Two experienced healthcare technology leaders has announced the launch of MDisrupt, the first medical diligence company for the health technology industry. The first-of-its-kind firm will focus on helping investors, startups, and healthcare organizations with an independent, transparent review of health tech-related products, data claims, and processes. If deficiencies are identified, MDisrupt offers strategic guidance and the ability to utilize an extensive network of experienced health professionals to help fill in the gaps.
MDisrupt Background
Co-founded by Ruby Gadelrab and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jill Hagenkord, MDisrupt seeks to bridge the cultural divide between health technology and healthcare. Gadelrab and Dr. Hagenkord both began their careers in the traditional healthcare sector and moved to Silicon Valley 10 years ago, inspired by early trends in consumer-empowered health products. They quickly realized that the area’s startup culture was severely lacking in healthcare representation, leading to some high-profile missteps in health technology companies. Led by a medical doctor and a commercial strategist, MDisrupt intimately knows and can help counsel startups on the formula for widespread market adoption.
Accelerating the Path to Market Adoption
Although health technology is one of the fastest-growing industries, with more than $50 billion spent since 2011, there are relatively few startup success stories. By providing impartial guidance for investors and by counseling health technology startups directly, MDisrupt hopes to accelerate the path to market adoption while satisfying the higher regulatory hurdles that healthcare products need to clear.
Core Components of Medical Diligence
“Before making a sizable investment, it’s not uncommon for investors to conduct legal diligence, financial diligence and technical diligence in a healthtech startup. They rarely do the detailed medical diligence and we believe that for a health product this should be a routine part of the diligence process,” says Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Ruby Gadelrab. “MDisrupt helps healthtech startups and their investors spot avoidable and costly mistakes early on and get potentially impactful products to patients faster and more responsibly.”
MDisrupt operates by conducting an independent, objective and transparent medical diligence assessment that consists of three components
1: MD Analysis, where impartial MDisruptors carefully review a startup’s products, data, and claims, as well as their regulatory and commercial strategy.
2: MD Score, which is a graded evaluation of the startup. A high score can be taken to investors as an independent validation of their clinical and commercial viability.
3: MD Report, which is a detailed and itemized report of actions a startup can take to improve their score.
MDisruptors Expert Network
Once the assessment is complete, they work with their MDisruptors—a network of experienced advisors across the scientific, medical, regulatory and commercial sectors of the healthcare industry—to connect with the healthtech companies that need their expertise to gain market adoption and reimbursement in a healthcare setting.
Why It Matters
“In tech culture, the classic saying goes ‘move fast and break things,’ meaning get products to market quickly and learn from your failures. This works well for consumer products, but the healthcare industry with its regulators, payors, physicians and professional organizations expects a higher level of assurance before applying a new product to real patients. This is the essence of the ‘first, do no harm’ philosophy of the Hippocratic oath,” says Dr. Hagenkord. “At MDisrupt we believe we can unite the best of both worlds and achieve the shared goal of getting impactful health products to patients faster and more responsibly.”
