Tomer Shoval is co-founder and CEO of medical bill tracking service Simplee. Shoval will be speaking at HealthBeat event next week, which deals with how IT is driving change in health care.

Mobile billing and payments have seen extraordinary growth in almost every consumer industry, from utility bills to lattes. However, the healthcare industry has been slow to adopt mobile billing and payments. A number of factors are converging to make 2013 a year of rapid growth in mobile payment options for medical providers and patients.

Healthcare is a slow-moving, highly-regulated industry that historically has been resistant to adopting non-care related changes. As pressures on hospital and physician revenue mount, medical providers are increasingly forced to take on new billing options. Here are three reasons why mobile medical billing and payments will expand in 2013:

1) Multiple Payment Scenarios and Options

There are two general types of mobile payment options: point-of-sale purchases and bill pay. To date, much of the mobile payments buzz has centered around quick and easy point-of-sale transactions. The partnership of Starbucks and Square to make coffee purchases faster and easier and the recent expansion of the PayPal mobile wallet to thousands of retail stores are perfect examples of this application.

Mobile bill pay has also been quietly gaining momentum. According to Fiserv, mobile bill pay has grown 41% among smartphone users since 2011. Further, a Western Union survey found that 39% of respondents intend to pay more bills online this year and 12% will pay more bills with their smartphone.

The good news for healthcare is that patients frequently make both types of payments – either at the doctor’s office as a point-of-sale purchase or through a cost share with insurance. There is a unique opportunity for medical providers to shorten the payments cycle, increase revenue, and decrease collection costs across the entire billing spectrum, all while providing patients with a much greater degree of control and convenience.

2) Healthcare Bills are Complex

Anyone who has visited a doctor or filled a prescription can attest to the complicated nature of medical bills and insurers’ explanation of benefits. In the past, this has translated into lengthy and often overlapping paper billing statements from multiple sources. It can be difficult to determine how much a patient owes, to whom, and by when.

By the very nature of the platform, online and mobile bill pay has the power to clearly and concisely deliver a simplified medical bill. As more providers begin to explore new billing practices, patients are eager to adopt them. According to a 2012 Billing Household Survey, 76% of customers who use a smartphone to manage utility, phone, and other household bills would also like to pay their medical bills this way. Patients do not want to spread statements out on the kitchen table and use a calculator and checkbook to pay these bills. They expect a better way. As soon as providers begin to offer these options, that demand will only intensify.

3) Providers and Patients are Aligned

By taking a cue from other industries, mobile medical billing and payments is likely to benefit both medical providers and their patients.

The Biller Mobile Bill Pay Benchmark Study by Fiserv found that service providers use mobile billing and payments to improve customer service and reduce costs, and patients use it to save time and improve convenience.

For the healthcare industry, the benefits of mobile billing and payments are even more immediate. Provider revenues are being squeezed on all sides, and patient payments are a rare area of potential growth. Mobile billing and payments has the potential to give patients clarity and convenience when and where they need it most and to enable medical providers to eliminate overhead, shorten time to payment, and increase patient engagement.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

---

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.

---

Share Practice is a collaborative clinical reference for doctors. After a doctor makes a diagnoses, the next step is to recommend treatment. Traditionally, the physician will step out of the room and consult with a reference book, research, or medical resource to find the best course. However, Brandeis said that these sources are not adequate because their funding comes from pharmaceutical corporations and insurance companies or from universities where findings are slow to publish and arduous to consume.

“Doctors right now have an antiquated way of transferring knowledge,” Brandeis said in an interview at his office. “I was calling or messaging or texting other doctors I trust to ask questions and realized that there was no structured way for us to share our experiences. When you are busy seeing patients, you don’t have time to sort through a ton of information. I want to collect doctors’ brains and experience in one place where it can spread quickly.”

As a practicing physician himself, Brandeis wanted to build a better way for doctors to connect over medical information. He started out with a Dropbox account that his colleagues could contribute to, and by the time it grew to 30 doctors and 10,000 treatment options, he decided to take it to the next level.

Share Practice pulls information from multiple medical databases together and contains thousands of diagnoses. Doctors can drill into a specific diagnosis to see the various ways other doctors have treated it. Every treatment is ranked by up-voting or down-voting from the community, and doctors who regularly contribute popular treatments have greater weight within the group. Specialists commenting on their area of expertise also rise to the top. The system will ultimately have filters for qualifiers and “co-morbidities,” which means that recommendations can take ages, gender, chronic disease, and other factors into account.

“We are layering experience on top of research,” said COO Zach Bell during the interview. “Getting doctors to collaborate is important, but one might put it in a Word doc, one might write it in a notebook, one might just remember the information. We created a tool for them to document their experience in a clinically relevant way that can be accessed when they need it. It was really important to us to develop a tool that fit into the doctor’s workflow.”

Epocrates is Share Practice’s biggest competition, along with companies like Sermo, Doximity, Cure Together, and HealthTap. However, the founders said Share Practice is distinguishable because it emphasizes the social and collaborative element while also allowing for integrative medicine. Share Practice isn’t just about prescribing drugs but rather sharing treatments that are the most effective. Brandeis said that it is difficult to get treatments in front of a large audience, and he gave the case of a doctor in New Zealand who found that honey could be used to treat a specific type of lesion. It took 15 years for the information to get to the U.S.

The startup is part of Founders Den in San Francisco and has raised $750,000 from Founders Fund Angel, Base VC, Hub Ventures, and a series of doctor angel investors.

Photo credit: Share Practice

---

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.

---

The system combines a sensor that snaps onto asthma inhalers with a mobile app that displays data to the user and provides insights about their treatment. The company also provides personalized feedback in email, text, mail, and personal calls to help patents more effectively manage their disease. For clinicians, Asthmapolis provides dashboards with real-time and summary data so they can monitor their patients.

“No one offers an automated, comprehensive disease management platform like we do – combining sensors, apps, analytics and personalized services for patients – and we’re the only ones to date that have FDA clearance for this type of solution,” said CEO and cofounder David van Sickle, PhD in an email. “Traditional disease management doesn’t combine technology with services in this way, and disease management apps don’t collect passive information through sensors or provide real-time feedback with nurse educators.”

Sickle formerly worked as a epidemiologist focusing on asthma and respiratory health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was frustrated by the lack of objective and timely data about asthma, as well as the lack of communication between doctors and patients that comprised treatment of the disease. He said doctors lacked information about their patients between visits, and patients often misunderstood how to effectively control their asthma. By using inhalers to capture data, Asthmapolis seeks to bring a greater level of transparency and insight to the treatment and prevention of the disease.

Asthma is still a pervasive problem in the U.S.. Each year, uncontrolled asthma leads to 500,000 hospitalizations, 2 million Emergency Room visits, 10 million physician visits, and 25 million missed days of school or work. Additionally, 60% of asthma conditions are uncontrolled, but getting it under control can potentially save patients thousands of dollars.

Asthampolis can also save hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies money. The startup has rolled our commercial partnership programs with Amerigroup Florida (Wellpoint), Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in New York, Dignity Health in California, and pharmacy and public initiatives in the City of Louisville. To date, Asthmapolis claims to have helped users achieve 20,000 asthma-free days. This financing will support development of new services to extend its reach to people living with all forms of chronic respiratory disease, not just asthma.

The company is based in Madison, Wisconsin. It was founded in 2010.

Photo Credit: Asthmapolis

Today, Scanadu unveiled three health products that help people get in touch with their physical health. Billed as “the biggest innovation in home medicine since the invention of the thermometer,” these home diagnostic tools use mobile, sensor, and social technology to create a real-time, comprehensive picture of your health data.

Scanadu SCOUT is a sensor that people hold up to their temple, and in less than ten seconds, it will collect data on pulse, heart rate, electrical heart activity, temperature, heart rate variability, and blood oxygenation. The device be available at the end of 2013 for $150.

The second tool, Project ScanaFlo, analyzes urine for conditions like pregnancy complications, preeclampisa, gestational diabetes, kidney failure and urinary tract infections. This disposable cartridge will be sold over-the-counter.

Finally, Scandau will sell Project ScanaFlu. This disk tests saliva through a disposable cartridge to detect Strep A, Influenza A, Influenza B, Adenovirus, and RSV. Catching respiratory disease and the flu early generally leads to a speedier recovery.

All the data collected through these devices will be tracked through the mobile app, which offers a personal health feed to monitor vitals signs and identify patterns over time. By “sending your smartphone to med school,” mobile devices become a powerful tool to keep people in tune with their bodies.

“People can get access information about health and connect to each other about health, but the piece that is missing is that people can’t get information about their own body,” said founder Walter De Brouwer in an interview with VentureBeat. “By getting precision diagnostics into the hands of people, this can enable them to get early detection and to inform their conversations with their doctor in the ways that haven’t been possible.”

De Brouwer is a “futurist, academic, scientist and entrepreneur” who helped found TEDGlobal and worked with the One Laptop Per Child initiative. In 2005, his son suffered brain trauma and spent a year in the hospital. This experience inspired De Brouwer to leave academia and set out to change the healthcare industry.

The American health industry is in a state of flux, with significant reforms and technological developments affecting the way people think about healthcare and its providers. De Brouwer said that that the center of gravity is moving out of hospitals and into outpatient care, and tools like this can lead to better, smarter care for more people, at a fraction of the time and cost.

Scanadu is based at the NASA-Ames Research Center and is part of the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize competition. These three products are just the beginning. The crack team of biohackers, doctors, scientists, engineers, PhDs, and MDs are full of ideas for the future, including testing for AIDS and “embarrassing diseases” where patients feel shy about seeking medical help.

---

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.

---

But that might be about to change, according to Jeff Tangney, a serial entrepreneur who founded Epocrates, the medical information company, and is currently running Doximity, a Facebook-style app for doctors that is growing fast, with more than one in six doctors already on the network.

VentureBeat had a chance to chat with Tangney about the future of investment in the medical space.

VentureBeat: We don’t hear all that much about investing in medicine.

Tangney: No, health tech hasn’t even really been recognized as a category until the last 10 years. There wasn’t really too much venture investment in health tech, but that’s changing. With the passing of the Affordable Care Act and the recognition that health care is 18 percent of the U.S. economy … some VCs have started looking in.

VentureBeat: What will national health care do for the space?

Tangney: The first changes of Obamacare haven’t really changed all that much yet – the biggest changes are still coming up. In 2014, the insurance exchanges start at a state level. Until then, there’s a lot of uncertainty … which actually favors the venture community.

The medical community is not quick to change over time – venture community is the only one that can react that fast. For example, we just raised a $17M round a few months ago.

VentureBeat: What’s hard about investing in health care?

Tangney: Well, you see a lot of folks sitting on their hands due to regulation.

For example, it’s illegal for a doctor to send an email about a patient. It’s illegal to send an SMS. And the internet really isn’t used in healthcare. It’s a little like a third-world country … where they’re skipping PCs and going straight to smartphones.

Over time that will change.

VentureBeat: What is working … who’s getting VC in health?

Tangney: ZocDoc, HealthApp and CastLight are doing well. CastLight, which creates a very cool employer portal for lower health care costs, raised $100 million earlier this year.

ZocDoc, with does online scheduling, raised $70 million a few months before that. And PracticeFusion raised $34M round to help usher in electronic health records. We’ve raised $27 million at Doximity … so there’s easily $200 million raised in the last year.

VentureBeat: What do you see in the future?

Tangney: Investors who are focusing on health care are starting to place their bets … as soon as we get out of this regulatory uncertainty, things will start to move.

Most people don’t know it, but Sequoia’s biggest investment ever was in an urgent care center … MedExpress, about two or three years ago. They’re seeing this shift to insurance exchanges, where, instead of someone paying  $3,000 for treatment in a hospital, they’re getting essentially the same service for $1,000 in a small health care facility.

VentureBeat: How does the growing self-quantification movement fit into this?

Tangney: Well, I wear a Jawbone wristband, but the knock on Sand Hill Road is that no-one’s been able to turn it into a big business yet.

The question is: Where’s the cross-the-chasm product?

The hotbed of this is San Diego … QualComm has invested a lot, and West Wireless Institute has  put $500 million into quantification. They’re trying to come up with cool new technology that the U.S. can sell to the rest of the world … to the wealthy well.

I have a Sonos headband too. It’s really ugly, really geeky, and measures your sleep patterns. What I’ve learned is that to get a sleep score of 100, I need to be intimate with my wife first. [laughing]

Those are all cool things, but even Nike hasn’t been able to really crack this market yet.

photo credit: Viktor Hertz via photopin cc

---

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.

---