribute their voice to the medical world, which has led to an inability for patients to share effective treatments because there is no centralized platform for patients to share their findings, people have had to spend their lives trying to find balance. This is demoralizing and hopeless, as it is a direct result of the broken medical system across the world, and one that only gets worse when considering that the patient faces the brunt of its negative effects. 

 Healp is a health tech platform that crowdsources what works. We are a mobile platform on both IOS and Android devices. 

Healp has two components, a social network and a crowdsourcing tool.

Healp helps you find a friend with the same health condition as you. After installing the app, you create a profile with information such as your age, location, hobbies and medical conditions. You can also connect 1-1 with vetted NGOs, health groups, advocacy groups, researchers, podcasts and more who want to support your journey. If you match with a friend or partner, you can talk about their health, personal life, work, school, family and so much more. 

The second feature is our discovery page where you can take surveys. We collect all the solutions community-recommended by our trusted community the best doctors, tips, and advice. We then aggregate this information and publish the results. Nothing will be on our platform that hasn't been community recommended by our trusted community. 

We partner with health institutions, universities and the likes to create surveys that we then target to users based on health condition, age, location, and other demographic information like gender and interests. Surveys range from topics about treatment, best doctors, treatments that worked and didn't work, how to talk to an employer about your rare disease needs and the likes, and so much more. 

 Our platform does more than just bring people together -- it also provides valuable information for patients that doctors and medical textbooks can't provide, and that is the personal experiences and learnings from a global community that is then aggregated and then published. 

We have two kinds of users- our most loyal and our loyal. Our most loyal are those who have chronic conditions and rare diseases. Chronic Conditions: 157 million ( 45% of population) with 81 million having multiple conditions.Rare Disease: 25-30 million Americans.

Our loyal users would be members with temporary symptoms/ medical conditions. In fact, 80 percent of Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for a health-related topic online, and these kinds of users would be able to come to Healp to get answers about their health from real people. 

Our target demographic are users between 13-30 years old(80% of our users), and our primary early adapters, which makeup 65% of our app are those who identify as women who identify as having a women's health condition like: PCOS and Endometriosis. 

Beneficiaries would include health groups, health NGOS and private practices who want to connect to our patient communities by sharing resources, initiatives or information on clinical trials, and with that, they are the key institutes that want to create personalized surveys for specific health groups. 

Elizabeth knows the patient journey first-hand and understands the devastation, loss and hopelessness that comes with a diagnosis. She founded a platform to bring positivity, hope and most importantly, answers.

Though this is Elizabeth Tikoyan ( Founder/ CEO), first startup, she is a fast learner and a vigilant executer. Her startup grew through influencers and social media (300+ across 30 countries), and mentors. 

She has partnered with Apzumi (medical software firm)since October of 2021 with support from Google for Startups, to build a novel HIPPA-compliant crowdsourcing tool that will collect community survey responses and publish conclusive results for stakeholders and users.

 MIT Solve can help our team establish partnerships with stakeholders that will bolster the value of our crowdsourcing database and network, expanding our reach to more patients.

In addition, we plan to keep building and expanding our Healp partnership  pipeline( NGOS, hospitals, patient advocacy groups), and would see great value in partnering with the network MIT Solve has. 

We partner with health institutions, universities and the likes to create surveys that will be targeted to users based on health condition, age, location. We create surveys asking users about topics such as the best treatments they’ve tried, the treatments that haven’t worked, advice on best doctors, and lifestyle questions, and these insights can be transformative to institutions that prior to Healp, can only be gathered from clinical trials.

We  want to forge alliances with heads of hospital systems, clinical trial coordinators, universities and leaders in the pharmaceutical industry to create surveys and better provide insights from the patient perspective to these institutions to help them in creating better solutions, and providing them an opportunity to understand the Rare disease communities biggest barriers and setbacks. .

In addition, the keyy areas I need support with to get us to the next level include: 

1. Business model: We are working through how to create a business model that would entail recruiting patients into clinical trials and also how to create contracts with organizations ( we have a number of avenues- example should we partner with school health centers as a way to provide a resource to their students, while being able to make money, secondly, we create surveys on our app that we target to certain patient populations- I am trying to figure out how to monetize this piece by creating sponsored surveys. 

2. Go-To market strategy: we want to partner with health organizations, hospitals and private practices  to help expand our reach, and also with hospitals and pharmacies- ideally we would love to have a QR code listed across hospitals, pharmacies and private practices, etc. about Healp and how it supports patients to find connections, so we want to fine tune how the partnership pipeline will look for the various players we plan on working with.

We look forward to taking advantage of the innovative resources, and mentors this program offers, and are excited to make an impact in patients lives through this program. 

Our company's appeal to young patients in the health-tech space sets us apart from our competitors, who typically cater to older demographics. Our young users typically regard online health platforms as unappealing, so we believe we have a competitive advantage by capitalizing on our user base's natural enthusiasm for social media and crowdsourced medical information.

Most platforms for patients either are social networks used for socializing/ chatting, or on the flip side, there are platforms that include databases where patients can discover new treatments and reviews that have been curated by doctors and researchers. 

There hasn’t been a patient led health network that combines social networking, and crowdsourcing.  However, the only startups that are doing any kind of health crowdsourcing are out of Israel: Stuff That Works and Alike. StuffThat Works crowdsource health data by collecting surveys for each conditions to help patients find the best treatments. https://www.stuffthatworks.health/. However, Alike connects  patients with similar health condition  through public forums. https://www.alike.health/

In regards to health social networks, our competitors are online health groups/apps like: Facebook groups, PatientsLikeMe, Wisdo,and Healthline. These platforms permit users to seek advice through group chats. However, 70% of users have reported feeling dissatisfied by these platforms, so we founded Healp. 

 We have identified a completely new market category within the health tech sector, as the number of people with chronic conditions and rare diseases is not limited to older populations.

Our health influencer campaigns are consistently successful and generate millions of views without requiring any paid advertising. While other companies have grown and raised millions of dollars through Venture Capital, their impersonation campaigns of our work do not get the same results, and it's not just the social media that we got right, but we truly learned how to tap into the Gen Z and millennial audience from over 72 countries- from Nigeria, United States, Kenya, Australia, Ghana and so many more.

 We know how to reach a demographic that others in the health tech space don't know how to reach. I'm a young founder with a chronic condition myself, and I founded Healp because of my own personal experience; our community trusts us because we have their best interests at heart, and with that, I know how to solve the problem MIT Solve has set forth, and the biggest challenge any health solution will face is the trust of patients to buy into their solution, and I do not need patient buy in, as my story and health battle speaks for itself. 

We will be flipping the model of support, there is power in the patient voice and experience, and we are creating that platform to elevate the patient voice and experiences. 

We measure impact by assessing our short and long term outcomes. We collect quantitative data using surveys and data on app usage. We also collect qualitative data through interviews with users and group interviews to understand if we are truly making an impact. 

Our short term outcomes is to ensure patients who are alone and need community will be able to find community. We are able to assess our short term outcomes by doing user testing, surveys and interviews to better understand if our venture is a value add to patients. 

Our long term goal is to improve the health and well being of our users. 12 million people are reported to be misdiagnosed annually, which is leading to 400,000 preventable deaths.  Its leading to a $750 billion problem in the US alone. We want to address this issue by doing what no other platform is doing, and that is listening to the patient experience, learning about what does and doesn’t work and sharing those valuable insights to a global community. 

Our long term outcome is a population- level measurement that uses surveys and data on whether our venture helped our users find treatments, better doctors. We can compare the data and experiences of patients on our app to a control group and see if our venture made an impact or not, and we can also assess the experiences of our users before and after using Healp to see if Healp made a difference. 

Healp App is a mobile platform that 

Our business model consists of four components: clinical trial recruitment, subscription, sponsorship, and data. We do not charge patients to participate in our platform but our partners do( pharmaceutical companies, NGOS, private practices, etc.) . 

Firstly, we will use our app to target clinical trial participants based on their gender, age, life stage, and region.

Our second model includes partnerships with our partners, including health groups, NGOs and medical practices. These partners have expressed an interest in using our platform to connect directly to patients. We would include subscription-model plans for groups that want to connect to users.

Our third financial model includes pharmaceutical companies, clinical trials, and other companies that wish to run surveys on their products. For example, after a drug has been launched to the public, its makers might want to know how users respond to it. We plan to partner with such companies and merge our platform with their drug launches.

As we expand our platform, we will be able to offer sponsored spaces for products and/or treatments from supplements, medications, or remedies.

We have an angel round of $170,000 that has sustained us up until now, and still gives us 6 months runway, and no need for any other technology cost needed. 

We are going to start monetizing end of August and September with our partnerships with universities. An example of a partnership we would make: we partner with 100 universities with all schools agreeing to a $10 K contract to provide Healp as a resource for their students seeking peer support, and then creating surveys to gather insights on their therapy services, accommodation offers and the likes, with 100 partnerships we will make $1 million. We are about to finalize our contract with 5 schools, and we know more will ensue. 

 We are also going to use Healp to recruit patients into clinical trials and with a partnership with the nonprofit Patients Rising, we will earn a referral fee of $30-$500 per recruitment.

 We have raised over $170K in angel funding and pitch competition funding. Our biggest expense to date has been the development of our technology, and now that we have fully built it out, we are now ready to begin partnerships with universities and health centers across universities to create surveys for their institutions, gather data, and analyze results.

An example of a partnership we would make, if we partner with 100 universities with all schools agreeing to a $10 K contract to provide Healp as a resource for their students seeking peer support, and then creating surveys to gather insights on their therapy services, accommodation offers and the likes, with 100 partnerships we would be making $1 million with this kind of agreement. 

We will create similar partnerships with clinical trials and NGOS that focus on particular rare diseases, as we can easily target these surveys to certain health groups, and provide crowdsourced, aggregated data based on health conditions, co-morbidities and the likes.

 Thus, with 100 partnerships of $10,000 contracts, we would earn a million dollars in revenue. With 1,000 such partnerships, we could expect to earn ten million dollars in revenue excluding sponsorship revenue and the cost of clinical trials recruitment of Healp users.