BabyNoggin- population health platform for all kids
1 in 4 children under age 5 has developmental issues. BabyNoggin is a population health app platform that educates parents to do developmental, autism, and postpartum depression screenings at the office and at home, integrates data & results to their preschools and doctors, teach the 15% of moderate risk families with personalized activities, and helps refer the 11% of high-risk children to specialists via telemedicine when in need. Our vision is early screening and early intervention for every child.
CDC reports that 1 out 4 children under age 5 has developmental or behavioral problems, resulting in 1 million kids entering school with undiagnosed disability every year. All pediatricians, preschool teachers in 16 states, and Head Start education sites are recommended to screen. By 2024, all 50 states are required to report out screening rates. Nobel Laureate James Heckman calculated that there's a $17 return for every dollar invested in early childhood. Yet due to lack of time and unfamiliarity with the tools, 70% of children are not being screened today. On top of it, about 80% of kids requires early intervention are not getting access today.
For the 220,000 primary care doc who are mandated to screen for kids developmental and mental health issues, we enable them to get reimbursed from health insurance.
For the teachers serving 25 million children under age 5, we enable them to be compliant to Department of Education recommendations and get more state funding.
For the caretakers of the kids under age 5, we offer them a peace of mind and activities to help the kids achieve the next milestone.
BabyNoggin is an app platform that gathers longitudinal human developmental data from birth to detect disease onset and recommend personalized therapies. We allow parents to screen their kids for depression and delays, their primary care doctors to get reimbursed from insurance, and kids to be referred for early intervention when in need. We
- Collect structure data by screening for developmental delays, autism, and postpartum depression, adding more
- Connect the data to their pediatricians and teachers
- Refers those at risk to local resources & therapists via telemedicine
- Reduce barriers to healthy physical, mental, and emotional development for vulnerable populations
- Enable parents and caregivers to support their children’s overall development
- Pilot
- New technology
Our main competitors include CHADIS- screening aggregator with over 300 tools aimed purely for pediatricians, and Cognoa- who developed their own screening tool still waiting to get FDA clarification and then reimbursement. Phreesia, on the other hand, focused on the entire previsit intake and billing for the clinic.
Our future competitors include parent education apps such as Ovia parenting and Glow that may decide to add on medical screening tools. Perhaps our biggest competitors are the paper screening tools themselves- fortunately the authors of 2 leading tools (dominating 65% of the medical market) are on BabyNoggin’s advisory board.
For the 50% of US doctors, they use paper screening tools with the patients and then score it- resulted in delayed visits and upwards of 25% scoring errors. For the 70% US children, they are not screened. Of which 25% of children will be at moderate & high risk. But delayed screening results in delayed referral and then delayed intervention.
BabyNoggin adds modern UX by digitizing the paper screening tools, eliminates scoring errors for doctors and save doctors a third of the screening time. We also empower parents by allowing the to screen at their desired time, place, and take action when their child is at risk. We are the first mobile app screening tool and the only to be endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Our first app, BabyNoggin
- Collect structure data by screening for developmental delays, autism, and postpartum depression, adding more
- Connect the data to their pediatricians and teachers
- Refers those at risk to local resources & therapists via telemedicine
- longitudinal structure data +AI to recommend personalized therapy & guide clinical decision support
Screening is just the first step. By Identify children at risk, we are the source of referral to specialists, telemedicine, and community services. By allowing parents to track their babies from birth at every 2-4 month intervals, we’ll have one of the largest longitudinal developmental data which will be useful for research, insurance risk adjustment and personal medicine.
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- Big Data
- Behavioral Design
Over the past 3.5 years, we've tried many different products and business models. For the past 10 months, we've reached $75K in revenue by selling to pediatricians, schools, and nonprofits with 100%+ MRR growth. We now get at least 2 inbound inquiry a week through customer referrals.
Our unique product has attracted partnerships with the American Academy of Pediatrics and nonprofits such as YWCA and United Way.
Based on currently closed contracts, we'll be screening 150,000 kids with about half a million screenings this year.
- Women & Girls
- Children and Adolescents
- Infants
- Rural Residents
- Peri-Urban Residents
- Urban Residents
- Very Poor/Poor
- Low-Income
- Middle-Income
- Persons with Disabilities
- China
- Mexico
- United States
- China
- Mexico
- United States
By the end of 2019:
125 doctors * 700 children under age 5 = 87,500 kids screened and 87,500 parents screened
87,500 kids * 2.5 average screenings per year= 218,750 screenings
By the end of 2020: we anticipate to screen 300,00 kids and parents
By the end of 2025: we anticipate to screen 5 million kids and parents
I used my own app to diagnose and convince my doctor that my 18 months daughter had speech delays. Because I detected the issue early, I was able to get another free evaluation through the state’s early intervention service. Most children waited 6 years to diagnose and 97% eligible are not in free intervention services.
My goal within the next year is to screen at least 300,000 kids and their parents and help the 25% of kids at risk into invention through free resources or tele-psychiatry.
My goal within the next 5 years is to screen at least 5 million kids and 5 million parents so that we can help every child reach his/ her full potential, regardless of zip code, in the USA and across the world.
financial- raising enough capital so that I can hire the right talent to get to our impact goal
cultural- behavioral change for doctors and teachers are difficult
regulations- doctors are incentivized by health insurance reimbursements and teachers by state educational funding
financial- raise venture capital money early and more than what I think I need. Leverage all my prior venture capital connections
cultural- leverage human-center design process to develop solutions that fits in the workflow of doctors and teachers, to minimize their workflow changes and save them time and effort
regulations- befriend the policy influencers and understand what's coming down the pipeline so that we have enough time to pivot our business model
- For-Profit
2 full time
7 contractors
I'm the CEO, a child psychologist, former healthcare VC, and now the mother of two under age 3. I used my own app to diagnose and convince my doctor that my 18 months daughter had speech delays. Because I detected the issue early, I was able to get another free evaluation through the state’s early intervention service. Most children waited 6 years to diagnose and 97% eligible are not in free intervention services.
CTO- Avishaan Sethi, is former NASA Bioengineer with 20 years of experience building apps for fortune 500 companies. He also worked with top 5 medical systems on AI & EHR.
This is the 4th startup for both founders.
City of Nashville- partnering with United Way, pediatric association, and reading nonprofit to screen kids at risk of dealys and help them into early intervention. Will customize our app specifically for their unique referral pathways
10th largest hospital system- customer
One of the largest educational chain- customer
We sell b2b2c.
For doctors: $60 per doctor per month, in return they earn $30K per year from health reimbursement. For schools and nonprofits: we charge $2 per child per screening. They then refer the kids at risk to BabyNoggin partners ($75 per referral for telemed to and $50 for genetic testing) .
Since we've been charging our latest product 10 months ago, we had zero churn.
From our existing signed contracts, we'll be profitable within a year. However, to reach our mission of screening 5 million kids within 5 years, we'll need to raise more capital, add to our product line and expand internationally.
As we only have 2 full timers, 12 months of personalized support from Solve is a luxury for me to bounce business model ideas, reach out to the network to hire more talent, and think of ways to get sales revenue and impact faster.
Being on stage in front of the 500 cross-sector leaders as well as MIT faculty and students will also help us get users, potential collaborators, and talent to join my team.
- Technology
- Distribution
- Talent or board members
Home visiting programs- Nurse family partnership, parent as teachers- allowing home visitors to low income families
preschool associations/ institutions such as Bright Horizons - customer to use BabyNoggin and enable their teacher understand where the child is at
Researchers in early childhood health- coapply to grants and help analyze our data for peer review publication
Screening is just the first step. By Identify children at risk, we are the source of referral to specialists, telemedicine, and community services. By allowing parents to track their babies from birth at every 2-4 month intervals, we’ll have one of the largest longitudinal developmental data which will be useful for research, insurance risk adjustment and personal medicine.
We plan to leverage the longitudinal structure data and build AI and ML algorithm to recommend personalized therapy for teachers and parents and guid clinical decision support for the doctors.
In order to do so, BabyNoggin must optimize an algorithm that will more accurately predict developmental outcomes. These predicted outcomes will then determine appropriate referrals and/or interventions. Modeling these relationships is complicated by the fact that childhood is a continuously evolving process where previous life events impact future ones, a context in which frequentist or Bayesian approaches (Traditional Statistical Methods) are usually not as flexible. BabyNoggin is thus utilizing a machine learning toolset alongside traditional methods to develop a model by analyzing the screening tool response data that the app collects every 2-4 months from birth to age 5 in combination with demographic data.
BabyNoggin plan to leverage the prize money to hire data scientists and ML developers.
CDC reports 1 in 9 women are at risk of postpartum depression and 1 in 4 children under age 5 has developmental issues. BabyNoggin is an app platform that gathers longitudinal human developmental data from birth to detect disease onset and recommend personalized therapies.
BabyNoggin plan to leverage the prize money to hire data scientists and ML developers. We plan to add in additional features to measure mother's mental health state and how that is correlated with their child's development, leveraging ML to flag abnormal behavior, and using AI to refer the right clinician at the right time at the right convenience for the mother.
By allowing parents to track their babies from birth at every 2-4 month intervals, we’ll have one of the largest longitudinal developmental data which will be useful for research, insurance risk adjustment and personal medicine. All our data is HIPAA & FERPA compliant per medical and education mandates, stored in AWS cloud, and has audit trails of who used it.
We plan to leverage the longitudinal structure data and build AI and ML algorithm to recommend personalized therapy for teachers and parents and guid clinical decision support for the doctors.
In order to do so, BabyNoggin must optimize an algorithm that will more accurately predict developmental outcomes. These predicted outcomes will then determine appropriate referrals and/or interventions. Modeling these relationships is complicated by the fact that childhood is a continuously evolving process where previous life events impact future ones, a context in which frequentist or Bayesian approaches (Traditional Statistical Methods) are usually not as flexible. BabyNoggin is thus utilizing a machine learning toolset alongside traditional methods to develop a model by analyzing the screening tool response data that the app collects every 2-4 months from birth to age 5 in combination with demographic data.
BabyNoggin plan to leverage the prize money to hire data scientists and ML developers.