Health Q&A startup HealthTap has raised $24 million in its second round of funding and added former Square COO Keith Rabois to its board of directors, the company said today.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based HealthTap offers a popular service for doctors to answer questions from everyday folks. More than 38,000 accredited doctors in the U.S. are on the platform and more than 8 million unique visitors connect with those doctors each month via apps for smartphones, tablets, and the web.

HealthTap founder and CEO Ron Gutman told VentureBeat that the average doctor on the platform uses the app a crazy “69 minutes per session.” Doctors get hooked so easily because the app provides a way to put their names out there, attract more patients, and compete to answer questions.

“A large number of doctors use the app every single day,” Gutman said. “I think many of them do it because they are good people.”

HealthTap does not make any money off its robust network at present. Gutman says the company could be profitable today if he simply allowed advertising across the applications. But he’s forgoing advertising with the promise that the apps will eventually facilitate digital doctor appointments, which could be extremely lucrative.

“We want to provide access to care,” Gutman said. “25 percent of doctor visits are just exchanges of information. We want to take over those appointments … and we will charge less than a traditional visit.”

The new funding was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation by prior investors Mayfield Fund and Mohr Davidow Ventures. Including the new funding, HealthTap has raised about $38 million to date. Its previous round totaled $11.5 million.

Having Rabois onboard to help the company will come in handy since he’s known for helping early companies grow and become successful. He previously worked for PayPal, LinkedIn, and Slide. Following a rough departure from mobile payments startup Square, Rabois became a VC at Khosla Ventures. Vinod Khosla himself will also join HealthTap as “an adviser.”

HealthTap was founded in 2010 and has just over 30 employees. The new funding will allow it to hire aggressively. Gutman specifically said he plans to hire workers for “big data, engineering, product, design, and health informatics.” Looking forward, Gutman also said he’d like to take the service global, but the focus will remain on the U.S. in the near term.

Photo via HealthTap

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Practice Fusion provides free web-based health records to doctors, and now it’s expanding to serve the general public, too. The company has just acquired 100Plus, a mobile app maker that helps regular folks track the health impacts of their behavior.

The company won’t disclose the final sum, but did tell us that the acquisition was a combination of stock and cash.

100Plus’s mobile apps use analytics to show how minor behavioral changes like drinking a glass of water in the morning or walking to work can lead to a longer and healthier life. The startup’s first app demonstrated the impact of alcohol consumption on lifespan, and it launched at the SXSW conference in March.

This is Practice Fusion’s first major acquisition, but it has ample budget given that it raised $34 million in June. The relationship appears to be longstanding — Practice Fusion’s CEO Ryan Howard is listed as 100Plus’s cofounder on Crunchbase, and he provided a small amount of funding in the company’s early days.

In a recent interview at the San Francisco headquarters, Howard revealed that Practice Fusion plans to roll out consumer health products in the coming months, so the acquisition is in line with the broader strategy.

Practice Fusion is best known for its free web-based electronic health record (EHR) for doctors, which became big business in 2009 when Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, a mandate that pushes doctors to adopt an EHR by a fixed deadline of 2015.

The 100Plus apps will likely be rebranded, and the 100Plus team will be brought into the Practice Fusion fold.

The existing apps are an impressive technical feat, but it did not gain a strong foothold with consumers (it’s a similar story to design-focused health app maker Massive Health).

According to Practice Fusion’s associate vice president of corporate development Patrick Dugan, these insights should be made available to physicians. The goal is to keep doctors informed about a patient’s health in between visits. ”100Plus was interesting for us because they make it easy for people to engage with their health on a daily basis,” he said in an interview.

Chris Hogg, CEO and cofounder of 100Plus

Through the strategic acquisition, Practice Fusion will also gain an analytics expert in the form of 100Plus CEO Chris Hogg, who will assume a new role as the vice president of data science. “We were trying to make health feel like less of a chore,” Hogg told me, adding that in his new role he’ll “create a link between the doctor and patient between visits.”

Practice Fusion is accumulating a vast store of information about the patient experience, which may prove to be a valuable revenue stream. “We have more calendars, reviews about doctors, and records of visits than anyone else,” Howard told me.

The company has about 150,000 users, including doctors, nurses, and hospital admins, which accounts for about 6 percent of the addressable market.

100Plus was founded in 2011 and raised $750,000 in funding from Founders Fund, Greylock Partners, Felicis Ventures, and Band of Angels Acorn Fund, among others.

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