SAN FRANCISCO — Representatives from AARP and Geisinger Health System make no pretensions: They’re not into technology just because it’s cool.

While the 50+ population and doctors appear to be dissimilar markets, selling to either requires a deep understanding of customer needs rather than just a sense of having “the next big thing.”

If you’re a startup targeting either market, you need to wise up.

Here are a couple pointers from AARP and Geisinger, gleaned from a panel discussion at HealthBeat today.

How can entrepreneurs sell into a health system?

Geisinger Health System serves over 3 million people and is a premier case study in how to deliver effective care. Chanin Wendling leads their eHealth initiatives and gets so many calls each week from entrepreneurs that, she says, her “head is spinning.”

“Everyone has a cool new idea but no one has tested it,” Wendling says.

For startups that want to work with Geisinger, Wendling first wants to see a solid clinical business case where the technology solves a tangible problem faced by patients or physicians.

Once approved, her team will pilot the technology, sometimes three or four different ways, to figure out the right approach to product launch.

The technology must also integrate with their online medical records, and Wendling anticipates that the system will implement a data integration layer to facilitate more seamless deployment of technology in the future.

Understanding the 50+ market

The 100 million people who comprise the digital health market for 50+ is worth about $20 billion. Nice market, if you can get it.

Jody Holtzmann, a senior vice president at AARP, advocates that startups embrace the idea of “connected living,” which includes maintaining relationships with family, preserving autonomy, and enjoying life, rather than just connected health (focused on health maintenance.)

For the aging, adopting products in order to live life on their own terms is more appealing than using technology to assist with medication adherence. For example, the physical fitness market for 50+ is projected to reach $1.8 billion over the next five years.

But for now, Holtzmann asserts that the “quantified self” movement doesn’t reasonate with his target population: “You’re a fanatic and wearing a self-tracking device is a way to let everyone know what a fanatic you are,” he says.

Instead, he advocates that startups approach this group in a way that’s engaging, inviting, and, most importantly, fun.

Photo: Meghan Kelly, VentureBeat, moderator of the session. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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Keas announced at Healthbeat today two new content partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia that will help employees make wiser nutritional choices and save employers money on health care costs. 

Businesses use Keas to create and manage their workplace health programs. The system promotes healthy behavior and teamwork by rewarding people for achieving simple exercise and nutrition goals through games and social motivation. Keas’ CEO Josh Stevens said that seventy to eighty percent of health care costs are preventable, like those caused by smoking and over-eating, or conditions triggered by certain habits and behaviors. Unhealthy habits can lead to lower productivity and the business bears the brunt of these costs. Keas uses gamification to make losing weight and making healthy choices a fun, social, and mobile experience. 

“It is in employers’ best interest to motivate their employees to do the right thing,” Stevens said. “Healthcare costs are rising and every time an employee takes personal time off to visit a doctor or fill a prescription can result in $250-$500 in productivity costs. The productivity savings of health employees are huge.” 

Stevens said his goal is to provide solutions for the “99 percent of a patient’s life when they are not a patient.” Often this means supporting actions like eating more fruits and vegetables and reducing stress. Obesity-related conditions cost around $150 billion a year and a nutritious diet is a central element of overall wellness. 

Keas recently conducted a survey to track employee sentiment towards nutrition and gain insight into what it can do to improve workforce habits. The survey found that 73 percent of the U.S. workforce frequently or always reads nutrition labels, 86 percent is eating breakfast at least 5 days a week, and 94 percent is increasing the daily intake of fruits and vegetables. 63 percent believe that fast food and junk food are leading causes of obesity, and an increasing number of people are turning to home-cooking in an effort to eat healthier. 

The partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia will help employees do things like prepare green smoothies for the morning and provide inspiration for simple-to-prepare healthy dinners.  

“These are the folks that publish best content in nutrition,” Stevens said. “They provide meal planning and recipe ideas from experts that employees can use for inspiration. We want to bring everyone together, including CFOs, HR teams, wellness experts, and employees in one central portal.”

The easier it is to integrate nutritious eating into every day life, the healthier employees will be and the less employers will have to pay. It seems like a win-win, except for, maybe, the fast food franchises.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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If there’s one thing the health care industry needs, it’s technology innovation that’s actually usable for both doctors and patients.

To help identify the next generation of industry-changing innovations, VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference included a Grand Rounds Innovation Showdown that pitted some of the most promising startups against a panel of expert investor judges.

We received hundreds of nominations, and narrowed the field down to just 10 finalists. Today, those finalists made their pitches onstage at HealthBeat.

We looked at five startups in each of two stages of development: those that have received $3 million or more in Series A or later funding, and those have received $300,000 to $3 million in seed-stage or early Series A funding.

The winners, without further ado, are Beyond Lucid, the maker of a tablet app for emergency medical responders; and Liviam, a social networking tool for people with serious illnesses.

The winners and two of the judges are pictured above. From left: Bob Kocher, a partner at Venrock; Josh Margulies, founder and chief executive of Liviam; Missy Krasner, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures; and Jonathon Feit – cofounder of Beyond Lucid.

Series A and above

WINNER: Beyond Lucid Technologies

Beyond Lucid Technologies created a tablet app and device system that serves emergency medical responders when they’re out on the road, answering calls. It ties location data to an emergency document for a specific patient, but won’t connect it to the internet so the location data works in any  type of weather. It can send patient data within 30 seconds, so doctors aren’t waiting for a piece of paper with the responder’s scribbles about the situation. It’s available for $1500 per mobile license. Currently, the company has raised $600,000.

Procured Health

Procured Health looks at all the different devices that a hospital that may need to buy. The problem with the current way hospitals order the thousands of different pieces of technology they use to keep people alive, is that doctors must rely on Google or costly analysis that is difficult to wade through. Procured Health is a software dashboard that pulls in data about all the different medical devices on the market and from there, analyzes them and can pull out relevant pieces of information that hospitals can use to make an educated purchase. For example, a doctor could see if a device recently had a bug that was fixed and could use that information to get a discount.

Empower Interactive

Empower Interactive is a software service that provides training on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques via web-based and mobile tools. CBT is an effective tool for improving mental health outcomes, and Empower’s research shows. Its tools are meant to be used in a clinical setting, in combination with talk therapy or other treatments.

Ringadoc

Ringadoc is a cloud-based calling service that connects patients directly to a doctor using a “ring-off system.” Jordan Michaels, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, explained that currently patients calling doctors go through a call center and the calls are often not recorded so information can go into the patient’s medical record. The way it works is a patient calls the same phone number they’ve always called and record their issue. That message is then sent directly to a the doctor’s app, allow the doctor to respond via text. The calls are then documented.

Better Doctor

BetterDoctor is a website and mobile app that helps you find a doctor. Ari Tulla, chief executive of BetterDoctor explained that 70 million people need to find a new doctor every year. Unfortunately, the process by which people do this is painful. You have to look one up through your insurance company, try to find ratings and any malpractice issues through Google, and then look at their website that often looks like it was built the same year Snake was.

The app will look at your location and push different doctors around you to your phone. It further refines the search by your insuarnce plan and the specialty you need. The next step for BetterDoctor is to get more doctors on board because without them, the app will fail.

Seed round competitors

WINNER: Liviam

Liviam provides a social network, calendar, and blog for patients — or the loved ones who are helping manage their care — can use to stay in touch with their friends and family. It addresses a trio of pressing needs for people with serious health issues (communication, scheduling, and knowing how to reach out for help), and will be free to patients. To gain usage, the company is partnering with hospitals, including Good Samaritan Hospital and Stanford Hospital, who will benefit from the data about patient care collected by the Liviam system. Rather than waiting for the patients to report their satisfaction levels at the time they fill out an exit survey when being discharged, hospitals can collect data (about things as mundane yet important as “is your room too cold?”) in real time, helping them improve care before the survey is filled out.

Smart Patients

Smart Patients is a clinical trial search engine and cancer community site, so cancer patients can exchange information, find recommendations for oncologists, and search through clinical trials that might be relevant to them. “Patients insisted we build a clinical trial search engine,” Zeiger said. “The goal was to do what Kayak would have done, if they’d done trials instead of travel.”

Clinicast

Clinicast builds risk scores and analysis tools to help health care providers identify the 15 percent of patients who command 70 percent of resources, so the providers can better manage their care. The users are typically case managers — “not the type of individuals who typically ‘lean in’ to advance mathematics,” Challis quipped. The goal is to bring diverse data (from demographics, lab data, and more), use it to identify high-risk patients, match patients with specific interventions that might help them, measure the effectiveness of those interventions, and then provide performance benchmarks to help providers with ongoing evaluations.

Referral MD

Every year, the health care industry spends $250 billion processing 30 billion health care transactions, mostly via paper forms — including a whopping 15 billion faxes. Referral MD proposes an alternative, which is an electronic system for managing referrals from doctor to doctor and making appointments. It plans to sell its service to hospitals, clinics, and other health care providers, who have a big incentive to cut down on all that paperwork and streamline communication.

m-Health Technologies

m-Health Technologies provides a security layer to help hospitals and health care providers increase the security of the applications their doctors and staff use to access information on their phones and tablets. On the smartphone, m-Health provides an RSA token and, optionally, additional biometric tokens (voice recognition, for instance). Using the phone to sign on to a secure app on a tablet. But in addition to sign-on, m-Health also locks down the application if you walk away, because it uses Bluetooth to ensure that you (and your smartphone) are in close proximity to the tablet on which the app is running. Walk away, and it immediately locks down the app, starts ringing an alarm after 30 seconds, calls you (or your IT guy) after 60 seconds, and self-destructs the app if it doesn’t receive a response within 3 minutes.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Four female entrepreneurs came together at Healthbeat today for a panel titled “By Women, For Women: Building Technologies for the Chief Medical Officer of the Home.” Each of these women has a child under the age of four and each is building technology that can cut down on the costs and fears associated with family medicine.

A study by the Department of Labor found that women make approximately 80 percent of health care decisions for their families and are likely to be the care giver when a family member falls in. Despite this fact, only four percent of health care CEOs are women. There is a huge opportunity to improve the experience of care for pregnant women and mothers and bridge the gender gap between the people making consumer products and the people using them.

“I started thinking about this company when starting a family of my own,” said Leah Sparks, cofounder and CEO of Wildlflower Health. “I worked in health care for a decade, but pregnancy was the first time I dealt with the health care system as a patient. It opened my eyes to gaps in terms of resources available and risks. When I first started talking about my idea for Wildflower, the response from VCs was it was a niche market. Women represent half the population and pregnancy is the number one driver of hospital costs a year — does that sounds like a niche to you?”

Wildflower Health is a mobile platform that helps pregnant women track milestones customized to their due date, be aware of risk factors, and take personalized actions. The app has already reached 15,000 pregnant women and can significantly cut down on doctor visits by helping women monitor their pregnancy and feel like they are in control of the process.

The costs and fears don’t end once a baby is born. Quite the opposite. Infants and toddlers present whole new sets of health concerns. After spending hours and hours in the pediatricians office with her now two-year-old, Amy Sheng set out to create more convenient alternative.

“Anyone who has children knows that pit you get in your stomach when your child is sick,” she said. “The options are either to take your kid to the doctor during the work day, or go after hours to an urgent care clinic or ER. Neither of those options are good. People want to be empowered in their home to see what is wrong with their kid, to collect data and make an informed decision about whether it is serious enough to see a doctor.”

Sheng is a cofounder of CellScope, a company that makes a smartphone attachment that can snap images of middle ears. Sheng said and there are 25 million ear infection related visits a year in the U.S and ear infections are one of the most common reasons why kids go to see doctors. Using the CellScope, parents can capture photos of their children’s’ ear and transmit it to a doctor to be diagnosed and treated remotely, or brought in for a visit if necessary.

Wildflower Health and CellScope strive to cut down on the time women spend in clinical environments and provide the tools they need to manage their health from home. This not only cuts down on cost and anxiety levels, but also has significant implications for the position of women leaders. Having children is frequently cited as an obstacle to women advancing their careers. Maternity leave is undesirable for employers who don’t want to disrupt workflow and many mothers struggle to balance a time-consuming professional life with the demands of young children. Discrimination against pregnancy and mothers is an issue that contributes to the ‘gender problem’ in the business world, and any tool that can save women time stands to support their professional success.

“I had a healthy pregnancy and yet there were three or four times when I dealt with major issues during the work day,” Sparks said. “Anything that empowers women to deal with their health issues in the work place will help eradicate this myth that you can’t be a mom and a founder. Companies should want these technologies too, because they are in a talent war and want to keep women employees as happy, healthy, and productive as they can. Reducing complications and doctor visits can help do that.”

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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SAN FRANCISCO — The Affordable Care Act, aka health care reform, aka Obamacare, is spurring a massive creation of new business opportunities.

So says Bryan Sivak, the chief technical officer and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet-level agency that regulates the $2.8 trillion U.S. health care market. Sivak joined VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today via a video conference (see photo above).

Just one of the areas that’s becoming fertile ground for entrepreneurial innovation: the health insurance exchanges mandated by the law.

These exchanges bring a level of transparency and openness to the insurance market that hasn’t been easy to find until now, Sivak said. The new exchanges will be large, consumer-facing marketplaces, and the insurance industry hasn’t been exactly nimble about embracing the latest consumer tech trends — so there will be lots of opportunities for startups to bridge the gap.

They’ll increase competition, because people will be able to see and compare insurance plans more easily. Now, any qualified, licensed insurer will have access to a market of potential customers via the exchanges.

Also, he said, the act will bring 30 million to 50 million more people into the ranks of the insured, creating a new pool of customers to market to. And there will be lots of data.

“You have no idea what’s possible, and you have no idea what people are going to come up with, so that’s what I’m really looking forward to,” Sivak said.

Apart from the ACA, Sivak also said government has an important role to play in facilitating health care innovation.

Government can help spur technology in three ways, he said:

• Facilitation: ”Governments at all levels are interested in seeing citizens do great things.” At the federal, state, and local levels, he said, there’s a lot of interest in helping people create new ventures, improve existing health care systems, or create new systems.
• Convening: “We’re really, really good at getting people together,” Sivak said. So if a big problem needs tackling, governments are well-positioned to gather people to talk about it.
• Incentivizing: Governments can be very effective at spurring change through relatively small incentives or through mandates. For example, he said, the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) stagnated until it was mandated by the Affordable Care Act in 2012.

“Just think about that: A small government intervention has caused EMR adoption to go from under 15 percent to over 70 percent,” Sivak said.

What’s more, government sits on top of a lot of data. Sivak estimates that HHS has about 1,000 data sets, 400 of which have been catalogued on the agency’s HealthData.gov website. Some of the datasets aren’t free, though HHS is working to bring the costs down. So there’s a long way to go still.

Sivak, a former entrepreneur who cut his teeth in San Francisco during the dot-com days, says his attitude toward government’s role is a new perspective for him.

“The only time I interacted with government was when I needed to file my incorporation paperwork with the State of California,” he said of his experience in the 1990s — not atypical of many tech entrepreneurs.

But if he’s right, techies — at least those who want to do business in the health care field — would do well to pay a lot more attention to what’s going on in government.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Don Jones is a vice president for Qualcomm Life who’s on a mission to make the future of health care a reality.

Qualcomm Life houses a healthcare investment fund, grooms master’s degree programs in wireless health, and sponsors the Tricorder X Prize, dubbed “health care in the palm of your hand” (and apparently a product Jones proposed himself.)

Jones is also leading the Scripps Clinical Efficacy Center for trials involving connected clinical solutions. As we’ve heard throughout HealthBeat 2013, entrepreneurs should understand clinical workflows to test the adoptability of their health technology solutions before attempting to make inroads into a system already fraught with problems.

Jones was joined onstage by Susan Dentzer, a former health correspondent for the PBS News Hour and senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The two compared the coming changes in health care technology to a shift as drastic from horse and buggy to cars.

But what exactly does the future hold? According to Jones and Dentzer, it’s health care on demand.

Jones said, “Once you have health care on demand, you don’t want to go back … you won’t accept anything less.”

Both payers and providers will have to compete to attract patients, thus shifting markets based on new value propositions facilitated by technology. In rapid-fire succession, Jones described a system that is “smarter, faster, cheaper, more convenient, and more transparent for the patient.”

And Qualcomm isn’t just talk. The company has partnered with Stanford University to offer these types of connected health care services to all of its employees, located in 100-plus locations operating on a 24/7 schedule.

Qualcomm Life is focused on making “immediate response” something embraced by both technology companies and the healthcare industry alike by dictating the terms for what a future health system should be.

Photo: Don Jones of Qualcomm Life and Susan Dentzer of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — What do the most innovative doctors and nurses really think about the new wave of medical technology?

While investors and entrepreneurs are making noise about opportunities in the space, health care providers are often the silent, reluctant partner. But to continue to stay at the top of their field, providers are keeping tabs on innovation and new products.

So we invited clinicians from Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University to HealthBeat to discuss the new technology they are piloting in their hospitals, and the gaps that entrepreneurs can fill.

“One of our big challenges is making ourselves accessible,” said Faye Karnavy Sahai, vice president of innovation at Kaiser Permanente (pictured above, right). But Kaiser has built its brand around innovation at the front lines of healthcare, and claims its 17,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses are exposed to new ideas across the spectrum.

“We also work independently with a lot of entrepreneurs and give them advice,” added Sumbul Desai (above, center), a doctor who works as the associate chief medical officer for strategy and innovation at Stanford.

To guide investment in the space, Stanford offers startup founders the opportunity to pilot their technology. A number of innovation fellowships are also available, and the hospital works closely with the accelerator program StartX Med.

“Every morning we’ll meet with folks in the entrepreneurial community — we love doing it and are super invested,” Desai said.

What are the biggest challenges for health entrepreneurs?

Desai said one of the biggest issues is that entrepreneurs don’t do their homework. There are unique regulatory, privacy and compliance issues involved with health care — HIPAA compliance is just the beginning. In addition, founders aren’t as aware as they should be about the competitive market.

The other challenge is integration. Desai stressed that new products need to work well with existing workflows. Kaiser is working on centralizing its electronic medical records (EMR) system, echoing a nationwide trend. To that end, Kaiser inked a deal with Epic Systems, the electronic health record company that health entrepreneurs have a love-hate relationship with.

“Epic is the cornerstone of how we look at our data,” said Karnavy Sahai.

Epic has been criticized for hampering innovation due to its closed system that shuts out third parties. But it has a dominant position in hospitals, and isn’t wise to ignore.

Another issue the speakers raised is that entrepreneurs can often get too fixated on the idea, and not consider the organization that they plan to fit into. It’s easier said than done. So for this reason, startup founders like ConsultingMD’s Owen Tripp are opting to team up with physicians.

And the biggest opportunities?

One of the hottest areas is patient care, but Desai warned that it’s “just one piece of the puzzle.”

Consumer technology is slowly making its way into hospitals. Kaiser is experimenting with putting real-time location data in sponges to prevent them from being left in patients’ bodies during surgery (and producing an ensuing publicity nightmare). In addition, nurses can check in using location proximity badges, making it far easier to track their movements.

Some of the less “sexy” areas include reimbursement and data analysis.

“Big data and analytics will be huge — expect to see predictive diagnostic capabilities,” said Desai. Much of this data will be mined from fitness trackers like FitBit and Jawbone’s Up, which are used by patients as part of a “quantified self” trend.

When asked about the one piece of technology that would be most beneficial, Desai urged innovators in the audience to think big. Physicians need ”an overall digital experience,” she explained, that will clearly list out patient visits, second opinions, virtual visits, and so on.

“Too often we see separate small companies and pockets of innovation right now,” she said.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Bid to pitch your favorite venture capitalist.

The charity is the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the world’s largest volunteer health agency dedicated to curing blood cancers, and 21 leading venture capitalists from some of the biggest-name investment firms in the country have donated lunch, dinner, or pitch meetings to hear your best ideas … after you’ve coughed up a bit of coin for charity.

Those VCs include all-stars like Tim Draper, who’s offering a not just a 15-minute pitch session but a full two-hour dinner for three at the “famous Tamarine Restaurant” in Palo Alto, Calif. Menlo Ventures is represented by Shervin Pishevar, and will be donating a “power lunch” somewhere on the also-famous Sand Hill Road.

Keith Rabois

Which means you’ll have the full time and attention of a powerful, experienced, and — most importantly — looking-to-invest venture capitalist for at least an hour, and up to two hours. Which might be hard to pass up for founders who are looking to make connections and close funding rounds.

Here’s the stellar lineup:

• Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson founder and managing director)
• Shervin Pishevar (Menlo Ventures venture adviser)
• Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures)
• Brian Singerman (Founders Fund partner)
• Patrick Chung (New Enterprise Associates partner)
• Babak Nivi & Naval Ravikant (AngelList cofounders)
• Brian O’Malley (Battery Ventures general partner)
• George Bischof (Meritech Capital managing director)
• David J. Blumberg (Blumberg Capital founder and managing director)
• Josh Kopelman and Rob Hayes (First Round Capital founder and partner)
• Megan Quinn (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner)
• Tod Francis (Shasta Ventures managing director)
• Ajay Chopra (Trinity Ventures general partner)
• Ann Miura-Ko & Mike Maples Jr. (Floodgate Fund cofounding partner and managing partner)
• Jon Soberg (Blumberg Capital managing director)
• Tim Chang (Mayfield Fund managing director)
• Gus Tai (Trinity Ventures general partner)
• Geoff Lewis (Founders Fund principal)
• Ellen Pao (Reddit Strategic Partnerships)
• Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures principal James Cham)
• David Lee (SV Angel cofounder and managing director)

But it won’t be easy. If the Cook auction is any indicator, prices could get high. Dinner for three with Tim Draper carries an estimated value of $30,000, and it already has a bid at $3,000. Many of the others have estimated valuations of $5,000.

Ellen Pao.

A successful relationship with a big-name VC, of course, could be worth many times those numbers. But — and this might be the trouble with this particular auction — founders who are just starting out tend not to have huge sums of money to throw at speculative meetings.

Which means that already funding entrepreneurs who are looking to close a B, C, or D round might have a better shot. If they can convince their boards that this is a good investment.

But, lest we forget, it’s all for a good cause in the end, and it can probably be written off as a charitable donation.

“We are deeply grateful to the venture capitalists who have donated their time to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society,” Christina Resasco, the founder of MobilizeForTheCure, said in a statement. “Their generosity will provide crucial funding needed to advance blood cancer research and development for LLS and give hope to those suffering from the disease.”

The project is part of the Venture Capital Master’s Lunch Series, which has raised about $200,000 since 2010. Last year’s winners included entrepreneurs from Australia, Poland, Russia, and the Philippines.

Image credit: Tim Draper: John Koetsier/VentureBeat

Nurses are the unsung heroes of the hospital who navigate crappy software on outdated hardware to keep you healthy — and it needs to stop.

Executives from Cedars-Sinai and Kaiser Permanente explained at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference that technology innovators need to start focusing on new, consumer-like user experiences and better end-to-end communications software and hardware. Otherwise, nurses are going to start using their own devices, which creates obvious issues in privacy and data management.

“We’ve done a lot of ethnographic research of our nursing areas. … It’s still amazing when you walk into that environment that there’s still a tremendous amount of inefficiency, redundancy,” said Julie Vilardi, who’s a registered nurse as well as the executive director of Kaiser Permanente’s clinical informatics and strategic projects. “User experience it’s really critically important. Because of the consumer experience now is pretty slick, when you get into the walls of the hospital [consumer-grade experiences are] beginning to be the expectation, and we so don’t deliver it right now.”

She explained how nurses manage everything having to do with your hospital stay: your medical prescriptions, the food you eat, and the baths you take. They typically have four or so patients who may not even be in the same area of the hospital. These nurses often have to tote around workstations on wheels and clunky communications devices that simply aren’t effective. But because of their ability work in a chaotic environment, they’re making due.

Darren Dworking, the chief information officer for Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center, said it had recently deployed 800 iPhones to its staff. He thought clinicians were going to shy away from using texting for communications, but he was wrong.

“A lot of our clinicians are beginning to use technology in other aspects of their life … they want to know how come they can’t have a healthcare version of that,” said Dworking. “Giving them something akin to a cordless phone isn’t going to do it for communications.”

Vilardi says she hopes to see developers create a consumer-grade iPhone experience for patient management and electronic medical records (EMR). She wants to be able to push an icon to get a patient assessment, and she believes we’re very close to that reality. Dworking, however, encourages innovators to look beyond the EMR, which he says the window has closed on. Instead, he hopes that people will find a new way of displaying data and improving communications.

According to Vilardi, iOS phones and tablets really are the devices of choice in hospitals today. This is because vendors in general are taking more advantage of iOS than Android. She explained that Kaiser is looking for ways to integrate Android, however.

Nurses, speak up! We want to hear from you about your experiences with workstations on wheels, apps, and more. Send us an email at tips@venturebeat.com or e-mail me directly at meghan@venturebeat.com.

Image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Communication is one of the biggest challenges facing health care today. Doctors cannot use e-mail, social media networks, or SMS texting to discuss patients because it violates privacy regulations, and electronic medical record (EMRs) systems are generally incompatible with each other, which makes the secure exchange of information even more difficult.

At VentureBeat’s HealthBeat today, Verizon managing principal of connected health care solutions Nancy Green explained how Verizon can benefit the health care community.

“When you think of Verizon, you think of our wireless network. But we have a $6 billion health care practice and a chief medical officer ,” Green said onstage. “We are moving and enabling the business of health care so others can innovate. We have experts on compliance and security, and startups can use the size and scope and scale of Verizon to make a difference.”

Security and authentication are major concerns when it comes to medical communication. Green said that 27 countries, the White House, and the U.S. nuclear launch codes are secured by Verizon. The company knows how to do security and authenticate people, and it is applying this expertise to the health care. Verizon has credentialed every clinician and physician in the United States and provide a secure channel for transmitting data, such a prescriptions. An example is Verizon’s work with Surescripts to support electronic prescriptions and set up digital signage on devices. From their iPads and  iPhones, doctors can sign in using a passcode, authenticate their identity, write, confirm, and accept prescriptions, and digitally sign documents. Verizon’s “exchange layer” moves the information securely from network to network (doctor to pharmacy) so doctors don’t have to visit a terminal or use pen and paper.

Verizon’s dual persona technology is also particularly useful in the medical field. Doctors often use their personal mobile devices for work and Green said that it is a struggle to securely manage patient data on phones and keep it separate from personal information. Through an exclusive partnership with VMware, Verizon has a solution that can lock down the enterprise/clinical side of phones.

To quote Voltaire (or Uncle Ben from Spider-Man), with great power comes great responsibility. Verizon has a network of 115 million people and a huge telecommunications infrastructure, and Green said the company is committed to supporting entrepreneurs and ideas that use this power for good. So is competitor AT&T, which also has health care solutions. Both companies see opportunities in an industry that makes up 17 percent of the GDP and relies heavily on mobile and telecommunication technology. These opportunities also extend beyond mobile health technology. In March, Verizon announced its new cloud service for health data exchange and a partnership with HealthSpot to power tele-medicine kiosks in the field.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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SAN FRANCISCO — You might not guess it to look at your most recent medical bills, but doctors are nervous about their ability to make money.

CareCloud, which creates a fully-online management app for health care practices, surveyed over 5,000 doctors who say they are worried about their income in the next year.

“In the early 90s I saw healthcare for the first time and I was just blown away by how screwed up it was,” said chief executive Albert Santolo at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today.

Despite attempts to modernize today’s practices in how they keep data and report revenue, the health care industry seems to be just as screwed up as it was 20 years ago, according to the survey, which CareCloud calls the Practice Profitability Index.

“You think about it very differently than you would 15 years ago in the early days of the web,” said Santolo. But, he said, “when you look at these systems, they date that far back.”

CareCloud is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that doctors can use to manage their finances. It also has a social layer to communicate with patients, as well as its own form of electronic health records (EHR). Indeed, it seems these EHRs are on of the main issues that make doctors worry about their profitability.

Santolo explained that EHRs are currently slowing doctors down, and he admitted that even CareCloud is a part of that problem. He predicts that 20 to 25 percent of doctors will be back in the market for better solutions surrounding EHRs.

There’s a lot of opportunity there, of course, for businesses to take up the challenge. (For instance, Practice Fusion has made great headway offering a free EHR now used by 150,000 doctors.)

CareCloud isn’t ignoring the issue and says it will release a new user interface for its EHRs next month.

Other than coding and documenting changes, doctors are also concerned about declining reimbursements, rising costs, and Affordable Care Act requirements, according to the survey. Nearly 50 percent of doctors are worried about using all this new technology to handle the flood of new patients that the ACA will bring to them.

“Doctors still care very much about their future, economics of their business, and what healthcare reform is imposing on them,” said Santolo. “They feel ill-equipped to handle the influx of 30 million new patients.”

CareCloud image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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(Updated with comments from HealthBeat.)

SAN FRANCISCO – Reputation.com founder Owen Tripp is not the kind of entrepreneur who wants to solve small problems. For his new venture, Tripp tells me he has an ambitious solution that will someday “fix health care.”

Tripp’s startup, ConsultingMD, has secured a $10 million funding round led by venture firm Venrock, the health-focused venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family. The mission is to create a virtual clinic where patients are served by the top doctors in the world.

ConsultingMD founder Owen Tripp

“We don’t believe you need a network of thirty thousand doctors to be effective,” said Tripp [pictured above with cofounder Dr. Lawrence "Rusty" Hoffman] in an interview with VentureBeat. “We would rather use the same 750 doctors who achieve successful outcomes again and again.”

Tripp unveiled the funding as well as ConsultingMD’s first product on stage at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today.

“There is a ton of friction between the top experts and the patients who most need them,” Tripp said during an onstage conversation with Bryan Roberts, a partner at venture capital firm Venrock. “We take away all the friction.”

ConsultingMD offers patients the opportunity to consult a leading medical expert for a second opinion — and receive a detailed response in about 48 hours.

Patients are asked to submit some brief details about their case, and sign a release. ConsultingMD’s team will begin assembling a file with a full medical record, demographic information, relevant images, tests, and so on, and select a specialist from the network to take a closer look. ConsultingMD even does optical character recognition and handwriting recognition on the printed files to make them searchable.

The technology is HIPPA-compliant and cloud-based, so doctors can safely review a case in any location, given them what Tripp calls a “virtual clinic” on their iPads. The goal is to make the process user-friendly and efficient for doctors as well as patients.

“Great doctors want to do great medicine, and they’re handcuffed by the technology they have to use,” Tripp said.

Specialists like Dr. Berchuck, director of Gynecologic Cancer Research at Duke University, are already signed up. ConsultingMD offers top doctors the opportunity to review a higher volume of medical cases.

Even in its trial period, physicians were able to access and share opinions on rare cases they might not otherwise have been exposed to. Another draw is the boost in income for top-notch physicians.”As our brand grows, so too will the celebrity of our doctors,” said Tripp.

For patients, it means avoiding flying halfway across the country, or paying exorbitant medical fees for an in-person visit.

ConsultingMD won’t accept just any doctor to its network. “We never went out and perused the phone book for doctors,” Tripp explained. “We made invitations based on recommendations and are getting more in-bound requests each week than we can handle.”

This exclusivity makes sense in light of the business model. Tripp expects the richest and biggest companies like Pepsi and Home Depot to pay for its employees to access ConsultingMD. Large enterprises pay $6 per employee each month; some cases may be covered by insurance. Individuals can also pay for a second opinion – the average cost is $3,750.

“I am a little allergic to the term ‘corporate wellness,” he explains. “I think wellness is something we ought to do as a country.”

But corporations are increasingly offering top-quality and concierge health care to retain employees. An Adecco SA study stipulated that 55 percent of corporate execs view health care benefits as their biggest challenge.

In an interview, Tripp revealed plans for a second product, an online service that helps patients locate and schedule a visit to the top specialist in their area.

“ConsultingMD has decentralized this medical expertise and improves the lives and health of people through technology,” said Roberts, who will join the company’s board.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Online consumer engagement has been around since social media took off, allowing companies to form meaningful relationships with customers through ongoing interactions. Led by marketing and sales departments, consumer engagement programs can mean that people spend 20 to 40 percent more money on that brand or company’s products.

Since health care entrepreneurship became “sexy,” people are consistently using the term “patient engagement” at health technology conferences. But what exactly does this mean? Like online consumer engagement, is it simply when a company maintains a relationship with a patient through technology?

Since this is health care and situations are often complicated, there is little consensus over the definition of a term that everyone is using.

The closest analog to traditional online consumer engagement is “meaningful use,” a standard set by the U.S. federal government that enables providers to earn incentive payments based on how much patients are using their electronic medical records (EMR) systems. In this case, 5 percent of patients must log into an electronic record and upload their data for a provider to earn a bonus.

However, this “ongoing relationship” starts and ends when a patient merely interacts with the technology, regardless of frequency of use or the value added to a patient’s life.

For patient engagement, there should be a more robust definition that includes positive health outcomes, where engagement encompasses interactions with technology that lead to some ancillary or direct health benefit.

At HealthBeat, this concept was discussed during a breakout session titled “Consumer Health Apps: Human Centered Design,” featuring Marco Della Torre, biomedical engineer and business development at Basis; Chris Hogg, a vice president of data science at Practice Fusion; Eric Bailey, chief experience officer at PokitDok; and moderated by Aimee Jungman, formerly of Frog Design.

All agreed that we do not need a single definition for patient engagement. According to Chris Hogg, “all terms out of health are terrible,” adding that “patient engagement is merely creating products that people want to use.”

However, Della Torre of Basis saw value in correlating product usage with positive outcomes. Unless providers can quantify behavior change and prove value, the troves of data collected by sensors and “engaged” patients is useless.

Even though they clearly disagreed over the definition and value of the term, the panelists did agree on one basic point: Patients today aren’t truly engaged with health technology or even with their own health.

This is the crux of a problem that we need to address before we can begin to understand patient engagement, empowerment, and how to use these relationships to fix a broken system.

Can we create persuasive technology to encourage patient engagement with the mere concept of their own health?

For example, when people are sick, we have a tendency to exhibit avoidant behavior (like taking “medication holidays” from prescription drugs.)

On the other hand, when we are healthy we don’t want to think about health, and companies have found it challenging to channel consumer interest toward something as innocuous as their own biometric data.

So next time we talk about patient engagement, let’s also consider how users relate to the concept of their own health and whether technology can be used to not only engage, but also advance positive health outcomes.

Photo: Chris Hogg of Practice Fusion. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

SAN FRANCISCO – Your health is not solely in your doctor’s hands. As mobile technology improves and health care providers reach out to consumers, many apps are popping up to help people manage their own health.

The problem is that too many of these apps are useless.

At HealthBeat 2013 today, David Levin, chief medical information officer of Cleveland Clinic explained what he sees all too often when reviewing new technology: “CrApps,” or crappy apps.

Fortunately, not all apps are crappy. Here are some of the most promising new consumer health apps.

PokitDok

Pokitdok is a health marketplace with price transparency for health services, where consumers can shop directly from providers. Originally launched as a “Pinterest for healthcare,” the mobile app now offers tools for payers to facilitate transactions.

Coolness factor: Although it’s unclear whether consumers will actually purchase health services online, fully transparent cost data should facilitate better care decisions and value based judgments. The app also collects quality ratings data for providers so that patients can generate a match score based on their personal and clinical needs in order to locate their ideal provider. PokitDok makes it possible for patients to consider both efficacy and price when making healthcare decisions.

Caremerge

Caremerge is the first app that allows caregivers to communicate and coordinate with those living in senior  communities. Through their web and mobile apps, staff can connect with each other while offsite stakeholders (doctors, family members, etc.) organize timely care.

Coolness factor: As the population ages and baby boomer smartphone adoption increases, Caremerge will engage families in managing their elders’ health and help reduce hospital readmissions. But only 18 percent of consumers age 50 or older currently have a smartphone, and those are exactly the people who are generally caring for seniors, so this number will have to rise.

MangoHealth

MangoHealth came out of RockHealth’s 2012 class and enables users to facilitate and track their medication intake. The app identifies potentially dangerous interactions with medications, supplements, or food and drink, provides medication reminders, and offers real-world rewards for taking medication on time.

Coolness factor: Over half of the U.S. adult population uses supplements and 40 percent of older adults take 5 or more prescriptions per day. As these numbers increase, a user-friendly app can prevent adverse health reactions and decrease medication non-compliance (estimated to be a $289 billion problem.)

Asthmapolis

The Asthmapolis sensor sits on top of an inhaler and automatically syncs data to a mobile app on your smartphone. The system provides personalized feedback and education to control asthma, which affects 25 million people in the US.

Coolness factor: Once the sensor is paired, the phone will automatically capture data from the sensor whenever it is nearby (I wish my Jawbone Up were this easy to use).

Allayo

Allayo is a virtual health assistant that can save your family as much as 100 hours per year on health care activities. Members can send reminders, order and refill prescriptions, schedule appointments, arrange for tests and labwork, find help with insurance claims, and arrange home delivery. (The company also mentions gamification and loyalty, but we’re less excited about those buzzwords.)

Coolness factor: Allayo has created a new category of health care offerings; the virtual healthcare assistant. As our current system becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, this service provides  “certified medical assistants” who are available on the phone or through secure chat to take care of members’ health needs.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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SAN FRANCISCO — Aetna, one of the largest health insurance providers in the world, is changing the way it thinks about itself.

Last year, chief executive Mark Bertolini said Aetna was no longer in the insurance business, it is in the information business.

Now, the company is turning into a fitness app maker too. Next month, Aetna will launch an iPhone app and website for managing your fitness, encouraging you to eat and live in a more healthy way, and monitoring your personal health information.

If you’re an Aetna customer, the app, called CarePass, will integrate your personal medical records with data from popular fitness-tracking devices like Withings Wi-Fi-enabled scales, Fitbit’s Flex wristband, and Jawbone’s Up wristband, as well as apps like MapMyFitness. If you’re an Aetna customer, it’ll be accessible through the same sign-on you use with Aetna’s web portal, Aetna Navigator. But you can use it to integrate data from various sources even if you aren’t an Aetna customer.

“We want a consumer to be able to see the information they care about from a healthcare perspective,” said Aetna’s head of business development, Dan Conroy (pictured above), who gave a sneak peek of the upcoming app at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s health technology conference here.

It’s a consumer-friendly app with an approachable, simple design, based on Conroy’s short walk-through. When signing on to the app, people have a choice of looking at their data, picking a goal to work towards (like losing a pound or fitting into their favorite jeans), or getting medical care. The third option leads to another app, iTriage, which Aetna acquired in 2012, Conroy said.

Once you’ve picked a goal, the app can help you get there by setting achievable daily goals, like running a certain number of miles or consuming a certain number of calories. It can also show you how much you’ve walked each day (assuming it has step data from one of the compatible devices) and other details.

If you’ve given it access to your medical data, the app will also let you see vital stats like your body measurements, BMI, blood pressure, blood glucose level, and more details, all drawn from your last visit to the doctor’s office. It can also pull in data about your recent office visits and medications, and can even help remind you to take your meds.

There’s also a web version of the app.

Aetna’s challenge is going to be a steep one, given the large number of fitness apps out there. Many of them already integrate with a variety of different data sources — for instance, Runkeeper can also integrate data from Withings scales and Fitbit fitness-trackers; MapMyFitness helps you track your food consumption as well as your exercise; MyFitnessPal has an app library (as does Runkeeper); and all three are extensible through open APIs. And that’s just scratching the surface of the fitness-tracking universe.

Aetna has a couple of huge advantages, however: For instance, it has 38 million customers and made almost $500 million in profits in the most recent fiscal quarter.

The app won’t launch until June, but developers interested in integrating their apps can check out Aetna’s CarePass developer portal.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Cloud companies like Box and Salesforce have a new sector in mind: health care.

It’s still not clear whether the industry is ready for them.

“Anyone who has to write a check knows the value of cloud computing,” said Joshua Newman, an M.D., who is also the director of product and health strategy at Salesforce, a pioneering cloud technology company and the leader in defining the marketing term “software as a service.” Newman spoke this afternoon on a panel at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s health-focused technology conference.

Newman said a big part of his job is to communicate the value of the cloud to health providers, and to assuage fears about breaches of sensitive patient data.

In the past, patient records were stored on film, tape and paper charts. As data gets digitized, everyone in the field has grappled with how to keep it secure, including hospitals, physician practice groups, software and hardware companies, consulting firms and affiliated health care organizations.

The federal government recently released statistics that 21 million people had their sensitive health records hacked. This is just the cases that were reported — the actual number is thought to be far higher.

As a result, security challenges have overpowered the benefits of the cloud. Cost-savings and easier software upgrades pale in comparison to leaked health care records. As a result, health providers are treading very carefully.

Newman is convinced that we’ll see increased adoption of services like Salesforce in the coming years. “There are a lot of great examples of how it’s working, and you can see how quickly it’s grown,” he said. “There are emerging standards in health care,” David Chao, a product manager at MuleSoft, said in agreement.

At HealthBeat, we also heard from Box CEO Aaron Levie how the company intends to be an “underlying layer for how content gets stored and shared” for physicians. Recently, Box received HIPAA compliance certification, meaning the product is now considered safe enough to hold on to data about your health — and safe enough for health care developers who use it.

Box and Salesforce are both appealing to progressive CIOs at hospitals and other health providers. But Newman believes it really needs to start small. “Let’s get the ball rolling with small apps,” he said. The hope is that CIOs will then realize the value in these tools.

“Getting into the cloud is not an all-or-nothing game,” said Newman. When it comes to healthcare, he stressed that we can take “baby steps.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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David Yakimischak (who goes by “Yak”) opened a fireside chat at Healthbeat today by holding up a CD from radiology center that he has to physically deliver to his doctor. As the general manager of E-Prescribing at Surescripts, a leading health information network, Yak is an expert on using the cloud to exchange health information. He said that despite advancements in the transmission of health records and clinical information, data like X-rays MRIs, and lab results are primarily moved around offline.

“Over half of prescriptions in the country now flow electronically,” he said. “500,000 doctors actively use Surescripts every month, 60,000 pharmacies are connected, and we work with 450 EMRs. We successfully achieved critical mass because the players in the ecosystem got together and created this company. E-prescribing is deeply embedded into every prescribing application as a neutral common network that plugs into existing workflows. That’s what we have to do with labs and radiology.”

E-Prescribing digitalized the exchange of prescriptions which makes life easier for doctors, pharmacies, and patients. Physicians can quickly access their patients’ benefit and medication history, send presciptions to pharmacies online, and all of that information is kept within one secure network. Yak said that labs and images are currently moved in a point-to-point manner. To do for radiology and lab results what Surescripts did for prescription requires a strong network on both sides.

“We are where we are because people are trying to multiply both sides of the network, we need a single national plan or model that brings governance, a business model, and public and private institutions together to capture the market,” he said. “This is not a technology problem, this is a system problem.”

Surescripts has that system, and the network, experience, and technology to migrate imaging and labs to the cloud. Yak said the company signed a deal with Merge Healthcare in November to tackle this very problem. Surescripts “laid the rails” to 500,000 physicians and Merge will push its imaging results across its network.

For the cloud-based transmission of imaging and labs to succeed, it needs to provide a more cost-effective and efficient alternative to the existing model. Yak and John Cooper, a partner at Archpoint Ventures who moderated the discussion, agreed that the real opportunity here exists in the sharing of meta-data. Doctors usually don’t need super high-resolution images to make diagnoses and prescriptions, but they do need contextual information about the patient.

“You have to build some value around this data,” Yak said. Iit’s not just a transaction or a message switch, there is an ecosystem play here. Consumers, labs, and doctors probably won’t pay, but providers and servers would if the efficiency and accuracy is heightened and pays off.”

As with most services in health IT, the bottom line is increased efficiency at a decreased cost. In today’s day and age, driving across down with an envelope or CD-Rom with medical results is unnecessary and seems a little absurd, but no company has been able to create a superior, compelling alternative. Is Surescripts that company?

“We may be,” Yak said.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Practice Fusion is best known for its free web-based electronic medical record, but the startup’s goals are far more ambitious.

Speaking at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s conference, CEO Ryan Howard said the decision to offer the health record to doctors for free is “somewhat of a Trojan horse.”

“We have all this patient information that doesn’t reside anywhere else,” said Howard. The product is currently used by more than 150,000 doctors and tracks 64 million patient records, he claimed.

Aside from mining the data contained within its health record, Practice Fusion also helps doctors with calendaring, scheduling, and billing. The goal is to provide a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for physicians.

On the consumer side, the company launched a service last month, dubbed Patient Fusion, now used by 27,000 doctors. Already, consumers can use it to book appointments and peruse 1.5 million doctor reviews. In the month of April alone, the company offered 3 million open appointments.

That’s a lot of data to work with.

But the sensitive patient information is stripped of personally identifiable factors, and will not be sold to pharmaceutical companies. “We don’t sell data sets to payers,” Howard stressed.

Instead, the goal is to use the data to prevent miscommunication between doctors and patients. Howard observed in a recent interview that accessing and mining patient information can save lives. “We can recommend drug therapies based on their popularity [with previous patients],” he said, and claims there are 200,000 avoidable deaths a year because “data is simply not shared.”

By being among the first to put data in the hands of patients, Practice Fusion hopes to add more doctors to its health record. By marketing products to patients, the company will augment its brand with hospital decision-makers.

Howard revealed that the company is making “eight digit” revenues each year, and plans to go public in the future — but not in the coming year. Practice Fusion still has a long way to go; “we’re only at ten percent of our potential,” Howard revealed in an interview.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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An ambitious startup, AirStrip has a plan to circumvent the tangle of incompatible systems currently clogging up the free flow of information in health care.

Believe or not, it’s an iOS app.

That’s simplifying quite a bit, but the app — and the mobile devices on which it runs — are a powerful tool for making health care data easy to share for doctors, nurses, and similar professionals.

“Look at what the iPhone did for the music business, and retail, and banking,” said Bruce Brandes, executive vice president at AirStrip, onstage today at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference. AirStrip aims to make the iPhone do the same thing, only in health care. “Health care is arguably the industry most in need of a ‘big bang’ disruption.”

The crux of the problem, according to Brandes: It’s “humanly impossible” for doctors to get all the information they need from the many sources of data available to them. Electronic medical record systems (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs) are often built on proprietary systems and lack transparent interfaces for making them interoperable.

AirStrip started by focusing on a seemingly simple problem: Making it possible for doctors and nurses to share waveform data (heart rates and blood oxygenation levels, for instance) with one another without having to be in the same room — previously a difficult problem. The company initially focused on perinatal care.

“The sad truth is babies are injured many times because of that communications breakdown,” Brandes said.

Once AirStrip figured out how to coordinate that data exchange, it was able to expand the areas of medical data that it consolidates into its apps. It now incorporates vital signs, lab results, imaging, critical medical events, and more.

Dignity Health, one of the country’s largest healthcare providers, is using AirStrip.

“We need something that is going to allow us to communicate across system, that can layer on top of the other EMRs, otherwise we’ll never be able to exchange information like we need to,” said Richard Roth, a vice president at Dignity.

Dignity tested AirStrip with a pilot deployment at a rural healthcare location first, then followed up with an urban pilot, then jumped right in to a large-scale deployment.

An entrepreneur in the audience asked about AirStrip’s experiences working with EMR providers, particularly Epic, the market leader.

“Some vendors are more open than others, and as we know with Epic, they’re a hard nut to crack,” Brandes said.

However, Brandes noted that even Epic will integrate its data with other systems in response to customer demand, as Epic CEO Judy Faulkner noted in a recent Forbes interview.

With Dignity Health and other large health care providers who number among AirStrip’s clients putting pressure on EMR vendors, Brandes said, the walls are coming down.

“Even the closed ones are being forced to work with us,” Brandes said.

Top photo: Bruce Brandes, Airstrip. Photo by Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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Funding for digital health grew dramatically in 2012 and is continuing to climb. The health market is pegged at $6 trillion worldwide, and there are far-reaching opportunities for entrepreneurs to transform how we practice health care. At the same time, funding for life sciences and medial devices is drying up. Health IT is the darling of investors, and venture capital firms are all trying to get in on the action.

“There are so many carrots and sticks to take advantage of here and venture capitalists like to invest in big trends,” said Stephen Kraus, a partner and Bessemer Venture Partners. “You can’t get in on a bigger trend than 20 percent of the GDP. This is a sector with massive problems, and the government throwing money at it. You would have to be missing a brain not to pick up on this fact.”

Krause participated in a panel discussion about venture capital and growth equity in health IT at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today. The panel discussed trends in health IT/digital health as well as what investors look for in portfolio companies and success stories. Also on the panel was Dana Mead, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who focuses in life sciences investments. He said despite the fact that interest and funding is moving away from life sciences at the moment, this is a period of transition and evolution, and like digital health, there are plenty of opportunities for innovation.

“With digital health, you see traditional life sciences investors and traditional IT investors looking at the same space,” Mead said.”There are a number of companies that could be successful in this second wave of digital health, and everyone is experimenting with business models and finding out who will pay for these products and services. It all goes in cycles. Frankly life sciences got too big and will grow back in a big way.”

Mead said that most consumers view health care as an entitlement and that investors are looking for products that have a clear return-on-investment (ROI). Promod Haque, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, approaches the sector from an IT background and is interested in companies that bring traditional IT concepts to health care. Like Mead, he emphasized the importance of figuring out a viable business model.

“The big question is ‘Who pays for these things?’ Haque said. “If you are selling health care services to large enterprise providers, you have to convince them that there will be a fast ROI and then investors are interested. There is a general awareness among institutional and strategic corporate investors that this health vertical is very important going forward. Too many companies will get funded eventually, and then there will be a consolidation play. Big companies are not growing, and their revenue is declining, which is where acquisitions come in.”

Most of the conversation focused on enterprise products geared towards clinicians, healthcare providers, and payers. Warren Hogarth is a partner at Sequoia Capital, which has made investments in 20 health companies. He said that in addition to IT products, consumer products also have large and global potential. Certain products and business models may work in the U.S., but not in international markets where the health care industry is not structured in the same way. Mobile technology is growing fast and building products that help consumers manage and control their health care is universally appealing.

“Traditionally, health care is very silo’d– it is different in the U.S.,” he said. “Mobile is a ubiquitous world. On the consumer side, there are opportunities to be a global business from day one.”

Rock Health predicted 2013 would be a record year for digital health. VC interest in this sector is high, but this sector is still new. It came into being over the past couple years in response to seismic shifts in national policy, cultural attitudes, and new forms of technology. It is still early days, and these investors’ strategy is to find forward-thinking, experienced entrepreneurs who can lead the way into the next generation of health care, and generate large returns while they are at it.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Mobile devices could save the medical industry and consumers billions of dollars a year.

Mobile health technology provides patients with greater opportunities to manage their diseases and communicate with providers. On stage today at HealthBeat 2013, Ivor Horn of the National Children’s Medical Center (above, center) and Asthmapolis president Mark Gehring (above, right) spoke about the potential for “mHealth” to reach underserved populations and help them take control over their health.

“The key is recognizing how people use technology,” Horn said. “Over 80 percent of patients in underserved populations are willing to receive information via mobile or text, and over 90 percent wanted access to their health information and are open to sharing it back and forth. The two main issues are trust and self-efficacy — the ability to feel like you can accomplish what you want to accomplish is really important and that the information comes from a reliable source.”

More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese, and obesity-related conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and stroke are some of the leading causes of preventable death. The medical costs associated with obesity are in the realm of $150 billion.

Asthma is another pervasive problem. Fifty million people in the U.S. live with chronic respiratory disease, and uncontrolled asthma leads to 500,000 hospitalizations and two million emergency room visits a year. It is a $50 billion problem.

The prevalence of both diseases is higher in low-income populations, and mobile devices can be a powerful vehicle for addressing these problems.

During the discussion with Horn and moderator Robin Strongin, Gehring said that Asthmapolis is not just a mobile app– it is a disease management company that collects data and gives patients tools to improve their clinical outcomes.

“We are redefining the metrics for success,” Gehring said. “This isn’t about downloads. There is a 70 percent reduction in hospitalization for patients using Asthmapolis, and when they do end up in the hospital, they spend 70 percent less time there. This is where the health care system is headed. Our business model is to sell to payers and providers to save them costs, keeping in mind how to save payers and providers money is key.”

Asthmapolis recently raised $5 million from the Social + Capital Partnership to support development of new services to extend its reach to people living with all forms of chronic respiratory disease, not just asthma.

Horn and Gehring emphasized that when building mobile apps, it is important to develop the technology in partnership with the health care system, connecting and providing value to people on all sides, including patients, payers, and health care providers. Ultimately, fewer hospital visits is better for everyone and in addition to eating green vegetables and regular exercise, mobile devices could become part of an integral part of a healthy lifestyle for all segments of the population.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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SAN FRANCISCO — When health IT professionals are calling out for better ways to view patient data, third party applications are the obvious answer. But without HIPAA compliance, the task is more than a daunting one — it’s a potential financial sinkhole. But it seems that partnerships with companies such as Box might be the answer, according to remarks made by Box chief executive Aaron Levie today at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference.

HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and it’s the major safeguard of patient data privacy in the U.S. That’s because HIPAA governs all the ways that doctors and health care providers can or cannot exchange data — for instance, it prohibits doctors from sending emails to other doctors about a patient, because email is inherently insecure. For the IT service providers that work with the medical profession, HIPAA compliance is complicated and difficult — but it’s also the price of admission to the health care field.

Recently, Box received HIPAA compliance certification, which means Box is now considered safe enough to hold on to data about your health. The company worked for over eight years to get its systems to this point and sees a lot of opportunity to branch into the health sector. But Box, for many, is just an enterprise cloud storage company. It helps your employees send PowerPoint files and Word docs safely to each other.

Partnerships with third party developers, however, may put Box at the center of health IT innovation because it automatically shares its HIPAA compliance with those who build on top of Box data.

“There’s not that much tech that’s actually sanctioned … that has that consumer experience,” Levie said today. “We really want to be the underlying layer for how content gets stored and shared.”

Box provides an application programming interface (API) that gives developers access to certain content it stores. With the health care sector using Box, that means patient health records, medical images, payment information, and more may be stored on the site. Oftentimes this information is difficult to read, and time-consuming to call up. Developers can build a beautiful framework in which that data is displayed, but never store the data itself by using Box’s API.

Thus, developers get the huge added bonus of being both creatively open and HIPAA compliant.

Indeed, Box now owns one of these third parties working on making that data digestible. Crocodoc, a small startup that Box recently acquired, takes all different kinds of documents and translates them into HTML5 interactive experiences. The company says it will start looking at translated EHRs as well as medical imaging — doctors could one day be looking at a flip-book style document of a patient’s x-rays over the years as opposed to the more traditional methods.

Aaron Levie image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Before health care providers can handle “big data,” they first need to learn how to deal with small data.

That’s the frank assessment of Sean Cassidy, a vice president with Premier Data Alliance, a group purchasing organization that helps coordinate the health care provided by 2,800 hospitals, 56,000 non-surgical healthcare facilities, and 34,000 doctors’ offices.

He focused on the data needs of accountable care organizations, or ACOs, which aim to control costs while improving health  care outcomes by basing reimbursements to providers on the effectiveness of the care they provide. To do so, an ACO incorporates a network of physicians, hospitals, and other providers with a wide range of specialties, to ensure that patients can get the services they need within the network. That’s where technology comes in.

“I need tools to coordinate their care,” Cassidy said, speaking from the perspective of a healthcare provider in the ACO context. He was speaking onstage today at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference, a two-day event focused on health IT. (That’s Cassidy, above, on the right, speaking with VentureBeat CEO Matt Marshall.)

“The game is, keep folks in the ambulatory setting, keep them out of the ER setting, and that’s how we’re going to dramatically control costs.”

But to make that work, Cassidy says, ACOs need better data. Right now, much of the data available comes from medical claims, data that is “a mile wide and an inch deep,” Cassidy quipped.

Electronic medical records systems (EMRs) would offer much deeper data on each patient’s condition and needs, enabling much more effective large-scale analysis and coordination — but EMRs are hard to work with. That’s a fact acknowledged by many of the speakers today.

“We have had trouble getting data out of EMRs,” Cassidy said. “We have had trouble with closed systems, and with walls being put up.”

For example, Cassidy said, the database records and reporting provided by Epic, one of the largest EMR providers, lacks the flexibility and the transparency that he needs to make it truly interoperable with other systems. Other EMR systems are similarly limited.

That presents a huge opportunity for startups that can help break down those walls and increase the interchange of data, he said.

“What we’d like to see is standards emerge,” Cassidy concluded. “Then everybody, let’s innovate on top of that platform, and let the best companies win.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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SAN FRANCISCO — The startup Doximity is commonly referred to as a “Facebook for doctors.” Not anymore. It’s now moving in a new direction: medical education.

The new model came about in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, the nonprofit academic medical center. Cleveland Clinic has agreed to offer credit to practicing physicians who use Doximity to learn on the job.

The goal is to move continuing medical education, known as “CME,” to an online space so that it’s not confined to auditoriums and conference halls.

“Doctors spend about 40 hours a year to get accredited and 90 percent of physician education happens offline,” said Doximity CEO Jeff Tangney said. “This is time spent away from practice, not to mention administrative time needed to track the courses they’ve completed. It’s a pain. This platform will make it easier for doctors to track all these credits and automatically keep them up-to-date.”

CME refers to the practice of physicians learning about new areas of the field, and staying on top of the latest research. In the past, doctors have needed to travel to a remote auditorium; now they can access cutting-edge research from a smartphone device.

The news was announced today onstage at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference. Prior to founding Doximity to cater to the next generation of tech-savvy physicians, Tangney was the founder of Epocrates, a Bay Area company that develops mobile health applications.

Tangney said the result will be that doctors can save “precious time and reduce the burden of paperwork.” In addition, Doximity will help physicians track everything they’ve learned.

Doximity’s new service offers relevant medical research to its community of registered physicians — about 170,000 and growing. The company’s existing suite of secure HIPPA-compliant collaboration tools will enable doctors to share and discuss cases.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Doximity is one of the fastest growing digital health startups; it recently closed a $17 million series B round led by Morgenthaler Ventures. During a fireside chat with Rebecca Lynn, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, Tangey said that doctors “get a bad rap” when it comes to technology, but they were the first adopters of pagers and Palm Pilots. Doctors are busy and on-the-go, and they need solutions that fit into their workflow.

“Our goal is to make medical communication effortless, as easy as it is for the rest of us to shoot an email or text to a friend,” Tangney said. “We’ve gone a great job of digitizing health information, but not of making it easy to access. We can take the technology the teenagers have in the waiting room and give it to the physicians and specialists seeing them in the exam room.”

Twenty-four percent of physicians in the U.S. use Doximity, and the system sends 20,000 secure messages a day. Tangney said that the secure 1-to-1 messaging has “really blossomed” because it saves doctors time by giving them the information they need, when they need it. The new CME platform has a similar goal. Ultimately, the more time doctors save on the “other stuff,” the more bandwidth they have for patients.

When asked a question from an audience member about making Doximity available for nurse practitioners, Tangney said that it is something they are considering. Nurse practitioners, like doctors, also need more effective methods to communicate with each other about patients. Tangney also teased another major partnership down the road.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat 

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Digital technology is fundamentally transforming the practice of medicine, but Dr. David Levin, the Chief Medical Information Officer at the Cleveland Clinic, said this is still uncharted territory.

“We are all immigrants entering a new country and a new age,” he said at HealthBeat. “Change is coming as we transition from a volume-based system to a value-based system, where people get paid based on the results, quality of care, efficiency, and how satisfied our patients are.”

The health care industry traditionally operates on outdated IT systems and is slow to adopt new forms of technology that could streamline operations, make workflow more efficient, and centralize data in one organized and accessible place. Levin joked on stage that everyday he goes to work in health care and then returns home to live in the 21st century.

The Cleveland Clinic is a progressive health care organization that provides primary care services, conducts research and education, and develops new technology to modernize health care. It is dedicated to “pushing the limits of excellence in patient experience” and applying trends in data analytics, cloud computing, mobile technology, and the ‘Internet of Things’ to bear in the practice of medicine.

Levin identified the “three P’s” for the future of health care. The first is personalization.

“We are going to see medical practice highly customized for each individual, using real time information and considering individual preferences and tastes,” he said. “The full flower of personalized health will extend beyond the molecular level and be about what who each patient is a person and what they need. In medicine problem of having too much information long ago surpassed that of having too little. We can make use of that knowledge.”

The second “P” is “population-based,” or the “zooming out” to systems designed for large groups of similar patients. By gathering and analyzing health data, clinicians and researchers can gain greater insight into health patterns. The third trend is “pervasive.” Levin said that health care will become ubiquitous as the world becomes more connected and virtualized.

“Rather than you going to health care, health care will come to you,” Levin said. “Can you imagine banking if you had to get permission to see your balance or make a visit to a branch to answer a question? This is the current state of most health care, but looking at trends in other industries we can see what is ahead.”

Regulation is one of the major obstacles for innovation in this field, but Levin said another problem is that many health applications don’t integrate data, whether it is structured, semi-structured, or unstructured, as effectively as they could.

“Cr’apps’ far outweigh the apps,” he said. “The two main reasons for failure are either something technical — the app simply doesn’t work, or that it does not fit into the workflow and actually impedes job performance.”

Cleveland Clinic has a number of projects and initiatives to improve patient experience and make health care and health IT more efficient. Levin said the organization has created a new clinical systems office that moves from Electronic Medical Records (EMR) to EMR “as a portal” that lays the foundation for a “knowledge management ecosystem,” complete with decision engines and a collaboration platform.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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The new TrackingPoint sniper rifle doesn’t fire when you pull the trigger. Rather, it fires when it knows it will hit the target you’re aiming at. And then streams video to the included iPad mini to allow you to share your hunting or sharpshooting experience with Facebook, YouTube, or maybe even Al Jazeera.

Now, the company says, everyone can be an expert marksman.

“With TrackingPoint, even a novice shooter can become an elite long-range marksman in minutes, accurately and effectively engaging targets out to 1,200 yards,” the company said in a press release.

That’s good, if you’re a hunter and you want to “ethically harvest” game by making immediate kills shots. But it’s also incredibly dangerous, since now inexperienced shooters can be as accurate — or more accurate — as trained military snipers from almost a mile away. The potential for terrorism and targeted assassinations is obvious.

The shooter simple tells the rifle what he or she is aiming at by locking a laser on the target. The gun’s built-in laser range finder, compass, environmental sensors to gauge wind speeds, inertial measurement unit, ballistics computer, and networked tracking engine then engage. But the rifle only fires when you’re holding it in exactly the right direction to hit the target, ensuring that even the unsteadiest and untrained hands can deploy death from a distance. And every shot is recorded and streamed to your nearby iPad.

“Think of it like a smart rifle. You have a smart car; you got a smartphone; well, now we have a smart rifle,” company President Jason Schauble told NPR.

Hunters are excited by the possibilities, apparently.

Source: TrackingPoint

XS1 is the largest-caliber Precision Guided Firearm (PGF) available today.

“When I first saw this system, I knew immediately that I had to have one,” said the first owner of a TrackingPoint rifle. “As a sport hunter and professional marksman, I see the TrackingPoint technology as an excellent way to ensure more ethical harvesting of game and to share the thrill of the hunt with anyone. I cannot wait to make amazing shots of my own.”

The Austin-based company that makes the TrackingPoint rifle calls it a “Precision-Guided Firearm (PGF),” carefully avoiding any reference to “snipers” or “sniper rifles.” But the size and weight of this deadly weapon — 27″ long, over 20 pounds loaded — make it a very unusual hunting rifle. I’m no firearms expert, but several sites I’ve checked indicate that average hunting rifles weigh in at 6-12 pounds, and that a rifle of 20 pounds or more is “just too heavy for general purposes.”

Ergo, it’s a sniper rifle.

TrackingPoint has made some efforts around safety. The sophisticated tracking scope that makes the rifle “smart” is password-protected, according to the company’s CEO, so while the gun will still fire without an authorized user, it won’t allow access to all the intelligence that could make a weekend warrior into an instant Marine sniper.

The company made its first deliveries this week, and due to “overwhelming demand,” has set up a web-based application process to get on the waiting list. We can only hope that the application process doesn’t allow any deranged individuals to access this type of deadly weapons.

And, no matter how smart these rifles are, the question is: are they wise?

When people run into major problems with the health industry — trying to get money from insurance companies or to get access to an experimental drug, for example — they’re no longer just turning to lawyers. Increasingly, they’re turning to online petitions.

One petition website, Change.org, has already seen over 7,000 health-related petitions come through — with some big successes.

Chief executive Ben Rattray, who is speaking at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference next week in San Francisco, explained that that he has seen people successfully take on big-name organizations like the USDA and insurance providers — and those successes inspire him. Indeed, healthcare companies are often quite inaccessible despite the fact that they’re involved in such a sensitive and critical aspect of life.

Change.org isn’t focused exlusively on healthcare or health tech. The company helps people petition specific leaders on any issue. But health-related issues have quickly become one of the most popular topics on the site.

We chatted with Rattray to see just where his company fits into the healthcare conversation:

VentureBeat: What role does Change.org feel it plays in grassroots health activism?

Ben Rattray: Our role is to empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see. We’re an open platform and therefore don’t advocate for campaigns ourselves, but we are a place where parents and siblings and friends who haven’t been able to make their voices heard are starting petitions on behalf of their suffering loved ones. We think people deserve to be part of the decisions being made that affect their lives, so we’ve created a tool that gives them a voice in that conversation.

VentureBeat: How many campaigns has Change.org hosted and what kinds have you seen?

Rattray: More than 7,000 people have started health-related petitions on Change.org, covering every health topic imaginable. One of the most popular topics is around medical coverage from major insurers. For example, last year a young man from DC named Jason Warren successfully petitioned Blue Cross Blue Shield to cover his father’s recovery from a heart attack after gathering 190,000 signatures — a shift we have seen many insurers make in response to petitions. Another popular topic is healthy food; in one campaign last year, Bettina Siegel, a mom in Texas, successfully petitioned the USDA to stop packing “pink slime” in school lunches in just one week with more than 250,000 signatures –  after health advocates had been working on the issue for 10 years.

VentureBeat: Why is this, in today’s digital age, more powerful than picking up the phone and talking to your representative?

Rattray: There’s still value in many types of civic action, including picking up the phone. But on a phone call, you’re just one person with an opinion. On a petition, you’re a member of a collective movement, and your voice is shared publicly for everyone to see. Even if they want to, there’s no way a government official or company can ignore your comment – it’s like a highly visible time capsule of public sentiment.

Take Jenn McNary, the mother of two boys with a rare, lethal disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. One of her boys had access to a medical trial for a new drug, and his condition improved dramatically. Her other boy doesn’t have the trial drug, and his muscles are deteriorating rapidly. Soon, he’ll lose all upper body strength, and he won’t be able to eat or drink on his own.

Jenn’s petition asks the FDA to approve the medication through the Accelerated Approval Program, which expedites approval of drugs that treat serious diseases. Jenn could have picked up the phone – and trust me, she has, many, many times. But it was her petition, with its 179,000 signatures, many from parents of other DMD-afflicted kids, that got her a meeting with senior FDA officials. Jenn just sent us an email a few weeks ago saying they were “extremely supportive, engaging, and receptive” to her ideas – so things are looking up. That’s the power of the Change.org platform.

VentureBeat: Do you believe Change.org is really making a difference? Can you point to any successful campaigns?

Rattray: We’ve seen hundreds of health-related victories. The 28-year-old UC Davis student whose radiation treatment was finally covered by Anthem after four long weeks of appeals. The 21-year-old severely disabled student who got Medicare to continue her nursing care through the end of college, when she could move back home for support from her family. The Ohio woman who got Governor Kasich to add autism benefits to the state’s essential health benefits package. The list goes on and on. The question of whether petitions can have an impact is by now clearly answered – they can and do every day.

VentureBeat: Do you see spikes in health petitions around current events?

Rattray: We may see a small spike around, say, the Affordable Care Act — people who want it passed, people who don’t want it passed — but in general, it’s pretty consistent. That’s because our platform is really built for micro-movements: small, personal petitions replicated hundreds or thousands of times over across cities, states, even countries. At Change.org, we deeply believe in the power of starting local and building movements from the ground up instead of jumping on huge national problems and trying to tackle them from the top down.

VentureBeat: What role can social media sites play in health activism? Are they too unorganized to make a real difference?

Rattray: Social media sites can play a crucial role in raising awareness about health issues. Where they sometimes fall short, though, is translating that awareness into effective, coordinated action. That’s where Change.org comes in; because our platform is built explicitly to make changing the world intuitive and easy, it’s generally more effective than social media sites not structured for that purpose.

VentureBeat: Why should people use Change.org for health-related issues over creating a White House petition online?

Rattray: We’re big fans of the folks working on We the People, the White House’s petition platform. Over the past few months, we’ve actually worked with them on building out their API.

The Change.org platform is unique not only because it lets anyone start a petition about anything they care about, but also because people can target whichever decision maker has the power to do something. If the issue is political, sometimes that’s the Obama administration, but more often than not, it’s the director of a smaller government agency or the head of a specific task force. For non-political issues — say, an insurance provider who won’t cover a loved one’s medical treatment — you can use Change.org to petition the right people there, too. And it works — thousands of people have won their petitions using our site.

VentureBeat: If you could ask tech companies for any one thing to help Change.org health petitions get more attention, what would it be?

Rattray: Send us your engineers — we’re hiring.

Ben Rattray photo via Chrissy Farr/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Michael Yang is Managing Director, Comcast Ventures.

[Editor's note: Michael Yang and Keas CEO Josh Stevens will be debating the topic of educating employees on health benefits at HealthBeat 2013 next week. See Josh Stevens' story published yesterday: "Getting American employees online is key for health care — and reducing health costs."]

Despite some recent news that healthcare spending may be slowing down, it continues to increase each year, and traditional financial sponsors of healthcare in the U.S. — be it the government, the health plan, or the employer — are increasingly adopting a more “consumerist” mindset when it comes to healthcare.  This is especially prevalent in the employer market, which continues to underwrite approximately half of Americans’ healthcare costs.

So what have the leading employers in our country been doing about it? From pushing patient portals rich with online content, to offering decision-support tools for provider selection and procedure price transparency, to leveraging game dynamics and social networking techniques for corporate wellness programs, HR benefits teams have introduced numerous waves of innovation targeted at making employees more sophisticated consumers of healthcare. The central hypothesis is that if you know what you are consuming and how it affects you financially, you will better manage your utilization of healthcare. But is it working?

Health tech is no different than any other new innovation – just because you build it, does not mean they will come. No one remembers the portal’s URL address; no one remembers their log-in for their provider search tool; and no one cares about the leaderboard for weight loss. We are losing the war on patient engagement as these solutions on a standalone basis are not enough. If the patient or employee will not engage, then there is little hope that information is exchanged, proper guidance is given, and appropriate actions are taken. So the real question is, how do you encourage employee engagement?

True engagement can only be achieved through the helping hand of an emerging class of players in the health advocacy, health assistant, and health navigator space. Our Byzantine healthcare system is so complicated that most of us are effectively healthcare illiterate. “Do-it-yourself” is arguably easier with a home remodel than a chronic condition in our healthcare system. As such, it is falling on the shoulders of companies like Accolade, Health Advocate, and Quantum Health that are offered as an employee benefit to assist employees through their healthcare journey. Professionally trained health coaches and assistants are accessible to employees by phone, email, chat and even sometimes on-site, and can help problem-solve a wide range of topics from administrative to clinical, all with the objective of helping the employee understand their options and having all the relevant information in front of them to take the right next step. A patient portal, a wellness program, or a price transparency tool is so much more powerful when an employee can talk through what they’re seeing with a health assistant (or better yet, have their health advocate do it for them).

Early results are in and engagement is high, patients are satisfied and healthcare costs can be managed. Perhaps this is the formula for the future. Engaged employees can equal smarter patients, which in turn can be healthier employees, but you have to help them become engaged.

To learn more, come hear Meghan Kelly of VentureBeat moderate a fireside chat with Michael Yang and Josh Stevens of Keas at HealthBeat 2013’s Healthy Employees=Smarter Patients.

Disclosure: Comcast Ventures is an investor in Accolade.

Doctor image via Shutterstock

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Want to call your doctor but can’t abide that awful 1970s call center system and the hour-long wait?

Patients need a better way to communicate with their physicians, and Ringadoc believes it can help. Investors agree; the San Francisco-based startup added another $700,000 to its seed round today, bringing its total funding to $1.9 million.

Startups like One Medical are taking on some of the biggest challenges in health care. But sometimes the right approach is to start small and focus on one specific problem. Ringadoc is laser-focused on building simple tech to bridge the communication gap between doctors and patients.

Ringdoc helps doctors separate personal and professional messages, and enables them to triage patients before speaking to them on the phone or in person. In addition, physicians can access after-hours calls on a smartphone or tablet device anytime through the answering service.

Ringadoc initially developed and launched an app that let patients record video messages ahead of a virtual visit with a physician. But the company has dropped video for now and shifted to phone consultations.

“Ringadoc reduces the human error associated with costly answering services and live operators by allowing the doctor to hear the patient’s issue in their own voice and words,” said CEO and co-founder Jordan Michaels (pictured above, right, with co-founder Micah Grossman).

Michaels said that conversations between patients and doctors are “an instrumental part of the health care conversation” and were “previously overlooked.”

The company claims its cloud-based answering service has now successfully handled over 100,000 calls for practices across the country. The business model is also clear and simple; Ringadoc charges physicians $49 per month.

Investors include Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, Sharon Knight, co-founder of One Medical, the chain of concierge primary care practices, Siemer Ventures, Telegraph Hill Group, and Dr. Lyle Dennis, the neurology chief at Bon Secours Health System.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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So you’ve developed a cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) or medical device that will drastically change the way we deliver health care.

Just a few years ago, you may have faced a prolonged struggle to gain investment. Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, one of the more dynamic new EHR companies, recalls having to use the cash from a motorcycle accident to pay the salaries of key employees. But by 2009 when the Obama administration calling for doctors to shift to electronic health records, investors saw opportunity.

Today, investors are rushing to invest in digital health.  This will be a “record year” for investment in the health care, Rock Health recently predicted. The research shows an uptick in deals in the first quarter of the year and an increase in venture capital.

But will the elite venture capital firms open their check books for you? With our inaugural health conference HealthBeat coming up next Monday and Tuesday (it’s almost sold out, but you may be able to get a ticket still if you move fast), I caught up with Sequoia Capital‘s Warren Hogarth, and Morgenthaler Ventures‘ Missy Krasner to dig deeper into their digital health investment thesis.

VentureBeat: What’s the primary area of health that you’re currently interested in? What’s the future?

Warren Hogarth: One of the key areas is bioinformatics. It’s everything that is enabled by cheap genome sequencing. We’ve made about a half dozen investments to date in the U.S. and Asia. We have also taken a keen interest in the consumer side and health IT. These new technologies will play a role in engaging people in their health in a complete way.

Morgenthaler’s executive in residence, Missy Krasner.

Missy Krasner: A sister theme would be “big data” analytics and business intelligence in health care. There is a tremendous amount of interest in sucking data out of health records and mining data from clinical performance.

Hogarth: We’re talking now about the microbiome, not just the genome. We’re understanding that the microbiome interplays with our health, and we’re seeing a new opportunity for non-invasive treatment and testing.

VentureBeat: Have you addressed the ethical concerns around mining data about the human body?

Hogarth: Patients will have choice and control when it comes to their data. Hopefully, we’ll overcome some of the concerns about the broad misuse of data. The trick is to do it in a de-identified way with a clear process.

Krasner: And in 2014, medical underwriting will be banned so patients won’t be rated based on preexisting conditions. [Medical underwriting is already prohibited for children. -Ed.]

VentureBeat: Are you buying into this “quantified self” trend? Is it empowering for patients to have access to all this data about their health?

Hogarth: I think it’s empowering. I just had my genome sequenced, and my doctor was able to use that information to make a decision regarding my health. Companies like Jawbone are taking reams of data and surfacing it to a physician in a meaningful way.

Krasner: I spent five years at Google Health trying to get patients to engage. We tracked some of the early adopters of Basis, BodyMedia (recently acquired by Jawbone), and other great activity trackers. But there are a couple things that still need to happen. The data that is collected needs to actually be put into nuggets that are actionable. We need to take this data and figure out how to use smart algorithms to provide usable clinical insights. Otherwise we’ll get alert fatigue.

Hogarth: We need to go beyond the “chronically worried well.” We need to make an impact on people who are obese.

Krasner: I did some interesting research by signing up for Weight Watchers. I went to the meetings and subscribed to the mobile product, the device that helps you count activity. It’s a great program but we are still in the stage where patients have to record what they’re eating and put manual data into the app. The next piece of technology will automatically know my patterns. We’ll see a fantastic amount of adoption.

[Editor's note: Krasner will moderate a panel at HealthBeat on the "death" of the personal health record (PHR). That's different from the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which is alive and well and seeing serious innovation. Also at HealthBeat, we'll have executives of the major disruptor EHR companies speaking, from Practice Fusion's Ryan Howard, to the leaders of CareCloud and AthenaHealth).

VentureBeat: Are there areas that you wouldn't invest in?

Hogarth: We don't invest in drug discovery or medical devices that are pre-FDA approval. [Venture capitalists say it's a nuclear winter for medical devices. Read more on that here. -Ed.] It’s too risky, and there is a lack of control. When it comes to devices, I would love to see a culture where things happen in a timely manner.

VentureBeat: What’s the one big health care transformation that you’re most excited about?

Krasner: The one area we haven’t talked about is the new insurance models for health. Patients are being asked to pay more out of pocket than ever before. That whole wave is forcing people to think much harder about where they go. There is no transparency around quality and price. There is a big opportunity here.

Hogarth: We will see a big transformation with employee sponsored healthcare — we’ll see businesses not offering insurance. You’ll shop and make a decision about health care based on price. We’re looking hard at startups that consumerize this experience.

Meet and mingle with health investors at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s conference in San Francisco on May 20 and 21. Partners from Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers will speak on a panel “Health IT: The Numbers, The Funding, The Exits,” about the drivers making this industry segment more appealing to investors. 

photo credit: Emmanuel Gadenne via photopin cc

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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