JASTR, INC. is a company founded by Carl Jamilkowski, Kevin Rand and Chris Ha. Their main goal is to decentralize healthcare and its return to the ordinary man.
The story of JASTR is the amalgamation of three narratives that derive from the name and acronyms; there’s the story of Human Factors, of Science and Technology, and of innovation economics and the entrepreneurs themselves. The Scientific and Technological reference is Digital Health, the emerging market and science they are pioneering.
Their team is a reflection of JASTR’s core competencies: digital health sciences, health care, hardware, human computer interaction, mobile technology, product design, and software. They have academic, start-up, and enterprise industry leadership and management experience from many leading companies and universities.
“To take from one of the greatest entrepreneurs (without sounding trite), Jobs says ‘you can only connect dots looking back.’ I was fortunate to have a high exposure to all types of scientific, technological, and design initiatives that influence product innovation at JASTR. The inkling to develop JASTR was an inherent appeal to create technology that would impact greater consumer bases; solve complex problems through market-based approaches, and to work within my domain expertise and skills” says Chris Ha.
JASTR, Inc. is a design-technology corporation focused on building what they term, “IoH” technology, which stands for Internet of Health technology (both hardware and software) for digital health sciences clients and consumers. Their technology allows digital health and health care stakeholders to experience consumer-centric, mobile-first products and services. Unlike other health companies, JASTR, Inc. allows any stakeholder, immediate access to digital health and health care across five levels, made accessible through their fingertips. Rather than deal with bureaucratic health institutions and large-hospitals, JASTR, Inc. innovates the delivery of care through new web-based software, mobile devices, and software-enabled hardware products with the aim to make digital health and health care as a whole: decentralized, integrated, and aligned.
This platform is an idea that accumulated from years of merging intersecting fields together – with an aim to bring creativity and innovation into a slow-moving industry. The only way to truly humanize and personalize the practice of health, science, and medicine is to pragmatically include intersecting sciences (art, technology, philosophy, economics) into the design process of (digital health) technology.
During the interview, Chris Ha said, “Personally, I’ve always enjoyed science and technology; and as a start-up entrepreneur, one should always focus on his/her strengths. I grew up next to a computer hacker who let my brother and me play with his CPU hardware and I went to a GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program that emphasized STEM and Montessori style teaching at a young age; that didactic yet discovery-driven environment helped develop my passions for physics, biological animal models, and applied sciences such as medicine, applied economics, and design science.”
We asked Chris Ha “What was the biggest hurdle you faced to begin with this Start-up?”
“The biggest hurdle that every start-up faces is turning the narrative into a movement. When JASTR first started, it was just one person; now we have a solid team of design engineers and human infrastructure for growth and development. The major turning point was location and people: we went from mainly bringing on like-minded talented from New York to acquiring technologists from multiple locations (Palo Alto, Boston, New York, Princeton, Florida, etc.) and tech start-up scenes”, she says.
“Their approach to renewing the healthcare market is to reverse engineer the ill-incentives in healthcare through a bottom-up approach: designing for the consumer.
One of the greatest barriers to adoption of new scientific and technological advances is the psychology of the individual user. Without knowledge on how to innovate within the law, alignment of stakeholder interest, and both short-term and long-term vision: a fully digital and data driven health care system is still a pipe dream. As a result, consumers are unable to fully capitalize on the potential of well-designed technology to enable quality care and empowered decision-making.
JASTR provides easy-to-integrate software and software-enabled hardware solutions that can be used agnostically by any stakeholder in health—their products will work to reimagine every human’s health behavior through the lens of a mobile device and put science and technology in the hands of the consumer. They design through user-centric innovation principles so that use of technology is stress-free, unobtrusive, uncomplicated.
The incumbent market is the monolithic electronic health record (EHR) providers who design technology for monopolizing healthcare stakeholders (providers, payers). We believe the winners will be the ones who take on value-based care, health savings accounts, and innovative technologies that are interlinking to those trends. For JASTR, ultimate goal is to not make winners and losers, but to build new consumer value to help the rest of the stakeholders become winners as it aligns with consumer-facing value.
For their first two IoH hardware products, the target market audiences are the athletic sports community and the geriatric population; those who are at risk for concussions, mild-traumatic brain injury (mTBI), chronic dehydration, and malnutrition. The product offerings serve best those with overlapping health conditions. In sports those are found in athletic programs such as high school and collegiate universities; those of the geriatric population are found in nursing home facilities or home care services.
“We want to move from consumer-facing product development to enterprise level product development and we want to build development teams in every burgeoning technology hub such as TX, DC, SF, SD, LA, CO, SEA; as well as European technology hubs such as France, London, Ireland, Australia, and Japan”, says Chris Ha.
The great thing about their platform design is that it was designed to organize health care systems agnostically not just the US health care system.
JASTR has a high chance of becoming a global platform for healthcare and therefore we foresee a bright future for them.
Update: They have a beta program, feel free to sign up.
To know more, visit: http://www.jastr.co/beta
