Latest news with #Stansell
Business Insider
22-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Check out the exclusive 18-slide pitch deck an ex-Uber leader used to raise $10 million to build AI for hospital-at-home tech
More hospitals want to bring care into the home, but many are missing the technology to support that shift. Axle Health is building AI that can help. Before launching Axle Health, CEO Adam Stansell helped launch Uber Eats in the northeastern US, coordinating food-delivery logistics in the new market. He later joined Motive, a logistics software company for trucking fleets. In 2020, when hospitals were scrambling to enable hospital-at-home care during the pandemic, Stansell, his cofounder Connor Hailey, and some of Stansell's former Uber colleagues set out to create the same intelligence infrastructure for healthcare that the gig economy had built for itself. Now, Axle Health has raised a $10 million Series A led by F-Prime Capital, Business Insider has learned exclusively. Y Combinator, Pear VC, and Lightbank also participated in the round. Axle's software uses AI to handle some of the hardest problems in home healthcare: scheduling, routing, and patient engagement. Its logistics engine can coordinate care based on clinical eligibility, patient preferences, clinician license levels, and even cost, all in real time. Its customers now include large health systems, independent home health agencies, mobile phlebotomy providers, and high-acuity dispatch services. Axle Health originally set out to be a home health provider, powered by its proprietary technology. The company joined Y Combinator's Winter 2021 cohort and quickly scaled to operate in all 50 states, growing to a couple of million dollars in revenue, Stansell said. But in 2023, the startup pivoted to focus on building and licensing its technology for other hospital-at-home providers. "We realized it's better for us — and better for the industry — if instead of keeping the technology for ourselves, we built tools to empower every home health provider," Stansell said. Axle Health announced it had raised $4.4 million in funding in February 2024, which Stansell said included seed funding from 2021 and additional funding Axle raised after the business pivoted. In the past year, Stansell said Axle Health has grown its revenue tenfold. The home health market is growing fast, accelerated by an aging population, clinician shortages, and rising consumer demand for in-home care. Other startups are racing to meet that demand, including by forging ahead with the tech-enabled services model that Axle shelved, like Sprinter Health, which recently landed a $55 million Series B led by General Catalyst to provide at-home preventive care. Later-stage players, acute-care home health provider DispatchHealth and home care tech company Medically Home, merged in March. Axle wants to differentiate itself both by plugging its tech into the existing home health ecosystem and by building technology that clinicians actually want to use, said Stansell. Axle's AI generates logistics plans that clinicians trust, which is an especially difficult bar to clear. And Axle's team, Stansell said, with its several ex-Uber leads, is a key ingredient in the startup's secret sauce. Next up, Axle plans to improve its patient engagement capabilities, including rolling out AI-powered voice call features for patients. It's also expanding its integrations with electronic medical record systems and forming more direct connections with other companies contributing to home health operations, like medical equipment suppliers and pharmacies. "You're not going to have one provider that's going to solve the whole thing," Stansell said. "You need an ecosystem." Here's the 18-slide pitch deck Axle Health used to raise its $10 million Series A. Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Health Axle Healt Axle Health Axle Health
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
With measles cases rising across country, Alabama doctors encourage vaccination of children
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — The Alabama Department of Public Health is encouraging people to vaccinate their children against measles. That comes as the ADPH said the disease is on the rise across the country, including neighboring Georgia. While no cases have been recorded in Alabama at this point, the Jefferson County Department of Health said it is something to keep an eye on. 'There are several groups that are highly likely to suffer from complications,' said JCDH Deputy Health Officer Allury Lal. 'For example, children that are less than 5 years of age, older than 20 years of age, women that are pregnant and people that have a weakened immune system because of other medical conditions like leukemias, HIV, tuberculosis.' The JCDH said vaccines are a big help in preventing the spread of the measles. Dr. Keith Stansell at Alabama Pediatrics said because of them, measles is a disease many of today's doctors have not seen a case of themselves. 'Fortunately, we've been very successful from our vaccine efforts,' Stansell said. 'But the unfortunate part of that is we've also been so successful that now the fear of potential side effects is much greater than that of the actual disease.' Doctors said measles is a highly contagious virus that lives in the nose and throat mucus of people infected and spreads through airborne droplets. Children and adults are susceptible to the disease. The ADPH said those who have not been vaccinated against the measles have a 90% chance of becoming infected if exposed and can spread the virus for up to three weeks. 'COVID was considered a highly contagious disease, right? And so we talked about these things called R-naught value where if one person gets infected, then how many people they come in contact with will then be infected?' Stansell said. 'So for instance, with COVID, that number was five. Ok, so if I became infected with COVID, then I would potentially infect five people around me. For measles, it's 18. It is over three times more infectious than COVID, which was one of the things that we considered to be one of the most contagious things out there.' Video shows arrest of Jefferson County teacher in Blount County sting operation The ADPH said measles symptoms come in chronological order. It starts with a high fever, cough and runny nose and then a rash develops. According to the ADPH, the measles vaccine is a two-part shot. One dose is given around 12-15 months and the second between ages 4 and 6. Doctors said there are no specific medicines to treat the measles as a whole and it must be treated symptomatically. 'Before the vaccine, we relied heavily on people developing antibodies, so if they made it past that rash and didn't have any sort of the side effects and severe illness from measles, then we would use that as the way to build immunity in the community,' said Dr. Rachael Lee, an associate professor with the UAB Division of Infectious Diseases. 'But with the vaccine, one vaccine is 88% effective against the measles, two vaccines is 97% effective.' Doctors said one reason behind the rise in measles cases is people not getting their shots. In the early 2000s, doctors said there was a study published linking the measles vaccine to autism, but they said that study has since been debunked. Doctors said they understand there is still mistrust in vaccines, especially after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. 'It's not an issue I think parents are trying to be different or trying to not vaccinate their children against these diseases because most of our parents we talk to just genuinely want to make the right decision for their children,' Stansell said. 'It is OK to have concerns about vaccines, but the goal is to find a trusted physician or someone like that, your family medicine doctor, that you can ask those questions to, so that you can understand them better,' Lee said. 'I think unfortunately in this day and age, there's a lot of misinformation going on, so anything we can do to help with that, to answer your questions, to kind of dig deeper into the really confusing studies that clinicians, it can even be confusing for them as well. Find out those trusted sources and try to understand what that data is showing.' Stansell said the measles vaccine is still one of the required shots for children before they enter kindergarten. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
