More than 1 million people are diagnosed with diabetic foot ulcers each year, forcing them to face potentially debilitating medical treatments—including amputations—and costs. The condition is notoriously difficult to detect early on and has particularly devastating impacts on the veteran population, which faces an increased risk of developing it.
But the evolution of a cutting-edge ulcer-detecting device, originally thought up at a hackathon promoting public-private partnerships in 2011, demonstrates the unique opportunities the Veterans Affairs Department can offer health care startups to design and implement successful solutions. Today, that device—Podimetrics’ SmartMat—is making its way to VA clinics and other health care providers across America.
“Companies will come to us and say ‘why did you start in the VA? That doesn’t make any sense,’” Jon Bloom, the co-founder and CEO of Podimetrics told Nextgov. “And yet I think it’s completely the other way around. If you want to have immediate impact it might take a while to get into that system, but once you are there, it makes it all worthwhile in the end.”
Bloom’s SmartMats are now at 14 VA centers across the nation and in May, Podimetrics received more than $13 million in funding, which the anesthesiologist-turned-entrepreneur hopes to use to expand its reach. On Friday, the agency’s Office of Health Equity announced it has entered the collaboration and is funding an initiative to bring the budding tech to VA providers throughout North Carolina and Virginia.
But the spark that made the innovation possible was the first Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first Hacking Medicine Grand Hack, which ..
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