This Innovative Startup Is a Lifeline for Patients at Rural Hospitals
Chloe Alpert, the founder of Medinas.
When Jenn Morson Frederick went into labor with her baby in Annapolis, Maryland, she remembers being hooked up intravenously to an infusion pump because she needed antibiotics. She readily admits that the last thing on her mind was what would happen to the pump after she was done with it.
"Ten minutes from where I live, in Oakland, there are children who can't afford care and there are smaller practices just getting eaten up on cost."
In fact, the pump might go on to assist the labor of another new mother at a rural hospital many miles away, thanks to an innovative online marketplace called Medinas Health. Founded last year by a 27-year-old entrepeneur, Medinas Health buys used medical supplies and sells them to under-resourced hospitals who are happy to get functioning equipment at discounted prices.
The startup is built on a machine learning algorithm that uses historical data for medical devices to predict how much longer they can be used and still be sold at optimum prices on the secondary market. This allows hospitals to squeeze the most use out of their supplies.
Such transactions are the lifeblood for rural or critical access hospitals, says Chloe Alpert, the founder and CEO of Medinas. She first came up with the idea when she noticed a glaring discrepancy in the healthcare marketplace: From 2010 to 2016, 79 hospitals had closed their doors and hundreds more were at risk. At the same time, according to the National Academy of Medicine, the United States wastes medical supplies to the tune of $765 billion every year. On a household level, many people are saddled with medical debt: One in six Americans has past due healthcare bills. The numbers shocked Alpert.
What's more, she found that many used medical supplies were being shipped off to developing countries, partly to minimize the hospitals' liability. "[The model was] fundamentally flawed," she says. "I live in San Francisco and ten minutes from where I live, in Oakland, there are children who can't afford care and there are smaller practices just getting eaten up on cost."
Now, through Medinas, hospitals can offload unwanted clinical assets, and other medical offices can buy them at discounted prices. Since its launch in August 2017, the startup has sold just over 100 items, ranging from infusion pumps to an MRI machine.
Typically, hospitals hold onto their medical supplies as long as possible. Proprietary data from Medinas place the life expectancy of something like an infusion pump at ten years.
"Hospitals' biomed departments are going to try to keep that unit going for as long as they can because you have to replace an entire fleet and that's a significant financial overlay," says Suzi Collins, Director of Materials Management at Mountain Vista Medical Center in Gilbert, Ariz.
"I wanted to do something that would actually make an impact. Imagine healthcare costs going down instead of up."
But after many rinse-and-repeat repairs, it might be time to spring for a new unit. Medinas conducts cost-benefit analyses to show whether it's worth the financial cost for a hospital to hold on to old, creaky equipment. In some cases, manufacturers introduce a new version of a pump and discontinue support for older models, forcing hospitals' hands.
That's when Medinas may step in to facilitate the sale of older medical devices to different hospitals, connecting the lives of urban moms like Frederick to rural moms like Kelly Burch, who recently delivered her baby at the Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in rural Lebanon, New Hampshire.
At press time, Medinas had recently received more than 700 infusion pumps to sell from an Arizona medical center and was in negotiations with healthcare facilities who might be interested in buying them. For her work with Medinas, Alpert won $500,000 as part of the Forbes 30 Under 30 competition.
"It really blows my mind to see all these inefficiencies in healthcare, to know that Medinas is doing something tangible to address disparities in care," Alpert says. "I wanted to do something that would actually make an impact. Imagine healthcare costs going down instead of up. That is really neat."
Here's how one doctor overcame extraordinary odds to help create the birth control pill
Dr. Percy Julian had so many personal and professional obstacles throughout his life, it’s amazing he was able to accomplish anything at all. But this hidden figure not only overcame these incredible obstacles, he also laid the foundation for the creation of the birth control pill.
Julian’s first obstacle was growing up in the Jim Crow-era south in the early part of the twentieth century, where racial segregation kept many African-Americans out of schools, libraries, parks, restaurants, and more. Despite limited opportunities and education, Julian was accepted to DePauw University in Indiana, where he majored in chemistry. But in college, Julian encountered another obstacle: he wasn’t allowed to stay in DePauw’s student housing because of segregation. Julian found lodging in an off-campus boarding house that refused to serve him meals. To pay for his room, board, and food, Julian waited tables and fired furnaces while he studied chemistry full-time. Incredibly, he graduated in 1920 as valedictorian of his class.
After graduation, Julian landed a fellowship at Harvard University to study chemistry—but here, Julian ran into yet another obstacle. Harvard thought that white students would resent being taught by Julian, an African-American man, so they withdrew his teaching assistantship. Julian instead decided to complete his PhD at the University of Vienna in Austria. When he did, he became one of the first African Americans to ever receive a PhD in chemistry.
Julian received offers for professorships, fellowships, and jobs throughout the 1930s, due to his impressive qualifications—but these offers were almost always revoked when schools or potential employers found out Julian was black. In one instance, Julian was offered a job at the Institute of Paper Chemistory in Appleton, Wisconsin—but Appleton, like many cities in the United States at the time, was known as a “sundown town,” which meant that black people weren’t allowed to be there after dark. As a result, Julian lost the job.
During this time, Julian became an expert at synthesis, which is the process of turning one substance into another through a series of planned chemical reactions. Julian synthesized a plant compound called physostigmine, which would later become a treatment for an eye disease called glaucoma.
In 1936, Julian was finally able to land—and keep—a job at Glidden, and there he found a way to extract soybean protein. This was used to produce a fire-retardant foam used in fire extinguishers to smother oil and gasoline fires aboard ships and aircraft carriers, and it ended up saving the lives of thousands of soldiers during World War II.
At Glidden, Julian found a way to synthesize human sex hormones such as progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone, from plants. This was a hugely profitable discovery for his company—but it also meant that clinicians now had huge quantities of these hormones, making hormone therapy cheaper and easier to come by. His work also laid the foundation for the creation of hormonal birth control: Without the ability to synthesize these hormones, hormonal birth control would not exist.
Julian left Glidden in the 1950s and formed his own company, called Julian Laboratories, outside of Chicago, where he manufactured steroids and conducted his own research. The company turned profitable within a year, but even so Julian’s obstacles weren’t over. In 1950 and 1951, Julian’s home was firebombed and attacked with dynamite, with his family inside. Julian often had to sit out on the front porch of his home with a shotgun to protect his family from violence.
But despite years of racism and violence, Julian’s story has a happy ending. Julian’s family was eventually welcomed into the neighborhood and protected from future attacks (Julian’s daughter lives there to this day). Julian then became one of the country’s first black millionaires when he sold his company in the 1960s.
When Julian passed away at the age of 76, he had more than 130 chemical patents to his name and left behind a body of work that benefits people to this day.
Therapies for Healthy Aging with Dr. Alexandra Bause
My guest today is Dr. Alexandra Bause, a biologist who has dedicated her career to advancing health, medicine and healthier human lifespans. Dr. Bause co-founded a company called Apollo Health Ventures in 2017. Currently a venture partner at Apollo, she's immersed in the discoveries underway in Apollo’s Venture Lab while the company focuses on assembling a team of investors to support progress. Dr. Bause and Apollo Health Ventures say that biotech is at “an inflection point” and is set to become a driver of important change and economic value.
Previously, Dr. Bause worked at the Boston Consulting Group in its healthcare practice specializing in biopharma strategy, among other priorities
She did her PhD studies at Harvard Medical School focusing on molecular mechanisms that contribute to cellular aging, and she’s also a trained pharmacist
In the episode, we talk about the present and future of therapeutics that could increase people’s spans of health, the benefits of certain lifestyle practice, the best use of electronic wearables for these purposes, and much more.
Dr. Bause is at the forefront of developing interventions that target the aging process with the aim of ensuring that all of us can have healthier, more productive lifespans.
