Simplifying complex illness care at scale
Current Description: RTHM provides virtual-first care for complex illness including Long COVID, ME/CFS, POTS, and mast cell activation. Many clinics focus on teaching patients how to better cope with symptoms, which is helpful, but we don’t stop there. We develop collaborations & partnerships so our patients access to the most promising testing and root-cause directed early therapies for their illness(es) with the goal of simplifying and streamlining the most efficient and effective clinical pathways so they can be scaled in the form of low cost online modules overseen remotely by clinicians. In conjunction with clinical care, RTHM operates a clinical lab and collects deep molecular data with robust clinical context to develop AI-powered diagnostics and better ways of predicting which treatments may work best for whom.
Active Founders
Ryan Kellogg
Dr. Kellogg’s struggle with a mystery illness led him to pioneer technology for measuring thousands of molecules in self-collected blood microsamples. This allows for a better understanding of health fluctuations and the impacts of health interventions in detail. When combined with wearable sensors and symptom tracking, this technology allows for real-time health monitoring and pattern discovery with unprecedented resolution. PhD in Microfluidics and Systems Biology from ETH Zurich.
Jennifer Curtin
Physician treating post-viral illnesses & ME/CFS for >5 yrs, Long COVID for the past year. Member of the ME/CFS Clinician Coalition & co-author of the latest Coalition ME/CFS expert management guidance published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings 8/25/2021. Streamlined/mapped the complex decision making, testing & treatment logic for Long COVID & frequently diagnosed co-morbid illnesses (incl ME/CFS) so it can be more rapidly utilized by new healthcare providers and scaled.
Hear from the founders
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
Co-founder Ryan Kellogg worked in co-founder Mike Snyder’s lab at Stanford for 5 years developing remote lab and wearables monitoring technology that are being used at RTHM. Ryan met Jen Curtin on a dating app in 2020 and they connected over their mutual lived experience with ME/CFS that drove each to pursue different ways of improving the healthcare system’s poor recognition and handling of the complex system of conditions like ME/CFS that frequently are triggered or dramatically worsened by infections. Ryan and Jen were each working on their own separate startups when they met, but decided to join forces as SARS-CoV2 ripped through the world triggering long term symptoms eerily similar to those of ME/CFS in 10-30% of those who “recover.” They knew the medical system that had been so ill-equipped to diagnose and manage their conditions years ago was still not where it needed to be to handle millions of people suddenly developing similar symptoms and conditions.
How did you decide to apply to Y Combinator? What was your experience applying, going through the batch, and fundraising at demo day?
We were convinced to apply by a friend of Ryan’s who had just gone through YC with his startup.