UC Davis Health CoLab Incubator first startup: WellCent

New company provides at-home platform, making digital health resources more accessible to patients and caregivers

Sacramento, Calif. – WellCent, the first startup to come out of the UC Davis Health CoLab Innovation Technology Incubator, was recently introduced at the UC Davis Health Future & Health CEO Summit.

The new company, founded by Chrysanthy Demos, has developed a platform to equip patients and caregivers with validated medical devices and resources, making care at home straightforward and seamless. WellCent’s integrated care platform filters resources and provides training to make innovations in healthcare easy to use and understand.

Transforming Medicine

“Caregivers play a critical role in our health care system. They represent the invisible front line of health care, and companies like WellCent will offer much needed services to support this group through innovative smart home-enabled solutions,” said David Lubarsky, CEO of UC Davis Health and vice chancellor of human health sciences.

UC Davis Health is at the forefront of developing innovative technologies that are transforming medicine and making care more accessible to patients at home. In the last year, the prominent academic medical center created a Digital Health Equity Program to improve digital health access for vulnerable populations in Northern California. The health system also also recently announced a new partnership with General Catalyst to drive artificial intelligence and digital health innovations.

“With the increase in care shifting to the home setting, WellCent is prepared to be a key part of bringing families and providers together through smart homes and digitally-enabled care,” said Ashish Atreja, chief information officer and chief digital health officer at UC Davis Health.

Caregiving

According to the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, more than one in five Americans (21.3 percent) are caregivers. This means they’ve provided care to an adult or child with medical needs at some time in the past 12 months. This totals an estimated 53 million adults in the United States, an increase of 9.5 million family caregivers from five years prior.

“WellCent is reinventing home health care, by translating new digital health technologies and making them more equitable and accessible to the community,” said Demos, who serves as chief executive officer of WellCent. “Digital innovations in medicine are the future of health care and we are proud to be collaborating with UC Davis Health on this transformation, as they are leading the charge in developing the future of digital health.”

WellCent is the latest initiative from UC Davis Health to advance digital medicine through its Digital CoLab (Digital Collaborative for Innovation and Validation) and the first startup to have come from its incubator.

“Startups like WellCent play a critical role in expanding our health system’s innovation ecosystem,” said Yauheni Solad, chief medical information officer for digital health and vice president of innovation. “They represent a key part of our strategy to accelerate innovations that we incubate at UC Davis Health that ultimately can scale nationally.”