Frank Gencorelli loves being a pediatric anesthesiologist.
But at some point in his training to become a clinician, he realized that medicine is lagging behind other industries when it comes to incorporating breakthrough digital technology.
“You can order a car in three seconds with an app, and you’re seeing places like supermarkets using better technology than a hospital, where people’s lives are in the balance,” he says.
Frustrated with doctors scribbling notes to each other on paper or critical messages on dry erase boards, the Miami-based Gencorelli and friend and colleague Andrew Rosendahl, a psychiatrist, created their own solution: Hubspring.
What is it?
Hubspring allows doctors to streamline all their messaging, contacts, files, schedules, and charts into a single app. Headquartered at CIC Miami on the edge of the Health District, the app has been released over the past several months to a select group of hospitals and medical practitioners across the country. They’re now moving into growth mode, with hiring and venture funding planned.
What’s the South Florida connection?
With its numerous hospitals, private practices, assisted living facilities and the like, South Florida is the perfect place to launch, director of operations Danielle Zighelboim said.
South Florida’s health tech scene is in fact booming. And Hubspring plans to recruit heavily from the wealth of human capital the area offers, whether it be graduates from the University of Miami, Gencorelli’s alma mater, or CIC Miami itself, which was designed to accommodate health tech startups (the space, for instance, has biological and chemical laboratories).
How are they raising money?
The only local drawback so far has been raising capital, a common complaint among Miami’s tech community at large. And getting venture interest for hospital-related ideas has been particularly tricky, Gencorelli said, because most investors assume their business is tied to government entitlement spending.
“Our revenue stream is not tied to reimbursements, but [investors] think it’s all tied to Medicare reimbursements,” he said, saying they instead sell monthly subscriptions to access the platform. “Especially in healthcare, it’s been difficult to raise money locally, so we’ve had to look outside [Miami]. But we wanted to just do it all here.”
That is one of Hubspring’s overarching goals: to be known as a Miami-first company.
“We want to make something great in Miami, we want to be creating jobs in Miami, we’d like to create a business that’s feeding the economy here,” Zighelboim said.