[nCight, Inc] - Round 10 Proposal Creating a B2B Marketplace for Orthopedic Surgery Data

OceanDAO Round 10
#1

Grant Proposal Template

Grant Proposal

Part 1 - Proposal Submission

Name of Project: nCight, Inc: Creating a B2B Marketplace for Orthopedic Surgery Data

Proposal in one sentence: Unlocking independent orthopedic surgeon arthroscopic imaging data for medical device companies with recruitment and tokenization of data assets onto theOcean Marketplace.

Description of the project and what problem is it solving: Independent physicians struggle with maintaining autonomy due to the negative reimbursement pressures from third party payors. For the first time in the history of the United States, the number of employed physicians outnumber independent physicians. Orthopedic surgeons have been able to withstand the consolidating pressures largely due to access to ancillary streams of revenue such as ambulatory surgery centers and owning PT and advanced imaging (e.g. MRI). Even with these additional streams of income the number of surgeons in private practice has declined by over 30% over the last 20 years. Independent physicians drive innovation and represent an important part of the healthcare system. It was independent surgeons that pioneered advances in pain management and anesthesia to make outpatient procedures safe and cost effective, saving the healthcare system 100’s of millions of dollars. There is therefore a public interest in keeping physicians independent. By focusing on this group of physicians with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and fierce desire to maintain autonomy we believe this represents an early adopter group.

We aim to engage independent Orthopedic Surgeons into the data economy by leveraging the Ocean Protocol to turn data assets in the form of surgical images into tokenized assets that will be provided to medical device data consumers. The orthopedic medical device market is a $39.5 B industry. Limited access to surgeon use data makes market analysis and servicing of current products difficult. In comparison, the $2.6T pharmaceutical industry has access to granular data through companies like Iqvia ($48B) that assist marketing and decision making, there is no equivalent in the medical device space. This is where our opportunity lies to provide granular, unique data to a specific customer segment from data producers motivated to engage. nCight, Inc utilizing the Ocean protocol will establish a network of orthopedic surgeons and their patients to align incentives of patients, physicians and data consumers creating a marketplace for data assets. nCight, Inc will function as a trusted party through relationships within the orthopedic surgery world to bootstrap the network. We will be creating a business to business marketplace.

The initial approach will be to consolidate one side of this market by building our physician network of data assets. Care will be taken to not build something with no buyers so we will also conduct experiments testing our value hypothesis that medical device companies will engage with nCight, Inc if we build a regional network of physicians that demonstrate our ability to scale and engage with a segment of physicians. nCight, Inc will serve as a service intermediary connecting the crypto immature physician network to crypto immature medical device companies. We anticipate as adoption and comfort increases, more participants will manage these data relationships internally.

Reportable metrics for our physician network will be the 1. number of surgeons, 2. number of images, 3. number of datasets, 4. percent of contacted MD’s providing implant images.

Proposal Goals

  1. Recruit 5 orthopedic surgeons to participate in the Ocean protocol marketplace.

Surgeons will provide arthroscopic images, and explore the Ocean marketplace. This will introduce them to the price discovery aspects of the Ocean protocol and familiarize crypto immature independent physicians with the potential of data sharing. The goal is to establish the value of previously underappreciated assets in the form of arthroscopic images. This we believe can lead to scaling not only to other surgeons providing images, but also serving as a starting point for other valuable data assets produced by both physicians and patients. There are approximately 31,000 Orthopedic Surgeons in the United States. Of these, approximately 57% are in independent practice (n=17,670). There are approximately 4000 sports medicine surgeons who perform nearly 1.4 million arthroscopic cases per year generating over 10 million arthroscopic images per year. nCight, Inc will assist in getting a portion of this data onto the OCEAN platform and into the data economy. As part of this project we will assist data producers in establishing wallets and receiving Ocean Tokens, enabling future participation in the ecosystem to include image labeling and annotation, submission of their own data assets and general participation in Ocean ecosystem. Participating physicians will be compensated with OCEAN tokens to incentivize participation and support the network. We will conduct some surveying to identify the price discovery of the proper incentive amount to engage busy surgeons.

  1. Demonstrate traction and growth engine for physician recruitment:

In addition to recruiting 5 surgeons we will optimize a referral network as we believe our most effective engine of growth to be viral through maintaining a viral coefficient (k) >1.0 with each surgeon we onboard to the platform referring at least 2 colleagues. We will contact surgeons to join a physician network and we will report on referral links sent from surgeons to colleagues and their subsequent conversion estimated by providing contact information and signing up for a mailing list.

Number of surgeons: e.g. 5

Avg number of Referrals: (Referrals/surgeons) e.g. 30/5 = 6 referrals per surgeon

Total Referrals: e.g. 30

Percentage of Referrals that convert (sign up for mailing list): (Mailing List/Total referrals) e.g. 10/30 = 33%

Viral coefficient : (Converted referrals+number of surgeons)/number of surgeons e.g. (10+5)/5= 3 (for each one surgeon, they successfully recruit 3 other surgeons)

Grant Deliverables:

  • ロ Grant Deliverable 1: 5 Physician Data Providers
  • ロGrant Deliverable 2: 5 Arthroscopic Image Datasets Placed on Ocean Marketplace
  • ロ Grant Deliverable 3: High (80%) compliance data providers
  • ロGrant Deliverable 4: Pre and Post Study Survey Related To Perceived Data Value

Which category best describes your project?

  • Unleash data

Which Fundamental Metric best describes your project?

Datatoken Contracts

Total Value Locked

What is the final product?: Published datasets on Ocean Marketplace

How does this project drive value to the “fundamental metric” (listed above) and the overall Ocean ecosystem? What is the expected ROI?

With a total addressable market of 1.4 million arthroscopic cases performed in the United States every year capturing 10% of those cases should result in 140,000 cases. We believe this is ultimately an obtainable goal considering our target group of independent orthopedic surgeons represents nearly 60% of the total orthopedic surgeon pool. We have already piloted and deployed on the ocean marketplace a sample dataset contract.

https://market.oceanprotocol.com/asset/did:op:3af10546654FCe4b42D948aB485D13D9EFB427D7

Using data from this pilot contract, we estimate that each arthroscopic case is worth $4.87 (on 10/3/21). Based on the current market value of an arthroscopic case we estimate the total addressable market to be $681,800 ($4.87 x 140,000) if we can consolidate 10% of the arthroscopic images in the orthopedic market. Accounting for the required 30% provider shares which incentive data producer participation we estimate a total BANG of $477K. “While this level of return is not expected to be obtained in phase 1, we believe with a viral growth engine that functions with 2 referrals per physician we can reach this 400 surgeons within 12 months. With our access to orthopedic surgeons through our professional network we believe our chance of success is 70%.

Funding Requested: $20,000 (Buck)

ROI: $477K/20K = 23.8 *70%= 16.6

Proposal Wallet Address: 0x0cEC1Dbc5Db276dE35808bf717a4491082fDb8d8

Have you previously received an OceanDAO Grant (N)?

Team Website (if applicable): N/A

Twitter Handle (if applicable):N/A

Discord Handle (if applicable): @cryptoaware

Project lead Contact Email: asexton@ncight.com

Country of Residence: United States

Part 2 - Team

Core Team

Alonzo Sexton MD

Michael Dural

  • Role: Chief Digital Marketing, Operations
  • Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
  • Background/Experience:
    • Co-founder, COO blacQube
    • Account Executive, Razorfish
    • Alliance Manager, Interwoven
    • Manager, Accenture
  • Key Clients
    • Mercedes-AMG
    • Cigarette Racing Team
    • FedEx
    • Coca-Cola
    • IWC

Darrell Philpot

  • Role: Project Manager
  • Relevant Credentials:
  • Background/Experience:
    • SVP, Alpha
    • Account Executive, Razorfish
    • Alliance Manager, Interwoven
    • Manager, Accenture

David Livingston

  • Role: Head of Sales, Strategic Partnerships
  • Relevant Credentials:
  • Background/Experience:
    • Senior Vice President, IMG
    • Director National Corporate Sponsorships, Spectra
    • Director of Partnerships, Cleveland Cavaliers
    • Brand Manager, Procter & Gamble

Advisors

John Butler

John Sibley Butler holds the J. Marion West Chair for Constructive Capitalism in the Graduate School of Business (Department of Management) at the University of Texas - Austin. He is a professor in the Management Department and holds a joint appointment in Organizational Behavior in the College of Liberal Arts, where he holds the Darrell K. Royal Regents Professorship in Ethics and American Society (Sociology). His research is in the areas of Organizational Behavior and Entrepreneurship/New Ventures. His research appears in professional journals and books. He is the Sam Barshop Fellow at The IC2 Institute, an organization dedicated to the creation of new ventures throughout the world.

Jeff Spence

Jeff Spence has a wealth of experience in the venture, private equity and startup world. He has served roles as both a managing and operating director in a multitude of companies including Source capital and Caedan. He is on the board of directors of Displayit, and PTI Security Systems. He brings operating experience and over 20 years of expertise from the startup world.

Russell Smith

Founder of RTS Associates, Russell has been CEO for over 20 years. The company is one of the leading telecom suppliers in the Southeast. He is an advisor for several startup companies including Verady, a blockchain tax solution firm. Russell is a member of the Young Presidents Organization, Board of Trustees for Leadership Georgia and a member of the Northeast Georgia Health System Foundation Board of Trustees.

Jeb Stewart

Jeb Stewart is an entrepreneur and investor. He was founder and chairman of SciHealth Holdings, Inc, a healthcare decision support software and consulting solutions company. He has also been involved in starting and/or building businesses in telecommunications, computer hardware and software, construction, and manufacturing. Jeb has served in leadership positions or governing boards of more than three dozen business and civic organizations. He has directly invested in more than six dozen startup- and early stage- businesses and multiple venture capital funds, serving as an active advisor to many of them.

Mary Harris

Mary is the President of BioTechnical Communications, Inc. She has 34 years of expertise in business development, corporate strategy, corporate finance and government grants and contracting. She has a PhD in molecular genetics from Cornell University.

Part 3 - Proposal Details

Project Deliverables - Category:

  • Arthroscopic Image Datasets will be made available on Ocean Marketplace

  • Plan for scaling, focused on viral growth engine

  • 1000 images within published datasets.

Project Deliverables - Roadmap

  • Week 1-3: Recruit Surgeons and obtain letters of intent, MVP design to learn optimal nudge strategy to sustainable data stream
  • Week 4-6: Learning goal: Optimal nudge strategy to modify image capture behavior (i.e. how to best get surgeons to share different data element)
  • Week 6-8: After collecting data, get surgeons to download cryptocurrency wallet and receive OCEAN Tokens
  • Week 8-10: Place dataset on Ocean protocol
  • Any prior work completed thus far? Pilot dataset posted on the Polygon network.
  • Please include the team’s future plans and intentions.
    • Reporting on token value and liquidity of datasets
    • Website development for growth
    • Inclusion of referral link capture on website to monitor growth with a goal of keeping viral coefficient >1.
#2

I think your proposal is extremely niche, but most definitely an interesting use-case.

I’d be interested to reading about your plans to on-board consumers for the datasets you’re creating. If you add this to your deliverables, you’ve got our vote!

Cheers
DW

#3

Thanks DW for your comment. You are 100% correct regarding the consumer side of the marketplace being the challenge. As part of our strategic plan we will focus on consolidating one side of the marketplace (physicians) in this phase. We plan to demonstrate the ability to gain traction and scaling of this network prior to engaging consumers as the question we are likely to receive is “how big is the network”

Many of the target consumers such as medical device companies are certainly crypto immature and we will initially need to provide services to these companies to access the data on the ocean marketplace. We will incentivize participation in the Ocean Protocol, by offering “discounts” for paying for services in OCEAN, but predict this will take additional education. In further proposals I certainly expect to add the consumer side of the equation.

Thanks for your interest.

#4

Hey Team,

We thought we’ll support this and just submitted our vote for this proposal. Good luck.

If you have time, go ahead and review our Proposal on the Port. Let us know whether you have any comments.

Cheers,
Data Whale

#5

Thank you Data Whale team

#6

Interesting idea.
Would like to see a data marketplace in the first month with the first data set published.
Can you do more with less? I’d like to see a proposal in the range of $2-8k for a first proposal to build trust with the community. For this reason, I will downvote and ask that you resubmit next month with a more modest ask and more demonstrable results earlier.