Startup Spotlight: Shyro Health

Startup Spotlight is an interview series where we ask health, fitness, and wellness startups that use Terra, to share their wisdom from their journey to success and also where they see fitness data going in the future.

For this week's spotlight, we connected with Kat Kuzmeskas, founder of Shyro, the app that is helping patients take control of their data.

Shyro is a platform that is helping patients essentially take control of their data.

So it's an app, a cooperative, and a marketplace in the future. The idea is that it's a patient-owned data platform that's going to power the future of healthcare. So what we're doing right now is we're bringing individuals' data in from their wearables and we reward them for their movement, basically. Or if it's referrals that come into the app, we reward them for doing competitions, things that are basically getting them out and moving. And the idea is to then essentially create a health vault for them. So they're going to have their wearables data, but then also their electronic medical record data in one place, that we can personalize and help them take better control of their health.

I started to realize that our health data is for sale - everywhere

So I was actually working at Yale New Haven health system. It's a multi-hospital health system here in the United States. Most people know Yale University, so it's affiliated with the university. My job was to analyze data, we actually purchased data, we analyzed it, and I used that to grow the market share. That's when I started to realize that our health data is for sale - everywhere. Even in London, the NHS has all of your data in one place and people tapped into it for COVID. The NHS actually struck a deal with Google, which I think there's a lawsuit about, I think Google misrepresented what they were going to do. So our health data is out there, and people are tapping into it. And I had no idea that that was happening, but I also realized when I was at Yale that that data is actually really important. So at the time, we used it to figure out the best place to put the next doctor's clinic. We also used it for clinical operations and just general hospital operations. The data is actually helpful, it saves a lot of money and efficiency. I just wished at that time and still do that person knew that their health day was out there and actually getting sold. Every time we sign a HIPAA consent form or some consent form for your data, it doesn't say it explicitly, but you actually giving over the right for other people to purchase your data and then to actually sell your data. So that didn't sit right with me and so we've really been trying to figure out how to make this better since our parent company Tamarin was founded in 2017. So we've been at this for quite a while.

How did you turn it into a company?

I started by trying to figure out what others were doing in the space, like how can we actually connect electronic medical records. Here in the United States, our data sits in a lot of different places. So if you see five different doctors, your health information is in five different places and it's really inconvenient. So once I started to figure out that data doesn't really move because of business reasons, I started to try to figure out how to create a new business incentive around making that data move. So that's where we are now with Shyro and it actually pairs nicely with data privacy regulations that are going on now globally, where people are starting to realize that their data is being sold and companies like Facebook and Amazon are just going crazy with their data. So it's kind of a way to bring the autonomy back to the patient, you now have all these tools. Terra is an example of one of them. You've created a standardized API, which is awesome. That allows folks to kind of bring all that data from different places into one, which is, I think how a lot of your clients are using Terra, I've read the other bios and it seems like we're all just helping people bring stuff in one place. So that was the idea. One thing to note is Shyro is cooperative. I'm not sure if you're familiar with a cooperative model, but a cooperative model is super cool. Because instead of corporations, it actually allows us to profit share with anyone that uses the app that signs up as a cooperative member. That's kind of different from traditional corporations, where like bonuses and dividends or profits, or the ability to invest and get shares, is really just reserved for the leadership team, team members, or investors. But with a cooperative, you can actually open up that to everybody. So we wanted to do that because we want to try to find all the ways possible for patients to be able to get in on what's happening with their data.

Biggest challenge so far?

I would say the biggest challenge in all of our histories I think is just people not realizing what's happening to their health data and thinking that there's no other option. I feel like as individuals we've kind of given up on Facebook and Google just taking our data and we don't really have a say, but I think we have a chance to change that for healthcare data and it's a lot more personal anyway. So I think that's been the biggest challenge is just helping people realize that your data is out there, it's getting sold, and there is something you can do about it.

Biggest achievement?

Our app is doing really well so we have some cool stats. So we saw 156% growth from August to September and 612% growth from September to October. So pretty, pretty exciting.

What's your current focus on now?

I think so two main focal points. One is just continuing to add cool features to the app and second of all is we actually launched public fundraising, so crowdfunding on Wefunder, which allows anyone to invest just $100 or more. And so we're really pushing that to kind of create and grow the community around Shyro. So you can come in and use the app, but you can also be an investor, and get any of the upsides that comes from Shyro in the future.

What would you say are your goals and vision for the future?

What we envision is a kind of this platform around healthcare data. So all your data sits in one place and you get to direct what happens to it, where it goes, who can use it, and then being able to benefit when someone does actually use the data. So for example connecting to paid clinical trials based on your profile, and personalized statistics. If you have data across different places, your wearable data is great, but if you pair that with your electronic medical record data gets even more powerful. So I'd say kind of this idea of a platform around healthcare data, specifically with you as the center and that personalization.

What would you say are the biggest issues in the space?

I would say, you guys are helping to solve one of them, which is just that healthcare data sits in a lot of different formats and it would be much better if it was all standardized. I think your tagline is like the plaid for health care. So now everyone uses plaid or some sort of API to connect to their bank, we need to just be able to do that for health care and it's long past due. So I think that you guys are tackling one of the biggest issues and being that API you're poised to connect with all of this digital health. I would also say just think about data availability in general. Data availability in healthcare for researchers, for patients, for patients to actually give to their doctors, like, healthcare data should be moving, and right now it's moving to the wrong people, and we need to shift that.

What do you see as the future of the space as a whole?

I think the future for the space as a whole is standardized and fitness APIs like you guys have. There's also a standardized API that's required now by law for electronic medical records. There's a similar standard in Europe for electronic medical records. So I think we're gonna start seeing standardized APIs for healthcare and not fire, I don't think it's gonna be fire. And I think we'll start to see, we actually use to educate our senior leadership at Yale on this, healthcare has really lagged behind as a consumer-driven market, and I think we are at the tipping point of it becoming a consumer-driven market. I think it's only going to grow and only gonna get faster, you're gonna be consumers instead of patients. And we'll be putting their feet?? virtually, or at brick-and-mortar places.

How are you using health data?

So for right now we just use it to reward users for their movement, so we encourage general basic movement, we're more for the general population, we're not taught to your athlete driven, so we're really helping to support people to just get out and move. So I'm a parent of two under two, and it's a lot. It's hard to even get out inside and walk :) so we're kind of focusing on that, like, how do you get 5–10 minutes of movement in your day, and we want to reward you for that and then we'll grow from there to move into more personalization.

How do you see kind of the future for like wearables and health tracking?

So this is kind of a polarising topic. I think some people are for them, and some people are against them - I'm all for wearables and wearable data. I think they're only gonna get better and they're only gonna get more accurate, and I think it's going to be part of our daily lives. So one of the companies that I'm following, I think a lot of people are following, are continuous glucose monitoring companies like levels and some of the others. And the reason why I think that's really great is that I think there's just so much we don't know about our body and I think if we had that continuous, real-world, in-the-moment data, we could learn a lot. So I think once that technology drops in price, I think these devices for our health will become ubiquitous. I think it's just gonna kind of be the same way that we're tethered to our iPhone, I think we'll be tethered to our health data as well.

Or is it just for now like, is your focus on essentially digitizing the healthcare and utilizing steps? Are you looking at other metrics?

I would prefer to take all of the metrics and kind of cross-reference the user's health metrics. I think the steps are great, but we look at all activity data. I think when we pull from the Terra API, we either take activity or steps, whichever one kind of is the superseding number. But it'd be really cool too, you know, help people cohort themselves. So, for example, Strava is a running app, for example. In ours, what we would like to do is you can start a competition with other parents, or you can start a competition with people that are training for a marathon, or people that are training for a bike race, or, you know, weightlifting. So kind of having an activity tag, if you will, would allow us to kind of cohort individuals so that they can find each other so that's kind of, we really like all of the health data, because it's more flexibility than just steps.

Is there anything else you wanted to mention?

So I pushed this meeting out because I knew we'd be launching our fundraising so we can publicly push our fundraising since it's public crowdfunding. So just a shout-out for that would be super cool and it's really just a way for people to get in on the ground floor. We really want to help people see that there is an opportunity and that they can come into digital health, it's not just for VCs and angel investors.