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Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
As the chief medical officer overseeing four Los Angeles County hospitals, Vincent Green is looking at some grim realities.
The emergency room doctor is running low on ventilators, the supply of personal protective equipment is dwindling and many on his medical staff are over 60 years old, making them a higher risk for dying should they contract the novel coronavirus.
"There are times when I wake up and I can't get back to sleep," said Green, an executive at El Segundo-based Pipeline Health, which owns the Memorial Hospital of Gardena, East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital, Coast Plaza Hospital and Community Hospital of Huntington Park along with two others in Dallas and Chicago. He keeps going over in his mind what he can do to help protect his staff from changing intubation procedures to procuring gowns before the expected surge of patients hits. "We're trying now to get prepared and ready so that when that crazy volume comes in, we're able to try to be as safe as possible for everybody."
Green isn't alone. Other tech savvy medical professionals are turning to telemedicine to save lives and companies that provide it have seen usage skyrocket.
A few weeks ago, Green made a decision to use the translation equipment provided by El Segundo-based Cloudbreak, an interpretation service which is now providing telemedicine, to help reduce face-to-face visits with patients and in turn save protective gear that might otherwise be used for visits with COVID-19 patients.
Tapping telemedicine is one way doctors, policymakers and administrators like Green hope they can preserve resources and keep staff safe. At least two health care workers in Los Angeles County have died due to the virus and 324 have tested positive. And medical staff around the country are scared as reports of sick nurses and doctors stack up and a shortage of protective equipment persists.
Green and others have begun to deploy technology from smartphones and computers to remote patient monitoring tools in an effort to limit COVID-19 exposure. Meanwhile, jittery patients are flocking to companies that offer remote services rather than risk going into an infected doctor's office. But, telehealth has its limits and doctors can't diagnose everything via a screen.
Cloudbreak's service lets patients talk to doctors from monitors that are carted into their rooms. Like many executives facing the pandemic, the head of Cloudbreak, Jamey Edwards, switched the company's focus as the virus began to ravage the country to one more relevant to the times: telemedicine. Now, demand is booming and he is looking at more services that can help doctors reach patients on their cellphones and beyond. Green has 16 of Cloudbreak's carts in his Los Angeles-based hospitals and ordered another 20 in anticipation of an onslaught of COVID-19 patients.
Jamey Edwards, CEO of Cloudbreak
It may sound like a small gesture, but the video conference could slow the burn of hospitals' protective equipment by 10% to 15%. Not only is the protective gear more difficult to acquire as demand jumps, but prices are rising just as hospitals and clinics like his are getting squeezed financially as they forgo elective surgeries and other treatments they rely on for revenue.
The standard N95 masks used by doctors previously cost less than $1, but are now being sold for six times the price in some cases.
"This provides another layer of safety to my elderly physician staff as well as just to the rank and file employees," Green said. "They are nervous and rightfully so, because they have never had to unnecessarily risk their own life while treating patients."
At the Gardena hospital, which has a large population of uninsured and nursing home residents, Green said he is looking to use it for COVID-19 patients in the ICU that might normally require consistent monitoring from nurses, saving medical staff from constantly going into check on them.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, Dr. Stanley Frencher who is the medical director of surgical outcomes and quality, says many of these carts will be used in tents outside the hospital to evaluate possible COVID-19 patients, and there will also be one in nearly every room inside the facility. The hospital now has 60 with another 80 on order and a goal of getting to about 160 in the coming weeks.
"You have all these different ways in which telemedicine can be leveraged to ultimately manage this short term need to physically distance ourselves from one another," he said. "In doing so, we will definitely be saving lives by using telemedicine."
To encourage telemedicine use and slow the trajectory of the fast-moving virus, President Donald Trump earlier this month waived restrictions allowing doctors to operate across state lines and relaxed HIPAA compliance allowing doctors to use their own phones to free up hospitals and doctors for COVID-19 patients. This week, the Federal Communication Commission unveiled a $200 million fund to boost telehealth services for hospitals.
Use of remote health services has been surging amid the pandemic.
Companies like Los Angeles-based Heal, a primary healthcare service offering home doctor visits from a network of physicians, has seen usage jump 640% over the past month as patients turn online instead of risking going to a doctor's office. The San Francisco-based Forward, a health care subscription service with clinics in Los Angeles, launched a COVID-19 screener. At GoodRx, which acquired HeyDoctor last year, telehealth visits have soared.
"We think this is going to be the new normal for 2020," said John Asalone, who heads telehealth at GoodRx. "People are not going to their primary care doctors right now, but as health issues are still happening (and) they still need their medication, they will either skip care or find it elsewhere."
The $5.6 billion telehealth market in the United States has struggled for years to take off with people reluctant to connect with doctors online, but recently more companies like e-commerce giant Amazon have looked to telehealth to offset the high cost of employee medical coverage. The pandemic has forced people with chronic conditions like diabetes to check in with their doctor online or by phone as clinics and hospitals across the country cancel routine visits and elective surgeries.
"This could almost ironically be the tipping point for telehealth," said Jay Goss, general partner at Pasadena-based venture capital firm Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health that has several telehealth companies in their portfolio. "The core thing these companies do is more valuable today than it was before the pandemic.
"There's a cultural willingness now to do something that for the longest time was just done in person," Goss said.
There's also a dire necessity, but it's an imperfect tool. Doctors can't administer important tests or touch patients. There's technical issues that can pop up. And then, even Cloudbreak's carts that are rolled into ICUs must be sanitized by a human.
Despite this, Alex Fredrick, an analyst at Pitchbook, expects the pandemic will force rapid adoption of telemedicine. He points to companies like InTouch Health, a Santa Barbara company acquired by New York-based Teladoc in January that was used to treat what is believed to be patient zero in Washington.
He expects to see more robots being used to administer services as the sector develops. But that isn't helping people now who cannot be tested remotely.
The $5.6 billion telehealth market in the United States has struggled for years to take off with people reluctant to connect with doctors online.Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Forward, the subscription health service, tries to bridge some of the gap with their remote tools to monitor patients. But even the clinics in Los Angeles had to set up two drive-thru locations in Glendale and Newport Beach this month in an attempt to prevent carriers of COVID-19 from entering their clinics. And doctors there say there is no substitute for hearing and touching a person up close.
"Sometimes when you are talking to a person over the phone, you think, 'gosh, I really need to listen to this person's lungs. I need to examine them'," said Keith DesRochers, a primary care physician at Forward's clinic in Century City. "People have switched in his world to thinking COVID yes or no 100 percent of the time, but people still get pneumonia, people still get asthma exacerbations, they still get the flu. We need to make sure that we aren't missing those things."
But coming into work is a frightening proposition these days.
"To be honest, primary care doctors aren't used to being fully on the frontlines and putting ourselves at risk," he said. "It's scary, we are all trying to do the best we can to take care of our patients."
***This story was updated April 8 at 1:46 p.m. to reflect the most recent rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths among health care workers as reported by L.A. County health officials.
Reach out to me on Twitter @racheluranga, where my DMs are open, email me at rachel(at)dot.la.
Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
According to a Forbes report last April, both the viewership and dollars behind women’s sports at a collegiate and professional level are growing.
In 2022, the first 32 games of the NCAA tournament had record attendance levels, breaking records set back in 2004, and largely driven by the new and rapidly growing women’s NCAA tournament. WNBA openers this year saw a 21% spike in attendance, with some teams including the LA Sparks reporting triple-digit ticket sales growth, about 121% over 2022’s total. In 2023, the average size of an LA Sparks crowd swelled to 10,396 people, up from 4,701 people.
Women make up half the population, but “also 50% of the folks that are walking into the stadium at Dodger Stadium, or your NFL fans are just about 50% women,” noted Erin Storck, a panelist and senior analyst at Los Angeles-based Elysian Park Ventures.
Storck added that in heterosexual households, women generally manage most of the family’s money, giving them huge purchasing power, a potential advantage for female-run leagues. “There's an untapped revenue opportunity,” she noted.
In the soccer world, Los Angeles-based women’s soccer team Angel City FC has put in the work to become a household name, not just in LA County but across the nation. At an LA Tech Week panel hosted by Athlete Strategies about investing in sports, Angel City head of strategy and chief of staff Kari Fleischauer said that years before launching the women’s National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City FC was pounding the pavement letting people know about the excitement ladies soccer can bring. She noted community is key, and that fostering a sense of engagement and safety at the team’s home venue, BMO stadium (formerly Banc of California Stadium), is one reason fans keep coming back.
Adding free metro rides to BMO stadium and private rooms for nursing fans to breastfeed or fans on the spectrum to avoid sensory overload, were just some of the ways ACFC tried to include its community in the concept of its stadium, Fleischauer said. She noted, though, that roughly 46% of Angel City fans are “straight white dudes hanging out with their bros.”
“Particularly [on] the woman's side, I'd like to think we do a better job of making sure that there's spaces for everyone,” Fleischauer told the audience. “One thing we realize is accessibility is a huge thing.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.
Here's what people are saying about the fifth day of L.A. Tech Week on social:
#LATechWeek has been on 🔥🔥🔥. Yes the events are super cool at amazing venues. But, I’m blown away by the people. I’ve met so many founders building generative AI companies from the ground up. I’m so bullish on LA right now🥳. LA is for builders #longLA
Thanks @rpnickson 📸 pic.twitter.com/B6rT2jJYIs
— Dr. Kelly O'Brien (@Kvo2013) June 8, 2023
Successful LatinxVC Avanza Summit 2023 in LA! It’s been an amazing few days near the beach w great company. Thank you to our panelists & participants.
Huge thanks to our incredible sponsors SVB, Chavez Family Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, PledgeLA, Fenwick & West, Countsy! pic.twitter.com/oVuGIgFurk
— LatinxVC (@LatinxVCs) June 9, 2023
30+ gaming startups presented at the A16z Speedrun Demo Day in LA yesterday. Great thanks to the @a16zGames team for an awesome day of events! #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/DKq8IFo5QZ
— Grace Zhou (@graceminzhou) June 9, 2023
📣🤩 What’s the buzz? It’s #LATechWeek from @TechstarsLA & @TechstarsHealth joint demo day with the #Techstar HC team where our @fyelabs founder/CEO Suvojit Ghosh mentored both cohorts! #TechStars demo day highlighted 12 amazing emerging #startups in #healthtech #innovation. 🩺 pic.twitter.com/0RXClCtfDQ
— FYELABS (@fyelabs) June 9, 2023
Another successful Coffee On Slauson in the books for #LATechWeek.
Special thanks to the good people at Pledge LA, SVB and @GundersonLaw for the ongoing support and the @findyourhilltop staff for providing the space, eats & vibes. ♻️ pic.twitter.com/51cMDoEn30
— Slauson & Co. (@SlausonAndCo) June 9, 2023
The perfect combo to start #LATechWeek Day 5: pastries, coffee, and great convos with industry founders ✨
Fireside chats with @enriquealle, @wp, and @robynpark pic.twitter.com/booYPdekVV
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Of course @designerfund has the most amazing pastries at their event. #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/PjyWlGTQI4
— Jesse Pickard (@jessepickard) June 9, 2023
My favorite event from @Techweek_ has to be "Modern Storytelling & Business Building." Hosted by @STHoward #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/SV1eexMJ4k
— JonnyZeller (@JonnyZeller) June 9, 2023
And the finale of the night was courtesy of the one and only @zedd for an unforgettable end to the "City of Games" party! Hosted by @a16zGames and @100Thieves #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/hliI9yLKse
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Excited to be at the @a16zGames Speedrun Demo Day! Loved the energy and excitement from the companies that pitched there. It was also great to see @Tocelot and @ndrewlee at this amazing #LATechWeek event pic.twitter.com/NfLQO5lR27
— Andy Lee | andypwlee.bit (@andypwlee) June 9, 2023
Thank you to everyone who joined the Sony Venture Fund US team at #LATechWeek for our screening of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Last summer, we started building a presence in LA. Today, it's exciting to host such an event with the @Sony family and the LA VC community. pic.twitter.com/wdDm6qtHdL
— Sony Innovation Fund (@Sony_Innov_Fund) June 9, 2023
Time to eat, connect and build while @remi_rodney provided the vibes. 🙏🏽#LATechWeek @BuildOnBase @developer_dao @WeAreRazorfish pic.twitter.com/QIPh1gjvoA
— Hola Metaverso-Blockchain & New Web Tech Events 🎪 (@holametaverso) June 9, 2023
@Lux_Capital at #LATechWeek advancing the impossible to inevitable, from..
..defense primes partnering with cutting edge defense tech startups, to..
..hardware x LLMs improving mental health.
From the rich and diverse LA ecosystem stems generational companies: pic.twitter.com/v5S5r8JtbU
— Shahin Farshchi (@Farshchi) June 9, 2023
LA Tech Week has been a blast! Met some amazing creators, founders and investors from all over the world! #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/AAh9JFELhe
— Chris Germano (@netslayer) June 9, 2023
Had such a blast at LA Tech Week and hosting events for @brexHQ
Top highlights were collabing with @pulley on an Emerging Managers / Founder mixer at the @poplco House, rooftop event in Venice, creator panel with @thechangj & proper Korean food with in KTown.
Exhausted is an… pic.twitter.com/mGQnSYGPdg
— Τyler Robinson (@TyyRob3) June 9, 2023
Did you have fun at @sophiaamoruso’s launch party for @trustfundvc? #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/gbrbXRQ9Xx
— Kay (@KaySnels) June 9, 2023
y00tilty in every city with @KaylaLor3n & @cryptochrisg813.
Welcome to the LA @y00tsNFT fam! #LATechWeek #3XP week. pic.twitter.com/6wWKlsTacx
— VanG0xH (@CryptoVanGoghs) June 9, 2023
Really enjoyed #LATechWeek. Here are some observations I made 👇
— s.personal.ai (Suman Kanuganti) (@SumanPersonalAI) June 9, 2023
Thank you @TheKofiAmpadu for including me in #demoday with the latest @a16ztxo cohort! It was a real full circle moment to witness the brilliance of both @ChrisLyons & @ZMuse_ & #PledgeLA very own. She’s why we’re #LongLA 🚀💕 #LAtechweek pic.twitter.com/itkKXMxQRb
— Qiana Qiana! (@Q_i_a_n_a) June 9, 2023
@upfrontvc Gaming Founders Podcast #iLOVELA #LATechWeek @Techweek_ @KatiaAmeri @mucker @fikavc @bonfire_vc @TenOne10 @WatertowerGroup @ganasvc @IAmRobRyan @john_at_stonks @eva_ho @dereknorton pic.twitter.com/LCbaGXCoW7
— Sean Goldfaden (@seangoldfaden) June 9, 2023
Hosts Kevin Zhang, Partner at @upfrontvc, and Eden Chen, CEO of @pragmaplatform, interviewed two special guests from @raidbaseinc Stephen Lim, Co-Founder & Product Director, and Trevor Romleski, Co-Founder & Game Director. 🎙 #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/hxHEAoELZ6
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Kicking off @a16zGames @100Thieves City of Games party at #LATechWeek 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/zQcZedG15f
— Jon Lai (@Tocelot) June 9, 2023
Yesterday at @socinnovation I got to have this AWESOME conversation with @iamwill — musician, producer, technology entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO of https://t.co/D60y1e2JOu #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/KBxK6rXyTG
— Anna Barber (@annawbarber) June 9, 2023
I absolutely love this game. Proud moment for the team @investwithatlas. #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/fPZvKXU7TC
— Tobias Francis (@TobiasFrancis) June 9, 2023
Had a blast at LA Tech Week this year with @brexHQ
From hosting & moderating my first creator panel featuring @BlakeMichael14, to a fun rooftop night in Venice, and to attending some amazing events such as Watertower’s emerging manager panel and a VC/founder tennis tournament pic.twitter.com/udjfmLHE0L
— Jonathan Chang (@thechangj) June 8, 2023
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
At Lowercarbon Capital’s LA Tech Week event Thursday, the synergy between the region’s aerospace industry and greentech startups was clear.
The event sponsored by Lowercarbon, Climate Draft (and the defunct Silicon Valley Bank’s Climate Technology & Sustainability team) brought together a handful of local startups in Hawthorne not far from LAX, and many of the companies shared DNA with arguably the region’s most famous tech resident: SpaceX.
Here’s a look at the greentech startups that pitched during the Tech Week event, and how they think what they’re building could help solve the climate crisis.
Arbor: Based in El Segundo, this year-old startup is working to convert organic waste into energy and fresh water. At the same time, it also uses biomass carbon removal and storage to remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in an attempt to avoid further damaging the earth’s ozone layer. At the Tech Week event Thursday, Arbor CEO Brad Hartwig told a stunned crowd that Arbor aims to remove about five billion tons of organic waste from landfills and turn that into about 6 PWh, or a quarter of the global electricity need, each year. Hartwig is an alumni of SpaceX; he was a manufacturing engineer on the Crew Dragon engines from 2016-2018 and later a flight test engineer at Kitty Hawk.
Antora: Sunnyvale-based Antora Energy was founded in 2017, making it one of the oldest companies on the pitching block during the event. Backed by investors including the National Science Foundation and Los Angeles-based Overture VC, Antora has raised roughly $57 million to date, most recently a $50 million round last February. Chief operating officer Justin Briggs said Antora’s goal is to modernize and popularize thermal energy storage using ultra-hot carbon. Massive heated carbon blocks can give off thermal energy, which Antora’s proprietary batteries then absorb and store as energy. It’s an ambitious goal, but one the world needs at scale to green its energy footprint. According to Briggs, “the biggest challenge is how can we turn back variable intermittent renewable electricity into something that's reliable and on demand, so we can use it to provide energy to everything we need.”
Arc: Hosting the panel was Arc, an electric boating company that’s gained surprising momentum, moving from design to delivering its first e-boats in just two years of existence. Founded in 2021, the company’s already 70 employees strong and has already sold some of its first e-boats to customers willing to pay the luxury price tag, CTO Ryan Cook said Thursday. Cook said that to meet the power needs of a battery-powered speedboat, the Arc team designed the vehicle around the battery pack with the goal of it being competitive with gas boats when compared to range and cost of gas. But on the pricing side, it’s not cheap. Arc’s flagship vessel, the Arc One is expected to cost roughly $300,000. During the panel, Cook compared the boat to being “like an early Tesla Roadster.” To date Arc Boats has raised just over $35 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kevin Durant, Will Smith and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Clarity Technology: Carbon removal startup Clarity is based in LA and was founded by Yale graduate and CEO Glen Meyerowitz last year. Clarity is working to make “gigaton solutions for gigaton problems.” Their aim? To remove up to 2,000 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere through direct air capture, a process which uses massive fans to move chemicals that capture CO2. But the challenge, Meyerowitz noted in his speech, is doing this at scale in a way that makes an actual dent in the planet’s emissions while also efficiently using the electricity needed to do so. Meyerowitz spent nearly five years working as an engineer for SpaceX in Texas, and added he’s looking to transfer those learnings into Clarity.
Parallel Systems: Based in Downtown LA’s Arts District, this startup is building zero-emission rail vehicles that are capable of long-haul journeys otherwise done by a trucking company. The estimated $700 billion trucking industry, Parallel Systems CEO Matt Soule said, is ripe for an overhaul and could benefit from moving some of its goods off-road to electric railcars. According to Soule, Parallel’s electric battery-powered rail vehicles use 25% of the energy a semi truck uses, and at a competitive cost. Funded in part by a February 2022 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Parallel Systems has raised about $57 million to date. Its most recent venture funding round was a $49 million Series A led by Santa Monica-based VC Anthos Capital. Local VCs including Riot Ventures and Santa Monica-based Embark Ventures are also backers of Parallel.
Terra Talent: Unlike the rest of the startups pitching at the Tech Week event, Terra Talent was focused on building teams rather than technology. Founder Dolly Singh worked at SpaceX, Oculus and Citadel as a headhunter, and now runs Terra, a talent and advisory firm that helps companies recruit top talent in the greentech space. But, she said, she’s concerned that all the work these startups are doing won’t matter unless we very quickly turn around the current trendlines. “Earth will shake us off like and she will do just fine in 10,000 years,” she said. “It’s our way of living, everything we love is actually here on earth… there’s nothing I love on Mars,” adding that she’s hopeful the startups that pitched during the event will be instrumental in making sure the planet stays habitable for a little while longer.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.