Announcing our early release program for kidney care providers 🎉
By: Tim Fitzpatrick
Tags: Startup, Funding, Nephrology, Digital Health, Edtech

Learn more at ikona.health

In September we announced that IKONA had joined the ranks of early stage companies backed by the National Science Foundation. America’s Seed Fund aims to foster innovation and help create businesses and jobs in the United States. Since 2015, NSF-funded small businesses have had 153 exits and have received $9.1 billion in private investment. In just a few short months, we have begun to see exactly how and why the program has earned its reputation as a world class pathway for brining high-risk, high-impact technologies to market.

As part of our discovery process, we have conducted scores of interviews with key stakeholders across the kidney care landscape to identify critical pain points, shared challenges, and long-overlooked gaps that lead to friction in everyday lives and clinical workflows. Importantly, this discovery phase never ends. We will continue to ask these questions in order to best understand prevailing needs and challenges, so please reach out to us here if you are a care provider and want to share your patient education and training challenges.

IKONA Early Release Program 🎉

Welcome to the next phase of our research and development process! Together, with our research partners and kidney professionals like you, we aim to co-design and build the future we need. To do that, we’re going to need your help. We are looking for nephrology providers from across kidney care settings (e.g. hospitals, homes, dialysis centers and clinics) interested in taking part in this iterative innovation process. For those interested in supporting these efforts, we will be providing free access to the product to use with your patients when it’s ready.

If you have been following along with our work, you know by now that we are bringing learning science to kidney care, that there is a neuroscientific framework for optimizing kidney education, and that tools like virtual and augmented reality possess qualities uniquely suited to address education and training challenges across kidney care.

This year has made it abundantly clear we need virtual communication tools that feel more personal, are easy for people to use and enable patients to receive the best possible care from the comfort and safety of their own homes. We also know education plays a crucial role in a patient’s ability to manage their own health, and that health literacy is an essential component in that equation. Patients need access to information they can understand and use, and providers need tools that instill confidence and foster effective communication. With your help, we will continue building the next chapter in kidney education by beginning to predict learning needs, recommend optimal learning pathways, and ensuring every patient makes the right treatment decision based on their individual needs.

In our vision of that future, patients learn from experience, stories are shared easily to help others overcome their fears, and providers play a key role in helping patients navigate their care.

Join the program 🙋🏽

If you would like to be involved in this early release program, fill out this form or contact us here so we can follow up with more details around timing for our upcoming release.