Seattle-based Remote Medical just scored $8 million to bring health care to virtually anyone in need, anywhere in the world.

Remote Medical serves companies and individuals in remote places; it’s a good option for military personell, research teams, law enforcement groups, or those lucky billionaires living out their days on private islands.

Remote Medical offers a variety of services, including telemedicine (physicians can securely chat with patients via video), medical training, drugs, and equipment.

One customer, a remote worker on an island in the South Pacific had a heart attack, but a Remote Medical physician and nurse were able to treat his symptoms. The company’s operations team based at the Seattle headquarters booked a plane and crew to fly him to the nearest hospital in Honolulu.

The company will use the funding to expand its team of some 100 employees, enter into new international markets, and beat out competitors like RemoteMd. Remote Medical has been around since 2003, but hopes it can really establish itself this year and predicts a 60 percent revenue growth.

CEO Brian Vincent said he is looking to hire medical professionals and EMTs as well as sales and operations folk.

The funding comes from Columbia Pacific, a firm that owns 23 hospitals across Asia. Remote Medical will use these hospitals as bases of operations as it expands across the region.

Top image via Remote Medical

How much did your last medical visit cost?

Most of us are in the dark about health care prices, even when it comes to our own expenses. This lack of transparency around health spending is a problem that Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs are angling to solve.

San Francisco-based Practice Fusion just launched a free tool for consumers to manage their health spending. The payment-tracking service is now available on the consumer-focused site PatientFusion.com.

Recently-launched Patient Fusion also gives patients the option to book doctor’s appointments and browse physician reviews. It’s similar to the product offered by New York-based physician scheduling startup ZocDoc, so Practice Fusion is building out new features to stay competitive.

Practice Fusion is best known for its free, web-based electronic medical record (EMR) system used by doctors and medical practices, but this new product is part of an ongoing strategy to serve patients.

“We want to facilitate the entire patient journey and life cycle,” said chief executive Ryan Howard in a recent interview.

Note that the new service, which is still in beta, is only available to patients covered by national insurance payers like United and Anthem Blue Cross.

The goal for the shift into payments is to help patients and their families set aside a reasonable amount per year to spend on health care, so they won’t fall behind on bills. In-depth insurance information will be incorporated in the product, and patients can see whether a claim has been accepted or rejected.

Howard said that patients have been “disenfranchised” in the current system. Still, the challenge will be to get patients engaged in their health between visits; it’s a problem that a small startup known as CakeHealth recently faced when it launched a “Mint.com for health.”

Howard spoke on stage this week at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference, and revealed a bit more about the company’s long-term strategy.

“We want to have an active dialogue with patients about their health,” he said. In the future, Patient Fusion will incorporate predictive analytics and alerts; the system will let you know if you’re due for a vaccination or physical exam.

The system will get smarter still when patients are able to manually enter information about their health.

“We’re already the largest, most utilized public health record in America — but we still have so much more to do,” said Howard.

Top photo: Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard at HealthBeat 2013. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat.

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

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.

The Qualcomm Foundation 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

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 49,000 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 Desai.

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

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

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 

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.

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

Josh Stevens is CEO of corporate wellness company Keas. 

[Editor's note: Stevens Comcast Ventures' Michael Yang will be debating the topic of educating employees on health benefits at HealthBeat 2013 next week. See Yang's story: "Health assistants can make patients smarter and employees healthier."]

I have met with over 200 enterprises in the last year. About half did not provide PCs, smartphones or Internet access to their employees. At first, this may not come as a surprise, because many roles in corporate America do not require online access to “do the job.”

However, a lack of online access to help employees enroll for benefits, change their healthcare plan or modify their 401K means that employees are far less likely to use or even be aware of the benefits they have. This digital divide hurts the employees and the company they work for.

This is particularly true when it comes to health care. The companies I visit with are self-insured, paying for their employees’ healthcare. When I visit with a CEO, CFO, or CHRO, it’s usually to consult and help the company drive up employee participation in and use of the health and wellness benefits available to them.

When I ask, “How many of your employees have email and online access?” the conversation usually gets awkward as the employer realizes that many employees who are eligible for benefits don’t have effective online access to understand and use them.

A number of enterprise employers are still communicating with digitally unconnected employees via posters in the cafeteria like they did a decade ago.

Why is this a problem?

Those who have online access have access to tools and resources about how to improve their health and lower their risk factors. Those who don’t are left in the dark and may therefore be at higher risk.

Today, the average American self-insured employer pays $10,000 for an employee’s health care per year. Seventy percent of that amount, or $7,000, is absolutely preventable. But that that requires an effective wellness and prevention program.

Our estimate for the cost of getting employees online is about $100 per employee per year.

Netted against the $7,000 of health costs that can be prevented, the investment is well worth the opportunity — up to a 70x return.

Company-wide initiatives, such as biometric screenings and HRAs to lower healthcare costs, can’t achieve meaningful impact if the most basic communications can’t reach the workforce.  Those unconnected and at risk are blue-collar workers — kitchen staff, drivers and janitors — who often comprise a large part of a company’s workforce.

Here are five tips for designing and implementing company-wide information access systems that reach everyone in the organization:

1. Understand that access is key
   Company-wide should mean company-wide. Ensuring communication reaches every employee is essential. That may mean putting a smartphone, tablet, or mobile device in the hand of every worker.

2. Develop a plan to get connected
   Determine the best online program to implement and the best strategic approach for rolling it out to everyone in the organization. Create a detailed roadmap and assess possible barriers to widespread adoption.

3. Provide hands-on interactive education
   Engage the workforce with inclusive classes and step-by-step instruction. Make it fun, get people interested, foster group involvement so everyone can learn the same way and understand what the benefits are.

4. Find applications that are easy to deploy
   Program upgrades and enhancements must be simple to roll out company-wide in a timely way.

5. Provide tracking and reporting to see where it’s gaining traction
   Have a program that tracks progress in a clear and compelling way, and decode that data to identify best practices and areas for improvement.

photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives via photopin cc

HealthBeat 2013 is less than two weeks away, and we’re confident it will be the most provocative and influential health-tech event of the year. The program is packed with over 70 industry leading speakers, high-level chats, breakout sessions, networking initiatives, and a brand-new health-tech startup competition.

CEOs of the nation’s most disruptive health-tech companies will share the stage with the long-established and respected giants of the health care world. They’ll share insights, analyze trends, highlight solutions, and showcase breakthrough products that are transforming health care.

Check out the full agenda here, and make sure to grab your tickets today. New participants include:

Albert Santalo, CEO, CareCloud
Albert Santalo is president and CEO of CareCloud Corporation. An experienced entrepreneur, he founded the company in 2009 with the vision of becoming a health care information technology leader focused on eliminating the waste and inefficiency in the healthcare industry today.

Albert will be participating on “The Next Generation Electronic Health Records.” With provider incentives being issued by the government (CMS) for electronic health record (EHR) adoption, overall hospital adoption of EHRs has doubled since 2009 (up to 35 percent). To date, about $5.7 billion in incentive payments have been made. With all this money pouring out to providers, what is next for EHRs? How can vendors stay competitive and fresh in this regulatory landscape? And how can they keep up with the building towards the new criteria for Meaningful Use Stages 2 and 3? Will cloud-based solutions take over legacy software systems because they are easier to update? How will interoperability between competitors really play out?

Other panelists include: Ryan Howard, CEO & founder, Practice Fusion; MaryKate Foley, VP, user experience, AthenaHealth; and moderator John Cooper, partner, ArchPoint Partners

Paul Tang, VP, chief innovation & technology officer, Palo Alto Medical Foundation
Paul Tang, M.D., M.S., is an internist and VP, chief innovation & technology officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), and he is a consulting associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. He directs the David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation and also oversees PAMF’s EHR system and its integrated personal health record (PHR) system, MyHealthOnline.

He’s speaking on “The Death of the Personal Health Record (PHR): Rebirthing the SMART Patient.” Why did Google Health and other nontethered products fail? Are PHRs really what patients want? With Meaningful Use Stage 2 going into effect in 2014 and CMS starting to ding hospitals for poor survey results on patient satisfaction, will “engaging the patient” really be more than an industry buzz word? Come see how entrepreneurs are re-creating this space: PHRs 2.0, social networks, mobile apps, and transparency and payment tools in health care.

Other panelists include Kristin Baker Spohn, director of business development, Castlight Health; Tomer Shoval, CEO & founder, Simplee.com; Sterling Lanier, CEO & founder, Tonic Health; Eric Peacock, CEO & founder, My Health Teams; and Chini Krishnan, CEO & founder, GetInsured.com

Jody Holtzman, SVP, thought leadership, AARP
At the AARP, Jody Holtzman leads the thought leadership group, where his focus is to find ways for AARP to stimulate innovation in the market that benefits people over 50. This involves areas such as the future of technology and the 50-plus, technology design for all, and 50-plus entrepreneurship.

Jody will be part of “How to Use Tools for Patient Activation/Patient Engagement: A Cross-Generational Look.” Everybody knows it’s important to eat well, exercise, get plenty of rest, and quit smoking. This is easier said than done. Harder still is adhering to medication schedules and weight loss programs. Patient engagement is not just for the young and healthy. Here from a panel of experts as they share tools and strategies for what works for all demographics.

Other Panelists include: Chanin Wendling, director of eHealth, Geisinger Health System; and Alexandra Drane, cofounder & chief visionary officer, Eliza Corporation

Joshua Newman, M.D., director of product management & health strategy, Salesforce.com
Dr. Joshua Newman works on building and promoting clinical health applications, developing partner presence on the Force.com platform and enabling health applications for nonprofit organizations through the Salesforce foundation.

He’s speaking on “The Health Care Cloud: Everybody’s Jumping In.” Is health care embracing the cloud? Are we seeing more personal health information (PHI) stored in private clouds? What are the advantages to hosting and storing document data in the cloud in health care? How can cloud solutions increase productivity, real time pushed product updates and scalability of data and analytics in health care? How can on premise solutions be integrated with cloud-based solutions in health care?

Other panelists include: David Chao, product management, MuleSoft; and moderator Tim Kwan, senior associate, Booz Allen Hamilton

Register today for HealthBeat 2013. There are only a few seats remaining!

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting HealthBeat 2013: AARP and ArchPoint Partners as Silver Sponsors and Allayo, athenahealth, California Healthcare Foundation, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Practice Fusion, Venrock, and Voalte as Event Sponsors.

Interested in learning more about opportunities in digital health? HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s health conference takes place on May 20 and 21.

The Iron Yard has launched the Southeast’s first digital health accelerator, proving that innovation shouldn’t be confined to Silicon Valley.

The Iron Yard’s tech collective was formed by a group of locals in the small city of Greenville, South Carolina. The original idea was to inspire networking among like-minded folk, but the Iron Yard quickly spiralled into a tech accelerator, a coding academy for kids, and a coworking space.

And now, the founders are asking entrepreneurs to fix some of the biggest flaws with our current health system.

Entrepreneurs enrolled in the accelerator will receive $20,000 in seed capital funding, three months of mentorship and training, a full year of free coworking space in Spartanburg, S.C., and the opportunity to demo their product at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Given the complexities of the space (founders will need to ensure their product is HIPPA compliant, for instance), the accelerator will provide free legal consultations.

The accelerator is looking for a wide range of ideas — fitness apps, web-based electronic medical records, “big data” analysis tools to name a few — but the program does not support medical devices at this stage, Iron Yard managing director Peter Barth said in an interview.

In the last five years, health accelerators have popped up around the country, and venture funding has drastically increased. In order to compete with established programs like HealthBox and RockHealth, the accelerator has signed up brand-name partners and mentors from JM Smith, Mayo Clinic, AbbVie (Abbott Labs), Zebra Technologies, and BMW.

For entrepreneurs who crave small town living and a break from Silicon Valley, The Iron Yard may be the best bet. “We want everyone to have the opportunity and ability to have an effect on the digital world and an effect on society,” said cofounder Eric Dodds in a recent interview.

The three-month digital health program begins on July 15. Click here to apply and learn more.

Images courtesy of the Iron Yard

Most incubators aim to help startups land funding for their ideas, but one healthcare technology startup is aiming to change this model. Prebacked hosts pre-incubation programs that get customers (large enterprises, such as Fortune 500 companies) to pitch the problems they are facing to early-stage startup teams, rather than the other way around.

The teams then build innovative, scalable solutions to solve these challenges. Winners land a revenue-generating contract with the enterprise.

“We call ourselves a reverse hackathon because we source together talented teams and pair them up with major enterprise clients,” its co-founder and former healthcare strategy consultant Chris Edell said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Our goal is new disruptive innovations and to act as a pipeline for the best talent.”

This past weekend Prebacked hosted 25 teams of three to five people, recruited from hackathons and code-a-thons, at one of its reverse hackathons in Campbell, Calif. Prebacked pitched three problems to the groups to solve. Prebacked judges will analyze the teams’ presentations on May 11. A 90-day incubation period follows, along with an integration stage in which enterprise will sign a major contract with the winning startup(s).

Hackathon program

Sameer Sonalkar, chief technology officer of the health insurance company Wellmark, works with Prebacked to select winners and come up with healthcare problems to solve.

“Because of healthcare reform, the industry is going through significant challenges,” Sonalkar said in an interview with VentureBeat. “The operating models are going to change; prices are going to change. We will need to adopt systems and solutions to help communities.”

Edell added that it also provides Wellmark with an incredible innovation channel at low price.

After being selected, Wellmark writes the team a letter of intent that indicates it is interested in seeing what the team can produce during the incubation period. These teams are also invited to weekly private events, dinners and mixed with top industry and venture capital (VC) executives.

“This attracts micro VCs and sends a signal that you’re a startup close to landing major deal with large enterprise,” Edell said.

An example of a past challenge Prebacked worked on was how technology lowers costs for the disabled/handicapped. The Prebacked team, which eventually became Benevolent Technologies For Health (BETH), built a low-cost prosthetic.  The team built a mold using coffee grounds and ground walnut shells, which conform to the body. The company is now in discussions with Band of Angels and other VCs.

Prebacked also poses questions like this one: “Different health care providers often charge different rates for the same procedure. Members are unaware since they only pay a flat co-pay per visit. There is no incentive to ‘shop around,’ contributing to excess health spend. What technologies can you build to: increase transparency of costs to our members and actively engage them to ‘shop around’?” Solutions could garner up to $100,000 rewards.

“Prebacked, at its core, stems out of Chris and I realizing it’s critical that we get enterprise and startup people talking,” said Prebacked co-founder and startup veteran Garrett Dunham in an interview with VentureBeat. “Coming from oil and water, we still are able to mix. Other people are doing it wrong by focusing on one to the extreme; it’s about having a balancing act between the two.”

Dunham said they also hope to alleviate some entrepreneurs’ fears of navigating the territory of acronyms, $1 million fines, regulations and a massive industry with insane amount of capital.

Competitors include 2020 VC and TechStars. Prebacked was founded in March 2012 and their first successful event was in October 2012.

The May 4 and 5 event included three C-suite executives from health insurance, three Blue Cross Blue Shield plans participating, five partners from Venture Capital firms and over 100 attendees.

Top image: Prebacked founders: Garrett Dunham (left) and Chris Edell (right). Photo credit: Courtesy

Chandra Duggirala, maker of an experimental device for type two diabetes, is on the verge of giving up.

Duggirala’s company, Novobionics, raised a small amount of funding for a noninvasive technology that mimics the effects of gastric bypass surgery. The device tricks the gastro-intestinal tract into thinking it is full, which slows the rate of nutrient absorption, thereby easing suffering for diabetes patients.

Despite promising early results, the entrepreneur and physician at San Mateo Medical Center has struggled to procure a second funding round that would bring it to market.

“We’re living in a time of total uncertainty,” Duggirala explained. “When it comes to medical innovation, investors essentially have to pay the government to invest in tech, which is scaring them off.”

Is the FDA killing medical innovation?

“Uncertainty” is not a word that Silicon Valley’s investors — or their limited partners — like to hear, so Duggirala’s story is far from unique.

Medical device entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs have complained vociferously for years that funding is drying up. And a confluence of factors have made the situation steadily worse.

A 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices enacted as part of the Affordable Care Act, the rising cost to get a device to market, and a lack of regulatory clarity from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are cause for concern.

The tax may not seem like much, but it’s on revenues, not profits — and since most medical device companies are far from profitability, that takes an especially deep bite. It’s still unclear which entrepreneurs will be required to pay the tax. For instance, will the government levy it on mobile medical devices — or smartphone apps — that are sometimes used in clinical settings, like this urine analysis app?

Other health-tech experts point to the current patent system that, as Practice Fusion’s senior policy strategist Lauren Fifield puts it, is “confusing and a real mess.” Because the Patent Office is slow to approve applications, inventors must work in secrecy to protect their ideas, sometimes for years. One entrepreneur might have a tremendously good idea for a device and be unaware that four other groups are working on a similar model.

A spokesperson from the FDA said the agency is aware of these concerns.

“We’re reaching out to venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to include them in our discussions and have used the feedback to develop smart regulations that balance patient safety and innovation,” an FDA spokesperson noted in an email interview, and provided a link to a new program where entrepreneurs work in concert with FDA employees.

(Note: It took the FDA took two weeks to assign a spokesperson, and cancelled interviews on multiple occasions, after VentureBeat requested comments — indirectly confirming criticisms about its glacial pace.)

The FDA may be partially responsible, but it points out that it’s not the only organization that has a role to play in bringing a new medical device to market. Entrepreneurs will also have to contend with institutional review boards, third party payers, and they have to front the cost of a clinical trial.

Venture funding is dwindling

Malay Gandhi, the chief strategy officer for digital health incubator Rock Health, estimates that medical device funding is down 13 percent year over year. He noted that class 3 medical devices are the most affected, as it’s taking longer than ever before to get these high-risk (and potentially high-reward) products to market.

Further research from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association found that the $700 million in 84 deals that went to medical device companies in 2012 represented a 17 percent drop in dollars and an 11 percent decrease in the number of deals year over year.

Mike Carusi, medical device investor at ATV Capital

“We have been pushing the FDA on how difficult it is to get products approved,” said Michael Carusi, a general partner at ATV Capital who specializes in life sciences and medical devices.

Alongside many venture investors, Carusi believes that the uncertain approval process for new medical devices is stunting innovation and killing jobs. In 2011, the New York Times reported that Carusi donated $1,000 to a Minnesota congressman who lobbied Washington D.C. to support a bill that would make it easier to bring new medical products to market.

Carusi’s relationship with the FDA has fractured over the years. His firm has grown all too familiar with abrupt regulatory changes midway through an investment.

Most recently, a spate of new mitral repair devices hit the FDA speed bump, prompting Carusi to question the high bar for efficacy of early-stage devices that are far less invasive than the alternatives.

This follows one of his most high-profile investments, XTENT, which went public in 2007 during the glory days for medical devices. But the Sun Valley medical device manufacturer saw its path to market prolonged by two or three years due to new regulation. The company was later sold at a “massively discounted value,” Carusi recalled, and was eventually shut down.

Worse still, portfolio companies have been stunted by regulation from Washington D.C., only to see success elsewhere. Just a few months after the FDA voted against approving Emphasys Medical’s lead device to treat emphysema, the company’s assets were put up for sale. Silicon Valley-based Pulmonx would later acquire the technology and begin marketing it in Europe.

Carusi expects to see this potentially life-saving (or prolonging) device return to the U.S. market in five or six years.

The FDA is currently under pressure to determine which mobile medical applications fall under its purview — and will face higher taxes. The agency has yet to issue the final guidance it promised in 2011, and so many entrepreneurs are waiting on the sidelines.

“Developers are mystified by the rules in this highly regulated industry,” said Ben Chodor, the chief executive of mobile health app store Happtique, who we spoke with after he testified alongside a handful of medical experts in Congress.

”The gap between D.C. and Silicon Valley is 3,000 miles, but it feels like 20 years in terms of understanding,” said Fifield, echoing the sentiment felt by scores of health entrepreneurs.

Our pets have better access to new medical treatments

Class II medical devices, indicating only a mid-level risk, are the most common. Among the latest batch, a company known as Alivecor has punctuated the popular imagination.

Imagine being able to press your iPhone against your chest to measure a heart rate. This is the vision for Alivecor, which raised significant venture funding and secured FDA approval. In August 2011, Alivecor succeeded in closing an $13.5 million funding round led by Burrill & Company, along with Qualcomm, acting through its investment arm Qualcomm Ventures.

But Alivecor is beset by challenges in selling to U.S.-based physicians, which raises another potential hurdle. Distribution channels are saturated by large and established players, so getting behind the doors of hospital decision-makers can be difficult.

Rumors are flying in the industry that the company has had far better luck selling to veterinarians than cardiologists. One source joked that our pets are getting better treatment options and access to the most innovative medical devices.

Source: Businesswire

Vets are the early adopters of Alivecor’s low-budget heart-monitoring device.

“We didn’t expect to see so much success in the veterinary space,” Joel Light, Alivecor’s business development lead admitted. “But there is far less regulation, so we could get to market quickly.”

Alivecor is launching its low-cost electrocardiogram in the U.K. this month.

“Uncertainty has been a big challenge, and in the medical industry — we see a big gulf between a great idea and a profitable business,” said Light.

Likewise, the executive team behind Visualant, a company with a spectral matching technology, considered the health care industry, decided to take their technology elsewhere.

CEO Ron Erickson said it could potentially be used as an inexpensive medical diagnostic device, but the regulation and “time and money involved” caused them to focus on “more immediate market opportunities.” Visualant’s ChromaID product can “see” what the human eye cannot by discerning minute variations in color.

The innovative technology will not be used by doctors to treat disease. Instead, Visualant will be selling it to defense agencies and jewelers to certify gemstones.

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This is a guest post by SilkRoad’s co-CEO Flip Filipowski

In the past, small businesses could afford a certain lack of sophistication in their human resources processes.  It was common practice to rely on Excel and labor-intensive reporting, but health care reform is changing the game.

Compliance reporting, benefits administration, and managing employee data are just a few of the back-office tasks that will become more difficult for small businesses to handle manually once further requirements of the Affordable Care Act take effect.  The first open enrollment in the health plan exchanges are expected in October and for penny-wise small business owners, throwing additional manpower at these challenges isn’t the answer.

If you haven’t already, now’s the time to enter the age of HR automation.

The new health care exchange — what’s the goal?

A central feature of the new Affordable Care Act is the government’s new health care exchange. While the finer details are still being worked out, the goal of the exchange is to empower citizens to choose affordable benefits from an array of state-sponsored plans. 

So what does this mean for small business owners?  It means that the onus is on you to ensure that your employees are offered an employer-sponsored plan and offered information on the exchanges as an alternative option.  Having a systematic way of tracking, reporting and communicating this data will be essential to the bottom line.

First, you’ll need to provide a report to Uncle Sam including basic demographic and health coverage data for employees and their dependents.  Tracking these details will be a time-intensive burden, unless you can automate your reporting.  Beyond that, you’ll need to provide proof of enrollment or risk paying $100 per day, per employee for non-compliance.

You’ll also need to make the complete details of health care plans readily available to your employees.  Chances are, you already share the details of your own offerings but, later this year, you will also need to provide employees written notice on the state health insurance exchanges.  Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) can be set up to provide information on all of an employee’s health care options.

You can also expect each state to have unique reporting requirements to supplement federal mandates.  This might be manageable if you have a single office location, but take notice if your company is spread across the country, or if you have a remote workforce. Your ability to meet the specific criteria will be tricky unless you have technology that can track data and provide customized reports to meet each state’s standards.

Pay vs.play?

For many small businesses, the big question of 2013 is whether it’s more costly to play along with new health care reform mandates or pay the penalty taxes associated with eliminating employer-supported health benefits altogether.  If you have 50 or more employees, one thing is certain – you’re going to have to change the way you do things.

If you’re considering reducing your workforce by moving employees to part-time or contract status, consider this: the IRS will be watching.  Employers will be required to track employees’ hours, and full-time or part-time status, and report to the IRS.  “Variable hour employees” need to be carefully monitored and only those that work less than 30 hours in the designated period may be excluded from eligibility for health benefits.  If you have less than 50 employees, your decision to play could pay off –you may qualify for a 25 to 50 percent small business tax credit, which would help offset the cost of your insurance plan.

Pay or play, accurate reporting will be the lynchpin of your success in avoiding costly penalties, or cashing in on valuable incentives.

HR automation tools aren’t just for the one percent

As the chairman of an HR technology company, I know most small business owners consider automating anything beyond their payroll to be a luxury.  However, in the age of health care reform, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

HR automation is no longer reserved for companies with big budgets and lots of employees.  Cloud-based solutions have alleviated the need for businesses to build expensive HRMS system in-house. Today, you can find a scalable, subscription-based HRMS to suit your needs for as little as $10 per employee, per month. These systems will keep you compliant and ease administrative burdens, freeing up time to allow you to focus on taking care of your most valuable resource — your employees.

Flip Filipowski is Executive Chairman and Co-CEO of SilkRoad, a leading global provider of cloud-based social talent management solutions. 

A high-tech entrepreneur and philanthropists for more than three decades, Flip was the Founder and CEO of PLATINUM technology, inc, which he grew into the 8th largest software company in the world at the time of its sale to Computer Associates.

photo credit: Dell’s Official Flickr Page via photopin cc

Imagine browsing dozens of reviews from past patients before booking a doctor’s appointment — all from a smartphone.

This is the vision for Practice Fusion, a San Francisco-based startup that is best known for its free electronic medical record (EMR). Today, the digital health company is launching a web app for scheduling doctor’s appointments, which will be closely followed by iPhone and Android apps.

“We want to facilitate the entire patient journey and life cycle,” said CEO Ryan Howard. The new consumer-facing technology is known as “Patient Fusion,” and Howard describes it as a “Yelp for doctors.”

We covered Practice Fusion’s history and culture after an office visit. Check out the story here. Howard will be speaking at our upcoming HealthBeat conference.

It’s a strategic move, given that Practice Fusion has already amassed doctor profiles and information about your health, all contained within its EMR. Howard admits that by marketing new products to patients, the company will augment its brand with hospital decision-makers. In a nutshell, Patient Fusion is a smart physician acquisition tool.

Already, Practice Fusion claims it has 3 million open appointments for the month of April alone, more than any of its competition. Roughly half of its user base of doctors have opted in — the app will go live with 27,000 doctors and 1.5 million reviews. These physicians serve an estimated 60 million patients across the U.S.

Patient Fusion is directly competitive with ZocDoc, the New York based scheduling technology that has registered about 30,000 doctors.

According to Howard, it’s still a problem as a third of staff time is spent on “scheduling, and canceling and rescheduling.” Patient Fusion was developed to reduce these inefficiencies, and help patients find an appointment at a well-reviewed doctor nearby.

The app isn’t intended as a monetization stream for the company. But it will be deemed a success if more doctors sign up to the EMR  (the company is going after big pharmaceutical advertising deals).

Another goal is to use patient’s data to help them find the best doctor; if you suffer from diabetes, for instance, the app will begin to prioritize physicians in the search rankings with relevant expertise.

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.”

Practice Fusion pulled in its most recent $34 million funding round in June 2012, and counts PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel among its investors.

This is the latest in a series of VentureBeat stories about startup culture. This week, our reporter spent time with ZocDoc in New York, a stark contrast to several San Francisco startups we’ve covered.

New York City health startup ZocDoc is best known for helping Americans easily book doctor appointments online. That simple premise helps attract more than 2.5 million unique visitors to ZocDoc’s web and mobile apps each month.

ZocDoc’s appointment booking service (and extras like online check-in) is in more than 35 major metropolitan areas, and it covers 40 percent of the U.S. population. It doesn’t reveal its number of bookings or the number of doctors using the service, but a cursory look at listings in cities like Chicago or Boston shows hundreds of medical professionals, who each pay $300 a month to use ZocDoc.

But there’s a lot more happening inside ZocDoc that’s helping the company push forward. ZocDoc promotes a specific culture to attract the best employees and enable those workers to do their jobs effectively.

In the picture below, you can see the seven values ZocDoc focuses on promoting: “patients first, great people, speak up, own it, us before me, work hard, make work fun.”

“Health care is the biggest problem facing our generation,” CEO and founder Cyrus Massoumi told me. “To change that is very ambitious. … To accomplish it, we try to have ‘humble ambition’ or ‘hum-bition.’ And that permeates everything we do.”

After touring the office and talking with several ZocDoc employees, including Massoumi, I noticed a few ways that ZocDoc is creatively approaching problems like growing pains and subordinate employees. Here’s what I took away from the visit.

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

The values ZocDoc emphasizes.

Great people

Recruiting has become one of ZocDoc’s the most pressing issues. ZocDoc has more than 400 employees in offices in New York, Phoenix, and India, and it plans to keep hiring like crazy to keep on growing. On top of revenue ZocDoc generates from its customers (doctors), it’s also tapping the $95 million in funding it has raised from DST Global, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, and others to keep the engines pumping. Its newest office is in the Phoenix area and the company claims it will hire more than 60 more people for that office alone before the end of 2013.

ZocDoc’s space in New York has gotten crowded enough that employees are now flooding over into the fourth floor of its SoHo-based building. (It also shares that building with other major NYC startups Foursquare and Thrillist.)

“We’ve been in the same space for three years, and we started out with a quarter of this floor,” Karsten Vagner, ZocDoc’s director of people and its third employee, told me.

A hallway in the New York ZocDoc office contains a row of seven rooms, all dedicated for interviewing new employees in person, by phone, or via Skype. When I viewed the office, the rooms were nearly empty, but multiple employees said that was unusual and on the majority of weekdays applicants fill most or all of the rooms.

Massoumi says he chiefly looks for people that will care about fostering the community of his workers, and he’s willing to look anywhere for these employees.

He uses a story to show how serious is about this. Early in ZocDoc’s history — about three years ago — he was visiting Chicago for business. At a pizza restaurant, Massoumi liked the waitress that was helping his group so much that he asked her to interview with ZocDoc. Massoumi said that she put customers first and dealt with their problems more effectively than most waitresses he’d ever seen, so he had to see if she’d come work for the company as its office manager.

“We hire for intrinsics over experience,” Massoumi said. “We need them to share our values more than anything else. … Every employee we have is better than the average employee.”

She is still ZocDoc’s office manager in New York.

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Mike from Monsters Inc. with a ZocDoc hat.

Speak up

Clearly, ZocDoc is trying hard to recruit and fill a lot of key roles. But to get those employees on board, Massoumi believes you have to give those recruits an unusual incentive: the freedom to tell bosses — sometimes loudly — that they are wrong.

“If you want the best people, you have empower them to speak their minds,” Massoumi said. “You can speak your mind here without your job being in jeopardy.”

The call to “speak up” is so prominent that people are criticized if they ever admit later to thinking another approach would have been better but did not say anything.

“Part of your job is to say what’s wrong,” Vagner said. “I don’t want people on my team who just nod along.”

Additionally, employees are able to book time with Massoumi to discuss issues or ideas. That’s made his schedule a bit hellish (it took more than two weeks for me to get him on the phone), but he cares about his employees’ thoughts enough that he’d rather be busy than not have the time to talk to them. “Office hours” sessions vary between 15 minutes up to two hours.

Massoumi also has an initiative to do lunch once a week with the newest New York employees. “I need to know every member of my team,” Massoumi said.

Staying lean

While employees speak their minds about things, something that they don’t question is the operation’s leanness. Even with the $95 million in funding, the company still acts like an early-stage startup.

ZocDoc makes employees share hotel rooms, pushes the boundaries of its office spaces, and only buys used furniture.

Massoumi illustrates this by telling me about the chair he has for guests in his office. The chair’s nickname is “Bouncy” and has a broken piece that makes it sink when people sit down in it.

“It’s been broken for four years,” Massoumi said. “It used to surprise people, but I think they’ve come to appreciate it.”

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Diet Coke cans stacked in a hallway.

Soda love

Outside of pushing values, another thing that seems to be helping fuel ZocDoc’s growth is the staff’s love of soda. Like many startups, caffeine helps drive employees who work long hours, but there seems to be a special affinity for the stuff; it’s a guilty pleasure among employees driven to make other people’s lives more healthy.

While water and coffee are the most popular employee drinks, the office is also well stocked on soda. When I toured the office, empty Diet Coke cans were stacked at the end of one hallway. I found it humorous that one of the most prominent health-tech startups consumes so much soda, and I pointed that out to Massoumi. (Admittedly, I’m a soda addict myself, so I wasn’t trying to judge.)

“We’re a health startup, I know, and we do our best to reflect a healthy lifestyle,” Massoumi said. “We do have one member of our exec team who drinks a lot of Diet Coke, but I haven’t had a drink of soda in 10 years.”

The company also offers beer and wine to employees on Fridays.

‘Unlimited vacation’

Finally, the last thing I took away from speaking with ZocDoc employees was the sense that they could actually take time off without getting a hard time from management. Startups have such a fierce mentality that taking time off can be a negative — and taking too much time off could get you fired.

“I think unlimited vacation is unusual, but it’s also valuable,” Massoumi said. “It taps into ownership. It’s our job at ZocDoc to improve health care in America, and our people understand that.”

ZocDoc head of communications Allison Braley took two-and-a-half week break in Sri Lanka when she started, senior PR manager Jessica Aptman just took a 10-day vacation to Taiwan, and Vagner said he recently took a two-week vacation to Fiji.

“I worked a lot to make sure everything was covered,” Vagner said. “There’s a clear expectation that you do your job and do it well. We believe taking time off doesn’t have to interfere with that.”

Check out more photos of ZocDoc’s office below.

All photos by Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Futurist and entrepreneur Michael Vassar has an issue with the U.S. medical system. He hopes to “humiliate” it into providing better quality care by creating a “product that works better than the system.”

With $500,000 in startup investment from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, he has handpicked a crack team of physicians and software engineers (including Skype founder Jaan Tallinn) for a new health care company called MetaMed. The goal is to leverage data and statistics to take the guesswork out of medicine.

“It seems very possible to add 10 or 20 years of healthy life expectancy to a person who gathers all the relevant data today,” said Vassar in an interview with VentureBeat.

It’s possible, but only for Metamed’s affluent private clients.

MetaMed provides high net-worth individuals with access to its team of doctors who dig deep into patient history, metabolism, genomic variation, results from companies like 23andme, and other research to deliver a full medical report.

MetaMed cofounder and chief scientist Michael Vassar

He cites some terrifying statistics from recent reports to highlight the extent of the problem they are trying to solve: Over 30 percent of fatal illnesses are missed during diagnosis, doctors only spent an average of 11 minutes with patients during primary care visits — and this figure hasn’t changed since the 1930s — and cancer death rates have decreased by less than 5 percent over the past 40 years.

It’s still early days, so MetaMed’s New York-based team is primarily occupied with providing doctors with high-quality research for a tricky case or medical conference. ”Doctors don’t usually have a public health or statistical background,” he explained. “So they aren’t in a position to distinguish between popular hypotheses in the medical field.”

MetaMed also works directly with patients who are suffering from a chronic condition like migraines, Lyme Disease, or even cancer. They receive varying treatment options from doctors, so turn to MetaMed for a concrete answer. ”We try to figure out what the global opinion is and not just take the dominant literature position,” said Vassar.

For about $400 per hour for a doctor and $200 per hour for a senior researcher, patients will receive an in-depth report and a medical consultation to discuss the results. It’s not dissimilar from ultra high-end company Private Health Management, dubbed by the Wall Street Journal as the “doctor to the 1 percent.”

When asked about whether MetaMed will share any of its medical findings, Vassar said he is open to a conversation. But Vassar said the company is not in the business of “awareness raising” and won’t be “spending millions trying to convince the public of every finding.”

MetaMed is aware of the security and compliance issues in the health care industry, so they are clear that patients need to volunteer their personal health information. This data is stored on a secure server, and is never shared without patient’s permission.

The company is on the lookout for physicians to hire to add to its medical advisory team as it expands its service internationally. According to Vassar, one of the major challenges to growth involves recruiting doctors at the top of their field, especially those in specialties. “There are just not that many good doctors out there; not every city has even one, unfortunately,” he said.

When asked about what makes a good doctor, he said it’s those who feel that their residency forced them to “violate” the principles they learned in medical school. Vassar doesn’t go as far as outspoken entrepreneur Vinod Khosla in suggesting that technology will replace doctors, but he does believe that machines can perform a “much better job of medical diagnosis.”

The idea for MetaMed was formed when Vassar was the president of the Singularity Institute, a research organization focused on the field of Artificial Intelligence.

At that time, Steve Jobs was suffering from pancreatic cancer, prompting Vassar to consider a scenario in which the late Apple CEO brought together Nobel Prize-winning scientists and physicians from around the world to consider his case. “That is the solution we are trying to create with MetaMed,” he said.

Medical research image via Shawn Hempel, Shutterstock

SAN FRANCISCO –  The health care industry is undergoing major surgery. At the center of these operations is Rock Health, a startup accelerator dedicated to the intersection of healthcare and technology. Today, at a demo event at the University of California San Francisco, 14 startups presented their ideas on how to transform and improve healthcare in the U.S..

Dr. Aenor Sawyer, an associate clinical professor at UCSF, said during her opening remarks that these companies are changing “how we take care of patients and how patients take care of themselves.” Whether it is managing secondary care, untangling the confusing labyrinth of insurance, or encouraging healthy lifestyle habits, these startups are holding the scalpels.

If the intersection of health and technology interests you, check out VentureBeat’s HealthBeat 2013 conference, which will focus on “Smart Hospitals” and “Smart Practices,” and how new technology can disrupt health care.

Rock Health was founded in 2010 as the first accelerator program for health startups. It currently has 49 portfolio companies, which have collectively raised over $43 million in funding from a prestigious list of investors. According to AngelList, Rock Health companies have the third highest valuations of all incubators and accelerators, following Y Combinator and StartX.

Each of the founders at today’s event had a unique story and expertise that brought them to the stage. Some come from the startup world, but many experienced these problems in the field and came to entrepreneurship as a method of solving them. Rock Health provides them with mentorship, funding, and other resources to get them off and running.

Digital health is one of the hottest trends in the tech right now. Venture capital funding in this space grew dramatically in 2012, as investors, entrepreneurs, and health care organizations from across the spectrum jumped on emerging opportunities. However, the health care industry is so massive and built on such old practices and systems that some are skeptical of a startup’s capability to effect meaningful change from the outside. A few of the startups that presented today are consumer focused, but most are targeting the enterprise and the operations of large healthcare organizations. These young, lean and energetic startups are tackling the big guys, and telling the healthcare industry itself, it needs to adopt a more active lifestyle.

Read on for notes on each company’s presentation.

The first four companies to present are still in “stealth mode” and gave brief updates on their activity and progress.

Benefitter helps employers confidently navigate health care reform, save money, and improve their employees’ well being. CEO Brian Poger said that many employees would actually be better off if they did not receive employer-sponsored health insurance. Benefitter helps them understand the legislation, set strategy, and execute it “to make the Affordable Care Act more affordable.”

SuperBetter helps people solve their health challenges by turning goal achievement into a game. The company is currently awaiting the results of a research trial with the University of Pennsylvania about how the system can help people battling mild to medium levels of depression, and other potential applications include anxiety and stress disorders, smoking cessation, and weight control.

Moxe Health improves access to care for newly insured and underserved patients by helping them find the best providers for their needs. This not only benefits patients but also health care organizations and insurance providers who want to optimize their available resources.

Mango Health makes mobile applications that inspire consumers to follow their treatment regimens. CEO Jason Oberfest said that 1 in 5 Americans take prescription drugs or supplements, but up to 75 percent don’t do it properly. “Nonadherence” is a $350 billion a year problem, and something as simple as a mobile app that makes sure people take their medication correctly can significantly reduce the amount of return hospital trips and remission.

The CEOs of the remaining 10 companies then gave longer, five minute presentations.

The first company is tackling an issue many male entrepreneurs won’t touch, but which on some level effects everyone in America.

Wildflower Health makes pregnancy healthier, safer, and more cost-effective through a mobile platform and predictive analytics. CEO Leah Sparks said that pregnancy-related costs are the number one driver of hospital costs at $86 billion a year, and two-thirds of these costs are associated with pregnancy complications. This is an issue for patients and their families, hospitals, and insurance providers. As it stands, wildly ineffective phone-based programs are the main method of risk assessment and tracking. Wildflower’s first app, Due Date, helps pregnant women track milestones customized to their due date, be aware of risk factors, and take personalized actions. The sales pipeline for its enterprise platform covers 30 million people, and they charge a fee for each person enrolled.

Sparks closed by saying that 40 babies were born during her presentation.

Wellframe combines mobile technology and artificial intelligence to extend the provision of care from the hospital to the home. The first product targets cardiac patients, who can use the system instead of regularly going on inconvenient and/or expensive follow-up visits. A patient can use the app as a “digital concierge” to personalize a daily task list that simplifies what they need to do to overcome heart disease and minimize risk.

OpenPlacement offers tools to match seniors with appropriate housing and care providers after they have been discharged from a hospital. According to CEO Dominic Scotto, over six million seniors are transferred a year to the next level of their care, but the process is inefficient and frustrating across the board. Patients receive list of possible facilities that is often out of date and missing information. On OpenPlacement, clinicians can search for placements based on available beds, geography, budget, required services, and the level of care. So far, 500 paying care providers use the service.

Wello makes fitness more personal, accessible, and affordable by using live, two-way video to connect fitness trainers and clients. The platform makes it easy to work out anytime, anywhere, targeting the 89 percent of Americans who wish they were more fit. Wello also just launched a Group Workouts feature that lets users exercise with other people, whether it is a group of pregnant women, middle-aged men trying to lose weight, or someone in California that wants to exercise with her best friend in New York.

LabDoor tells you “what’s real” in consumer products, beginning with safety and efficacy ratings for the $36 billion supplements market. CEO Neil Thanedar said that this industry is mostly unregulated, and yet consumers have a right to know what is in the supplements they take and give to their children. LabDoor tests the products in chemistry labs to find quality and purity data and offers this to consumers. “The results are amazing and scary,” he said. “Over 70 percent of products being tested had inaccurate label data, and over 90 percent contain contaminants. We want to change the base of the industry from marketing hype to real facts and build consumer trust.” Their next milestone is to have full ratings and reviews for 1,000 products and to someday expand into other industries like cosmetics and organics.

Eligible streamlines insurance eligibility checks for doctors and patients. Founder Katelyn Gleason said that the systems used to transport health information between patients, hospitals, insurance companies, labs, and pharmacies costs $150 billion a year, and the transactions are done using “archaic processing” technology that take full IT teams to run. She wondered why, in the middle of Silicon Valley, no one was building a better, simpler, more efficient system. Using Eligible’s API, software engineers can integrate health exchange protocols using three lines of code and connect instantly with over 700 health insurance companies. Eligible runs in the cloud, in the background in real time, and takes $.05 from every transaction.

Beam Technologies makes the Beam Brush, a connected toothbrush to improve oral health. According to CEO Alex Frommeyer, tooth decay is the most common infectious disease for children in the U.S. Through a sensor, the Beam Brush collects dental data and displays it in an application, so kids and parents can stay on top of their oral hygiene and even be rewarded for achieving their “brushing goals.” The company has also partnered with major dental insurance provider Delta Dental to use this data to reduce the risks and costs of oral disease. Since Christmas, over 2,000 brushes have been sold, and Beam has dreams for connected plates, bathmats, and more.

CliniCast unlocks the potential of health data to maximize outcomes and minimize costs. Founder Jack Challis seeks to provide a FICO score to health care data to make sure that physicians are delivering the best care and outcomes at a reasonable price. The system has tools to assess risk, streamline workflow, measure performance, and exchange information, to measure the effectiveness of each interaction.  The goal is to improve the transparency of information in the marketplace and make health care as efficient as possible.

Zipongo provides healthy food incentives and personalized meal plans that engage employees, making it easier to eat well. “Food is medicine,” said  CEO Dr. Jason Langheier. “We have built a ‘grocery Rx’ to deliver descriptions for health living.” Employers and health plans pay a small member fee a month, and Zipongo provides deals on food items, insights into dietary patterns, and suggestions for how to buy and eat healthier, and even recipes. The company has relationships with major grocery chains across the US and can be active in every zip code. started

Kit Check‘s product reduces the time it takes hospitals to process medication kits from 20 minutes to 20 seconds. Founder Kevin MacDonald is an RFID expert. He said that every year, billions of medications flow through hospitals and pharmacies, but there is a tremendous amount of waste and medical errors associated with the mismanagement of these supplies. Kit Check has built a box that can “kit” and quickly figure out what is missing and what is expired as well as generating all the required regulatory paperwork. The business charges per tag and has multiple six-figure revenue clients.

Photo credit: Rock Health

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

New York health tech startup ZocDoc will soon open its second office in Phoenix, a city not usually known for attracting startups the way San Francisco, Boston, or Chicago does.

ZocDoc helps digitally connect patients with doctors for all kinds for appointments. As with all things medical, the service needs high-quality customer service and support. This was the thinking behind Phoenix — the city is geographically distant from its NYC headquarters and is isolated from most extreme weather events. When NYC was threatened by Hurricane Irene, ZocDoc had to create a pop-up office in Chicago for customer service in case the HQ lost power or would be without power for days.

“Many companies may look at the Bay Area, where people try to attract engineers, but this is for customer service and sales,” ZocDoc director of communications Allison Braley told us. “We want better customer service coverage and it’s an untapped place in a sense.”

Braley admits that it’s a little strange to see a quickly growing 320-person startup like ZocDoc pick Phoenix for its second office, but the company especially liked the weather and proximity to universities to find talent. Phoenix also offers many emerging private companies to pluck talent from, as listed in the Inc 5000.

“For tech companies of our size, it is a bit unusual, but it made sense for us,” Braley said. “We only have a few employees there now, but we’ll add many more as we scale and grow.”

ZocDoc has raised about $95 million so far, including a large $50 million round last year from DST Global.

MyBreastCancerTeam formally launched today, announcing the availability of its social network for women facing breast cancer.

The site is designed to provide all forms of support that women with breast cancer may need. First and foremost, it provides an empathetic, engaged, and welcoming community.

Upon signing up, members create a profile, and like any social network, it is up to the user how much information to disclose. In addition to basic information, like a profile picture, location, and age, women have the opportunity to tell their story.

The story can be as short as a few sentences, but many women choose to share detailed accounts of who they are and their personal battle with breast cancer. They include information about their background, personalities, families, and lives, as well as what their journey has been like.

Another profile element centers around diagnosis and treatment. Women put up specifics about their condition, including the type of breast cancer, stage, the treatments they have gone through, and Hormone Receptor Info. All of this information is searchable, so members can search for women in their area, seek out kindred spirits with similar interests and beliefs, or look for patients suffering from the same type of disease.

While there are hundreds of websites that provide medical advice, online and offline support groups, and multiple social media platforms, cofounder Mary Ray said there are none that address the complicated and specific needs of those dealing with this serious disease.

“Women want to talk about their condition and connect with people who know what they are going through,” she said. “There are hospital support groups, online groups, and list serves, but it is all basic technology you’d find in the year 2000. This is the kind of information people don’t post on Facebook, but that they do want to share, and to share it with people who have been in their shoes.”

MyBreastCancer team incorporates multiple internet trends into their platform. There is an activity feed, and users can post updates and add people to their team, like they would add Twitter followers. There are “hug” and “like” options, and a percentage bar to tell users how complete their profile is. There is even a “pinboard”  a la Pinterest where women can assemble collections of images, whether it be modeling head scarves, pictures from an Avon walk, or recipes that appeal to radiation-sensitive stomachs.

The company has also created mobile apps for iOS and Android. Aside from being a smart move for any business, this is particularly useful for the user that spends extensive amounts of time at doctors offices, hospitals, and in waiting rooms.

Discussion is also a key component on MyBreastCancerTeam.

In the Q&A section, women ask and answer each others’ questions and the best answers are up voted by the community. The content is, of course, searchable. A patient looking for knowledge on a specific treatment type can type in the name of that treatment, and not only view relevant threads, but also comment or directly message women who responded to ask follow up questions.

There is even a Yelp like feature, where women recommend local doctors and other healthcare providers based on their personal experiences.

Due to HIPAA regulations, healthcare providers cannot disclose medical information. While this serves to protect patient privacy, it can make tapping into a disease-centered community more challenging. However, on MyBreastCancerTeam, women have control how much information they share, which enables a meaningful dialogue about sensitive, and private, medical issues.

“We heard so many women say they don’t know what their choices are and they are overwhelmed,” said cofounder Eric Peacock.  “MyBreastCancerTeam lets women empower each other, not just with information, but with a sense of perspective. The fear in the back of your mind quickly gets mediated when you see other women feeling similar situations.”

The site is created by MyHealthTeams, which launched its first network called MyAutismTeam last year. It started with 30 parents in California and grew to over 30,000 members. The founders realized they had struck a nerve by providing a safe, online forum for people affected by disease to interact with each other.

They chose breast cancer for the second network because it is so widespread: About 1 in 8 American women will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. As Peaock put it, chances are everyone knows someone afflicted with breast cancer. The community is there, its just a central, consolidated network that is not.

MyBreastCancerTeam is free for members. It is pre-revenue right now, although there is a business model on deck for the future. The founders do not want to plaster the site in advertising or violate their members’ trust by selling data. But they do intend to make sure of their large, engaged, and targeted user base to market products that their members may need.

Due to privacy regulations, it can be difficult for certain businesses to reach their desired audience. Working through MyBreastCancerTeam could give them the opportunity to place their product in front of potential consumers. On the other side, a formerly dispersed community could benefit from a new collective bargaining power.

MyHealthTeams is based in San Francisco and received $1.75 million in seed funding from Adams Street Partners, 500 Startups, and angel investors.

Rather, it’s doctors.

More specifically, medical mistakes and errors resulting from miscommunication. That’s exactly what professional networking tool for doctors Doximity was founded to fix.

A social network with a low profile everywhere but the medical community, Doximity has now signed up 11 percent of all U.S. physicians. The network focuses on helping doctors communicate and work together in a secure environment to coordinate patient care better and faster.

“Doximity is the largest and only real-name identified and verified private physician communications platform,” founder and chief executive Jeff Tangney told VentureBeat. “Unlike traditional social media, Doximity enables doctors to securely discuss patient care in a private, closed, HIPAA-secure environment.”

That’s important, because the medical community is significantly siloed, making it difficult for specialists, doctors, and other health care professionals to coordinate client care. Digital technologies haven’t made enormous strides yet in medicine – as of 2009 only nine percent of hospitals had an electronic records system in place — and tools for secure, simple doctor-to-doctor communication aren’t yet ubiquitous.

Doximity is looking to change that.

Other companies such as Sermo, QuantiaMD, and DocBookMD are doing similar things, but Doximity views its primary competitor as old technology and old practice:

“Our real competitors are the pager and the fax machine and any other antiquated form of communication still used in medicine today,” according to Tangney.

Perhaps not surprisingly given those tools, miscommunication between care providers is the root cause of 65 percent of serious medical errors, according to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

“Medicine is a team sport,” Tangney said in a statement. “Communication is just so vital.”

Source: Doximity

CEO Jeff Tangney

Doximity allows doctors to connect online as well as on the go with mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphones.

The company is backed by $10.8 million in venture capital from Emergence Capital Partners and InterWest Partners. Its chief executive, Jeff Tangney, previously founded Epocrates, a mobile medical data company. Doximity is based in San Mateo, California.

Image credit: ShutterStock

The company is trying to attract former Google Health, users and developers to port their data over to HealthVault. Google Health will be discontinued as of Jan. 1, 2012, as previously reported by VentureBeat.

“Microsoft is much better suited to take on the standardization of Health records, and its a more natural role for Microsoft than Google,” said CEO Jason Moore of Stratasan, a company that provides web-based analytics service to clients in the health care industry.

“So many in the health care world have spent the majority of their careers as .NET [Microsoft's aging software framework] developers,” Moore said, noting that Microsoft already has a long relationship with third-party developers.

Stratasan  — which has funding from TNinvesco, a fund associated with Clayton Associates and Michael Burcham — encounters many health care companies that are still very much entrenched in .NET, Moore said.

Using the Direct Project messaging protocols established by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Google Health users can transfer their records to HealthVault between now and January 1, 2013. Microsoft is clearly not wasting a moment during that window of opportunity to grow its platform.

Currently, the HealthVault platform has 300 third-party applications and 70 different medical devices, like blood pressure monitors, blood glucose monitors and others.

Third-party developers of Google Health applications wishing to port over to HealthVault can find documentation, reference materials and a software development kit via the Microsoft Developer Network.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

DrChrono, part of the current class of startups incubated by Y Combinator, has already received some press for its iPad app, which moves many of a doctor’s basic bookkeeping tasks onto Apple’s device. But when I talked to co-founder and chief operating officer Daniel Kivatinos, I wanted to know how he plans to get the app into doctors’ hands.

The key step, Kivatinos said, came at the urging of the Y Combinator team. The DrChrono app, which allows doctors to do things like take notes, write prescriptions, and access patient records on their iPad, actually launched shortly after Apple first released its tablet. At the time, the company charged a $2,500 set-up fee — after all this was a professional app providing real value to doctors. Kivatinos told me that YC partner Paul Graham has compared DrChrono to enterprise software company SAP, and SAP charges a big fee.

But after joining YC, Kivatinos and his co-founder Michael Nusimow decided that if they really wanted to bring the incubator’s “hacker culture” into the medical industry, they had to “let the floodgates open” — so they made the app free.

Now, more than 1,500 doctors have signed up to use the product, where less than 100 had signed up before (remember, this is an app for doctors, not consumers, so adjust your numbers expectations accordingly). DrChrono is now based on a “freemium” model, where doctors get the basic app for free, then pay extra for features like speech-to-text conversion (so a doctor could just talk into their iPad, and the app would convert their words into written notes) and electronic billing. Pricing starts at $99 per month.

Still, even with the cheap-or-free pricing, it seems hard to believe that large medical institutions are going to become customers of a new startup. Kivatinos said that when he first started the company, he tried to work with hospitals but found that the sales process just took way too long. Instead, DrChrono is working with small, private practices that have one to five doctors. Those doctors are often eager to switch to an electronic system (the financial incentives offered by the Obama administration for doctors to switch to electronic records help), but they can’t afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars.

“It’s almost like every doctor wants an iPad now,” Kivatinos said.

You’ll probably be reading more about DrChrono soon. There are still some cool features that Kivatinos would like to add, such as allowing doctors to use Apple’s FaceTime ability to talk to patients. DrChrono will be demonstrating at YC’s Demo Day today and tomorrow, and the company will also start holding training sessions in Apple stores in the next few months.

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to the top 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. Request an invitation.

Best known for its Dragon Natural Speaking speech recognition software, Nuance also focuses heavily on the health care industry. Its Clinical Language Understand technology provides doctors with speech recognition technology that can understand complex medical jargon. That technology will be combined with Watson’s deep question answering, natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, as part of the research agreement.

It’s not difficult to imagine what the combination of Nuance’s technology and Watson’s analytical computing system can provide. It could help doctors diagnose patients instantly, just as it can sift through its massive database to answer obscure Jeopardy questions. And it will continually get better, since Watson can learn from its mistakes. The combined Watson and Nuance project won’t replace actual doctors, instead it will augment their ability to treat patients and help to erase human error that can cost lives.

Products resulting from the IBM and Nuance partnership are expected to hit the market within two years. Researchers from the Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine will also be participating.

IBM mentioned that health care diagnosis was one of the potential uses of Watson’s capabilities when we first covered it last month. Now that it looks like Watson is well on its way to helping doctors, we may also see the technology licensed for other uses, like tech support or enterprise knowledge management. IBM wouldn’t say at the time if it was talking to government agencies, but it’s not difficult to see how Watson could be used to help analysts at agencies like the CIA sift through vast amounts of data.