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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Rattray photo via Chrissy Farr/VentureBeat

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

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Michael Yang is Managing Director, Comcast Ventures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclosure: Comcast Ventures is an investor in Accolade.

Doctor image via Shutterstock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This is a guest post by David Chao 

It’s a brave new world for healthcare organizations. Hospitals and other providers are teaming up to form Accountable Care Organizations to take a coordinated, community-level approach to health care.

Health insurance companies are no longer passively paying off claims, but are becoming active managers of their policyholders’ health. Providers and payers are having to change what they do and how they do it.

This requires the use of technology to ensure a free flow of information across clinical and non-clinical systems and across legacy, cloud, mobile, and personal device platforms. As the number of systems increase, this integration challenge will only grow.

How can organizations successfully meet this integration challenge?

1. Eliminate point-to-point integrations

All too often in the past, health care organizations have built custom point-to-point integrations between systems, creating a tangled web of connections. Businesses should instead turn to an integration platform that provides a common interface for all systems.

2. Leverage learnings from other industries and adopt a best-of-breed systems approach

Experience from other industries tells us that sharing data through a single, inflexible system is doomed to failure (contrary to what what some heatlhcare vendors would have you believe). Instead, loose coupling of “best-of-breed” applications has proven to be a far more effective model. Initiatives such as the CommonWell alliance and the SMART API platform are on the right track, but more must be done to push healthcare IT vendors to open up their systems.

3. Be pragmatic 

It seems that as a response to outdated technology in healthcare IT, there is a tendency to over-engineer solutions. As Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg said, “done is better than perfect.” Case in point: the 10+ years it took for the HL7 v3 healthcare messaging standard to supersede HL7 v2. For many, v3 is now so bloated that it’s impractical. At the same time, use of v2 is so deep-seated that it can’t easily be replaced. Low-tech examples can be very successful, as we see from the adoption of DIRECT protocol (essentially secure email), and the popularity of the secure e-fax feature in Doximity’s doctor platform. When it comes to solving healthcare interoperability challenges, done is certainly better than perfect.

As we’re all well aware, when it comes to technology, the healthcare industry is struggling to play catch up. The HITECH and Affordable Care Acts have provided a real catalyst for change, and it is up to all of us who work in the healthcare space to ensure we work together to deliver on this promise.

David Chao is a Product Manager at MuleSoft where he leads MuleSoft’s healthcare business. In this role, he works with providers, payers and government bodies to improve patient outcomes and lower costs by solving the challenge of interoperability across healthcare systems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morgenthaler’s executive in residence, Missy Krasner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

photo credit: Emmanuel Gadenne via photopin cc

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

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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

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

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If you’ve been waiting for the day when robot doctors will cut you open, monitor you recovery, and keep you company in your hospital room, you won’t have to wait much longer.

“We’re in the first inning of a nine-inning exercise. The average patient walks in a hospital and is not touched by robotics. That’s going to change in 10 years,” said John Simon, a partner at Boston-based investment firm Sigma Prime Ventures.

That adoption rate, Simon argues, is based on cost: As the price of robotics adoption decreases, hospitals may be more likely to invest in new technology. At their core, robots aren’t all that different from any other hospital gear.

The problem for hospitals, however, is that there’s a danger in pursuing robotics too far. “With medical robots,  if you automate something too much, people won’t accept it,” Simon said.

This results in a fine line that hospitals and doctors must manage. While some automation and robotics is good, the last thing a hospital wants to do is embrace robots to such an extent that they alienate patients.

Little of that, however, is on the minds of hospitals today. Right now, most of them are just trying to figure out how to get robots in the front door. Here are a few ways robots are changing hospitals today.

Zapping germs and cutting infection rates

In hospitals, fewer things are more lethal than the average bacterium. Approximately 1.7 million people get sick each year as a result of so-called “health care-associated infections,” and 99,000 of them die. So you might say that tackling this issue is a major problem for hospitals.

One potential fix is Xenex, a 5-foot, 2-inch robot that fights bacteria by flashing hospital rooms with ultraviolet light. This light, which comes from a Xenon bulb, damages the cell walls of bacteria, frying their DNA and preventing them from reproducing. (The light is so powerful that even humans have to leave the room while the Xenex is working its magic.)

While Xenex has only been around since 2009, evidence suggests that it’s working pretty well so far. Cone Health System, a health care provider in North Carolina, says that Healthcare-Associated Infections dropped over 40 percent after it started using Xenex. Another hospital, Massachusetts’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital, says that Xenex’s helped cut rates of infection of Clostridium difficile by 82 percent, according to a Xenex case study.

Keeping doctors present … even when they aren’t

Fewer companies are as well known in the robotics world as iRobot, the creator of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. But while iRobot is dominating the consumer space, it’s also doing some interesting things areas like defense, naval exploration  and, in particular, health care.

Among its health care products is Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant (RP-VITA), a tablet-controlled telepresence bot it developed alongside InTouch Health. Unveiled last July, the RP-VITA lets doctors care for patients remotely, allowing them consult with patients even when they’re miles away.

Reception to the idea has been pretty strong so far. Not only has the device been commercially deployed in seven American hospitals but the RP-VITA is also the first telemedicine robot approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Telemedicine is officially a thing.

Letting amputees walk again

While some robots are mostly about improving patients’  in-hospital experiences, device’s like the BiOM prosthetic ankle system are improving their whole lives. Developed by Boston-based robotics firm iWalk, the BiOM solves one of the less-advertised problems with conventional prosthetics: They’re exhausting to use.

“When people wear prosthetics, they are providing all the power themselves and sort of dragging this leg around,” notes Sigma Prime’s John Simon, whose firm invests in iWalk.

The problem is one of angles. When we walk up ramps or take stairs, our ankles rarely stay at one angle — but that’s exactly how most prosthetics force wearers to walk around. This is why the BiOM is so effective: Instead of forcing the wearer to power it with their own bodies, it powers itself. And that makes a huge difference.

The only problem with the BiOM is cost: The device runs for $50,000. And while that’s not cheap, it’s a small price to pay for amputees looking to walk around freely again.

Helping doctors cut you open

If you’re a surgeon operating today, it’s hard not to be at least a bit enticed by robotic surgery. Surgical robots promise the capability to operate on patients quickly, accurately, and with fewer of the side-effects associated with traditional surgery. By creating smaller incisions, robotic surgery (which is mostly just robot-assisted surgery at this point) cuts blood loss and reduces recovery time (which means patients leave hospitals earlier). Adding to the intrigue is the possibility of remote surgery, which enables doctors to operate on patient from halfway across the world.

The interest is real: Market leader Intuitive Surgical, which creates the da Vinci surgical robot, says its product was used in 450,000 procedures last year.

The problem is that robotic surgery systems are really expensive.  Systems like the da Vinci cost at least $1.5 million, and for a lot of hospitals, it’s tough to justify that sort of investment. More, robotic surgery systems carry with them significant liabilities, as Intuitive Robotics found out earlier this year. In February, the FDA launched a probe into claims that the Da Vinci was causing post-operation complications for patients. Intuitive surgical maintains that adverse event rates are low, but the debate over the company’s products is ongoing.

Still, in spite of this recent skepticism, robotic surgery remains a popular option for procedures like prostate cancer extraction, which, due to the, er, difficulty of access, is often better left to robot hands than those of humans.

Keeping patients and the elderly company

If all of this talk about amputees, bacteria, and botched operations has got you down, I offer the Paro, a well-known therapeutics robot developed by Japanese research company AIST. Paro has a very simple but very important job: It’s supposed to feel like a pet. Similar to the that ancient tabby that your grandmother’s nursing home keeps around, Paro relaxes patients in ways that other humans can’t. Aist, which was developed over 10 years ago, still remains one of the most well-known robots of its kind.

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

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This is a guest post by Jiff CEO Derek Newell

Digital health may be garnering all the glory for its promise to transform health care, but take a closer look and you’ll find a promising next wave of health care investments.

With a proliferation of mobile apps and data being generated at a dizzying pace, few investments have yet to fulfill their financial promise. The real money will be made when companies build services around these applications, make the data actionable, and connect all this inbound patient data to the physical health care system.

Expect companies that find new, creative ways of connecting data to patients, determine what to do with the data when it’s generated, and figure out ways to creatively (and profitably) engage the health care system, to attract the attention of VCs and entrepreneurs alike. Here are three areas worth watching.

Smart sensors

What if a device could predict whether you were going to catch a cold, succumb to diabetes or even your risk for getting cancer? Sounds a little far-fetched, but a new generation of sensors holds the promise to do just that.

Companies developing smart sensors that can be placed on the body or in the home that can accurately, non-invasively predict your chances of becoming ill stand to attract investors’ attention. Component and connection costs are dramatically dropping, while at the same time the value of connecting to the Internet has dramatically increased. Just think of Tesla’s ability to collect data from its cars. Look for value in companies that develop sensors that collect, connect and predict high-cost events that can be prevented by timely intervention.

Software systems for data analysis

Data generated from new smart sensors holds little value if it can’t be analyzed and acted upon. New investment opportunities in the companies that develop software systems to analyze data and determine what to do with it will ultimately be very profitable for some investors. Single-use systems, where a single sensor talks to a single server designed to analyze its data (which is the way most are architected today), will be much less valuable than servers that can import and analyze data from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of sensors.

Businesses across the spectrum are developing algorithms to analyze, for example, whether a person’s blood pressure and weight require a fitness program or whether other symptoms merit immediate provider attention. The smarter the software, the better. Just imagine patient alerts being delivered to warn of an increased risk of illness before the illness is even detectable through symptoms. Watch for large companies, such as IBM, to jump into the fray while new companies emerge to help connect all the dots. It’s also worth keeping a close eye on artificial intelligence companies.

New service models for patients

Smart sensors and smart software, however, will only go so far. At some point, we’ll need good old-fashioned people power. A new crop of services companies will arise to give virtual care a healthy dose of checks and balances. Take, for instance, the smart sensor that detects a racing heartbeat or chest pain.

Software algorithms will take in the information, analyze it and determine, for example, that a person needs immediate attention. But what if the racing heartbeat was just a false positive because the person had just climbed stairs? Activating an expensive health care system will be a waste of money, so services companies that provide the human intelligence to validate and verify the information will be required. A second type of services company will also emerge to manage the care.

Everything that can be done digitally and virtually will be done digitally and virtually. This will dramatically improve access to and efficiency of the traditional health care system. Call centers will be staffed not just by the traditional nurse, but also by physicians, pharmacists and other professionals who can provide a higher level of care.

Derek Newell brings more than 20 years of experience growing and leading innovative health care technology and services companies to his role as CEO of Jiff Inc. He is passionate about exploring the intersection of health care and emerging technologies, and believes that health outcomes and wellness improve when mobile and digital health technologies connect consumers with the traditional health ecosystems. 

Prior to joining Jiff, Newell was president and CEO of Robert Bosch Healthcare. While at Bosch, Newell worked to build Bosch into the world’s largest remote patient monitoring company. Previously, he was the CEO of Health Hero Networks, a US-based remote-patient monitoring company, and the chief marketing officer of a leading disease management company. 

Derek is a leading voice in the areas of health care technology and finance. He has co-developed and taught health care finance classes at the Haas School of Business from his alma mater at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds graduate degrees in business and public health.

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Janice Nicholson is CEO of i2i Systems.

As someone who has spent over 20 years focusing on the needs of healthcare organizations, I have experienced firsthand their unique challenges while using technology to improve patient outcomes. I think we have a major dilemma when it comes to health IT and it’s time we call it out.

First, let’s get right to the heart of the matter: What factors limit health IT’s ability to support quality measurement and quality improvement?

My response is based on field experience in supporting hundreds of clinics and practices who are using more than 30 different Practice Management (PM)/Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. I would like to tell you that we have figured out why health IT investment has not resulted in more dramatic improvements to outcomes of care, and that we have the solution — but we do not.

What I can share with you are three of the top challenges we have experienced in helping organizations realize the benefit of health IT adoption.

Limitations within EHRs yield roadblocks

The first challenge is that of standards and interoperability. EHR makers claim the records interoperate, but what they don’t say is at what level. Much of the data in EHRs about patients is customized, unstructured data. Even within the same EHR, templates allow a patient’s medical data to be stored in different locations of the database using different representations. This means that while you think you may be accessing information at one end of the EHR, the information you really need might be on the other. This lack of EHR vendor standardization and inability/unwillingness to share customized, unstructured data cripples efforts to address Meaningful Use (MU) and severely limits the analytic capability of EHR data.

Health IT capabilities are behind the times

The second challenge is that EHRs do not fully support MU requirements. Our current health technology isn’t able to analyze data in a way that would allow us to support tactical, operational, and strategic improvements in public health management. This primitive state hampers organizational leaders, management, and even care teams from proactively monitoring and improving performance. To meet requirements of MU Stage 3, organizations need tools that will support long-term, sustainable change.

A simple example of this is HbA1c testing for diabetic patients. Evidence-based guidelines suggest that A1C screening for a diabetic patient should occur at least twice during a year-long period. This simple adherence tracking for one patient becomes complex very quickly when managing population health for thousands of diabetics.

A lack of incentives creates stagnancy

The third challenge is lack of incentives to achieve higher levels of performance. We often see organizations drawn to our solutions mainly for required reporting to payers. We encourage organizations to leverage our tools to their fullest, but sadly, many are satisfied with threshold performance since there are not enough incentives for them to dive deeper into what’s available out there. This speaks to the lack of a data-driven culture incented to measurably improve health outcomes.

Challenges provide the opportunity for solutions

Despite all these challenges hindering the healthcare industry’s ability to successfully move forward in using technology to their advantage, I see various opportunities.

First, Health IT vendors must provide clinics open access to their data, and remove barriers to standardization and interoperability. Performance can then be measured in a reliable way and shared across the health system.

Second, we need to face the reality of what EHRs currently deliver. There is no single, comprehensive, all-inclusive Health IT solution that will meet everyone’s needs today and in the future. Rather, the real solution lies in cultivating a healthy and diverse Health IT ecosystem. We have to help providers understand the intelligence tools they need so they can plan and budget for what will be required to monitor, improve and sustain health outcomes.

Third, we need to increase the percentage of revenue directly related to pay-for-performance. Organizations must be incentivized for behaviors that drive change. This will naturally catalyze the quality life cycle that results in high performance.

We can be optimistic if we address these opportunities. Success is within our grasp and it can come at a price that you, me and the rest of the nation can afford.

Before founding healthcare software provider i2i Systems, Janice Nicholson worked as a software engineer and played a major role in developing a patient management system for private practice. She has managed over 10 major product releases; and, prior to its acquisition by WebMD, she served as the vice president of product engineering at HealthPro Solutions.

Hospital image via Shutterstock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo via HealthTap

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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

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Chris Hollindale is cofounder and CTO of seed-funded stealth startup Hasty.

If you’ve ever tried out a Nike+ FuelBand, a Jawbone UP, or apps like RunKeeper or Strava for runners and cyclists, the chances are that you’ve seen the powerful effects that gamification can have.

Gamification is an effective mechanism that taps into our naturally competitive instinct to help change our behavior. And in the case of health and fitness apps, this change of behavior means real lifestyle changes, enabling us to be fitter and healthier.

But is this gamification being applied to the right health metrics? Could it be applied to areas that have even more of a positive health impact?

In the health and fitness space, the best examples of gamification are those employed by the likes of Nike+, Jawbone and FitBit’s tracking devices. Statistical and anecdotal evidence shows how effective the gamification is here – FitBit reports that its users take 43 percent more steps. But is tracking your steps  – which is ultimately what these devices do — actually all that good for you?

I’d argue that there are many more important metrics when it comes to living better and healthier, and this is where the future of health gamification will lie.

An interesting possibility is applying gamification to real health metrics. Services like WellnessFX now allow consumers to evaluate all manner of data points about themselves, from nutrient levels to cholesterol and testosterone. Being able to measure and improve these core health metrics is a huge leap, and I can see exciting applications of gamification applying here in the future. It could be that you’re able to create and compete with your own personal wellness score based on a variety of health metrics.

Or … even try to beat your mate’s level of testosterone – the ultimate “who’s the bigger man?” competition.

Of the metrics that people currently track, the one that has the most overall impact is food. Gamification has the potential to have a huge impact on the way we eat and the choices we make when it comes to food, and this can make a monumental impact in terms of our collective health.

If I earned a badge for eating well during the day, or was competing with a friend to see who could stick to a diet the longest, I would be way more incentivized to persevere and eat well. The problem standing in the way is that currently, tracking is hard: it’s simply not automatic enough.

But if that were to be resolved, the applications of gamification to food tracking become really interesting. Fooducate is a good example of gamification already being applied to food – by scanning barcodes, it grades the groceries that you buy to encourage you to eat better.

And Google Glass has the potential to fundamentally change the way we track and gamify health.

Imagine being able to track and gamify your statistics for any sport – like what your shot accuracy was in your latest tennis game – or having Google Glass automatically read the stats off your bike machine at the gym. And how about creating a proper augmented reality experience for exercise – extending the idea created by the Zombies, Run! smartphone app, your morning run could be turned into all manner of videogame-style scenarios, from escaping zombie hoards to chasing down one of your friends.

And its tracking applications will go way beyond physical health – it could even be used to track and gamify the number of words you spoke during the day, or the number of social interactions you had.

There are many opportunities for new applications of gamification in these areas. As a final thought, suppose Google Glass could record all the food you ate, the portion sizes and how much food you left on your plate. Suddenly, you’d have cracked the food-tracking problem and you’d have a massive opportunity to gamify and fix our increasing battle with preventable, diet-related health problems.

Photo credit: Chris Chabot/Google

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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Raindance Technologies has closed a $20 million fifth round of funding with strategic investment from Myriad Genetics, the biotech company at the center of this month’s debate about we should be able to patent human genes.

Myriad’s involvement in the landmark federal case has not put a road block in its expansion plans. The company has signed a multiyear commercial agreement with Lexington, Mass.-based Raindance. The terms of the investment dictate that Raindance will provide technology to improve Myriad’s hereditary cancer test and speed up its process for large-volume genetic testing.

Raindance’s best-known genetics research product, dubbed “Thunderstorm,” helps its customers target 20,000 regions of the genome using any of the commercially available gene-sequencing technologies.

In recent years, the cost of sequencing the human genome has fallen, reaching a low of $1,000 in 2012 due to a microchip and machines designed by genomics company Life Technologies Corp. Raindance is one of the companies that seeks to capitalize on these developments, and it’s providing research tools for the growing crop of genetics labs.

“Imagine all diagnostics some day being reduced to a simple blood test,” said CEO Roopam Banerjee, who believes Raindance products are a “step in that direction.” The company’s overarching mission is to develop more reliable methods for researchers and physicians to detect disease and predisposition risk.

In a phone interview, Banerjee said he took on additional funding as the company is at an “inflection point.” He explained, ”We – along with our customers — have generated some compelling data to track complex human disease noninvasively.”

Raindance claims its customers will process 50,000 samples in 2013 and 100,000 samples in 2014 alone. According to Banerjee, the company doubled its sales in the previous year and anticipates explosive growth in the wake of the funding.

Existing investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Quaker BioVentures, Alloy Ventures, Acadia Woods, and Sectoral Asset Management also participated in the funding round.

Top image via Raindance 

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HopeLab is taking a blast at cancer with the relaunch of its titles that help kids deal with having cancer. More than five years in the making, Re-Mission 2 consists of six free-to-play online minigames launching tomorrow with a host of support from charities, medical researchers, and major corporations.

The new titles are on the leading edge of “games for health,” a movement to take the engagement of gaming and turn it to the cause of improving health.

(Consumers taking control of their own health through games or other digital technologies are one of the big themes of our upcoming HealthBeat 2013 conference, May 20-21 in San Francisco.)

The six releases are bite-sized casual experiences that combine fun and cancer education. They have the backing of scientific research and input from cancer patients. The games are the spiritual sequels to Re-Mission, a PC offering released in 2006 from HopeLab, a health charity that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam Omidyar set up.

The new titles deal with big changes in the way people play games. They include iPad versions since kids in hospitals often can’t easily access a PC. They are also accessible on the Web from any device that can connect online, and they don’t require a huge time commitment.

The games apply insights from a brain-imaging study that HopeLab and Stanford University researchers published in 2012. The study showed that the original Re-Mission, a game where kids can kill cancer cells in the body, strongly activates brain circuits involved in positive motivation. Such motivation helps kids stick to their prescribed treatments of chemotherapy and antibiotic treatments. Re-Mission basically helps them understand why it’s important to stay positive and be disciplined about anti-cancer treatments.

Steve Cole is a doctor who helped organize the whole effort. He is vice president of research and development at HopeLab and a professor of medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. He said in an interview with VentureBeat that a better attitude contributes directly to getting a biological edge on cancer.

“The goal is to give kids hope for power and control over cancer,” Cole said. “It is a souped up version of Re-Mission, using a different recipe for impact based on what we learned about motivation, emotion, and harnessing positive psychology.”

The new games include input from 120 teens and young adults with cancer across the U.S. Those patients helped contribute to making the games more fun.

“A lot of times we don’t really want to take our meds. We wonder, ‘What is this doing? Where is it going? I’m tired of it. It’s just going to make me throw up,’” said Jose Guevera, an 18-year-old who went through cancer treatment and helped design the Re-Mission 2 games. “But when you see on the screen and visualize what’s happening inside your body, and what the chemotherapy’s doing — you’re not looking at a PowerPoint, you’re playing a game, and you’re being chemo, and you’re killing your bad cells. I think Re-Mission 2 can really help a lot of us.”

In each Re-Mission 2 game, players go inside the body to defeat cancer with weapons like chemotherapy, antibiotics, and the body’s immune cells. The action has direct parallels to real-world cancer treatments, and it tells patients that one of the big reasons that kids don’t survive cancer is because they don’t stick to their treatments.

“Combining high-quality science and compelling game design to help young cancer patients fight their disease was at the core of my vision for the original Re-Mission, and I’m delighted to see that continue with Re-Mission 2,” said Pam Omidyar, HopeLab founder and board chair. “HopeLab science has improved our understanding of how technology can be harnessed to catalyze the innate resilience of young people, even in the face of extreme adversity, like cancer. The Re-Mission 2 games have been tested with kids across the country, including my own, and we hope people have as much fun playing them as we have.”

All six games are available on the Re-Mission 2 website, and three of them are also compatible with the iPad. Players can unlock a bonus pack of downloadable games for Mac and the Windows PC.

HopeLab headed the effort. Additional funding came from Vivendi, Livestrong Foundation, the Entertainment Software Association, Cigna, Genentech, and the Annenberg Foundation.

“When I first was introduced to the Re-Mission program, I was just amazed,” said Ernest Katz, Director of Behavioral Sciences at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Here is a product that kids can engage with in a fun way, and it helps them learn about what they needed to do in order to get better.”

A study of the original Re-Mission game showed that it improved treatment adherence and boosted self-efficacy in cancer patients, according to published findings from the medical journal Pediatrics in 2008.

“Kids were using their antibiotics, and we were happy about that,” Cole said.

Cole said one of the best things that came from the first effort were a series of studies that measured impact. Groups will study the new games as well.

“We looked at what worked,” he said. “Knowledge games weren’t the pathway through which we got improved behavior. We changed the view of chemotherapy from being a symbol of having cancer to having bullets in your gun or bombs you can drop to kill cancer.”

In other words, the kids had to like the titles to learn from them. HopeLab contacted a series of game developers, and just about all of them were able to help.

“We know that technology can be a powerful force for good in the lives of young people,” said Jenny Lai, vice president of the ESA Foundation. “Re-Mission 2 embodies that promise. The ESA Foundation became HopeLab’s first Re-Mission distribution funding partner in 2006. We are delighted to extend our partnership to support the launch of Re-Mission 2.”

The games include:

Re-Mission 2: Nanobot’s Revenge: You play a microscopic nanobot that blasts all types of cancer using an arsenal that includes chemo, radiation, and targeted cancer-drug attacks to crush the malignant forces of the Nuclear Tyrant. The Nerdook Productions-developed game has 12 levels plus a bonus level.

Re-Mission 2: Leukemia: The Leukemia Monster has sent waves of cancer minions to attack the body’s bone marrow. You can save precious stem cell colonies and cleanse the bone marrow of all leukemia cells with arcade-style play. It has 20 levels. Nerdook also developed the experience.

Re-Mission 2: Nano Dropbot: You guide a flying dropbot on search-and-destroy missions to kill cancer cells where they lurk. Nano Dropbot has 15 levels and 10 bonus levels. Tinime Games built the title.

Re-Mission 2: Stem Cell Defender: You have to defend white blood cells from a bacteria invasion using your flying nano-fling bot. Stem Cell Defender, from Borne Games, has 10 levels and a bonus level.

Re-Mission 2: Feeding Frenzy: You have to drive a colony of powerful chemo and leukocytes to devour colonies of bacteria and cancer cells. The Tinime Games-developed Feeding Frenzy has 10 levels.

Re-Mission 2: Special Ops: You can unlock this game pack by clearing five levels of each of the other Re-Mission 2 games. The title is an arcade-style shooter where you destroy cancerous invaders with an array of weapons. Novaleaf Game Studio created this adventure, and it has 15 levels.

Cole said that the Flash-based titles will run on mobile devices through cloud-based streaming technology. He also stated that the games do not require federal approval because they are not treatments that go inside your body.

“It’s akin to counseling, exercise, and weight-loss advice,” Cole said.

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Intel and the Oregon Health & Science University are teaming up on a supercomputing project to speed up analysis of human genetic profiles, which could help with personalized treatment for cancer.

The goal for the multiyear partnership is to make genetic analysis a routine part of patient care.

“We are generating an enormous amount of data, which has historically been unmanageable,” said Joe Gray, a research director at OHSU’s Knight Cancer Institute, in an interview.

Gray envisions that the project will involve a “lot of back and forth” between geneticists, engineers, and biomedical scientists before they can map the human genome to identify the mutations that lead to cancer.

Such a map would provide a better understanding of an individual’s genetic makeup, so biomedical engineers can cancer treatment that kills only the mutating cells, not the healthy ones.

It sounds simple, but Gray’s project is grappling with delivering the right kind of computer power for a project of this scale. “We are talking about a terabyte of data per patient that describes the molecular architecture of a disease,” he explained. If this is extended to millions of patients a year, it’s an awful lot of data.

Researchers will use Intel’s Xeon E5 HPC CPU, which offers Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and Intel Node Manager Server power-management technology.

Aside from the technology, which is steadily evolving to manage this volume of data, the other challenge is an ethical one.

“Privacy is a clear issue, and the data needs to be handled confidentially,” said Gray. When asked about whether the data will be stripped of any personally identifiable information, Gray admits to another “gray area.” Our DNA is like a molecular blueprint — theoretically, it is possible to match and reestablish a patient’s identity without having a direct link.

But the partnership with Intel is designed to explore the architectures best suited to deal with this data, and tackle ethical issues at a later date. The more immediate goal is to identify a number of challenging biomedical projects, and to experiment with hundreds of hardware and software packages.

An example of a project is tracking a typical cancer tumor through its thousands of genomic changes. “Some of them are important in the way that the disease responds to therapy,” said Gray. The team intends to build computer algorithms to predict how best to manage the disease as it progresses.

This isn’t the only partnership between a technology company and medical institution; Illumina and Life Technologies Corp recently announced rival Boston-based clinical genomics initiatives.

“Our joint team plans to do research not only into the mutations but also the ‘circuitry’ that enables malignant cells to spread,” Intel’s general manager for health care Eric Dishman, noted in a blog post. “The ultimate hope here is to learn how, for a specific individual, this circuitry can be “turned off” to stop the spread of cancer cells.”

Dishman, recently had his genome sequenced when recovering from a kidney transplant.

“It, too, took weeks of computing and then months upon months of analysis to make sense of my own unique case,” he concluded. “Today, these tools are too slow, too expensive and too rare—I want to make sure everyone has access to the kind of customized care that I lucked into.”

Curious to learn more? We’ll be inviting world leading geneticists to delve into the tricky, ethical issues at HealthBeat, our health care conference on May 20 & 21 in San Francisco. 

Scientific researcher image via Shutterstock

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

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This is a guest post by Chris Crowell, president and CEO of Enterasys.

The rate at which doctors are choosing to bring mobile devices to work continues to rise at an alarming rate. In fact, a recent study from Jackson & Coker found that four out of five physicians regularly use their mobile devices for medical purposes.

At the same time, patients and guests are also increasing their use of personal wireless devices in hospitals and healthcare facilities. While there are proven benefits in these situations, such as quicker access to patient records, the influx of devices also has some serious drawbacks.

Most often, those looking at the negatives are quick to point out patient privacy issues and the fact that patient information could be jeopardized. But a host of other concerns are also associated with this movement, such as the enormous burden it puts on the network and IT resources.

To help alleviate the side effects from the transition to mobile, hospital IT organizations across the globe are beginning to deploy bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategies. In order to provide the flexible resources required to manage a comprehensive BYOD strategy that maintains costs, control, and security, IT must be prepared to face the following five issues head on.

Network support

A recent report from Spyglass Consulting Group found that 69 percent of surveyed hospital nurses use smartphones for personal and clinical communications while on the job. That, added to the statistic above about physicians, equals a huge strain on the hospital’s network.

With the influx of end-user devices accessing the hospital network comes the demand for consistent, reliable, and continuously available connectivity, especially on the hospital wireless LAN. Federal standards call for institutions to deploy a single network to handle the needs of the medical devices as well as provide a standard of interoperability for securing all data on the clinical wireless LAN. Moving forward, hospital IT professionals must explore next-generation networking solutions that are highly available, scalable, and ubiquitous.

Lost devices

If you work for a company where you’re given a mobile device, the assumption is that IT bears the responsibility for the tracking and replacement of those that go missing. Healthcare organizations must rethink this traditional model as more devices brought into the workplace are personally, not company, owned.

Mobile device management (MDM) of personal devices is something that has historically kept health IT professionals up, yet most are only doing the bare minimum at best to control it. There must be a balance in strategy that takes into account the need to be noninvasive, yet law abiding. When dealing with patient information, anything that contains data covered by HIPAA needs to be secured, and those devices need to be able to be wiped clean.

Mixing personal and professional use of mobile devices

In the near future, mobile computing devices in clinical environments will be just as common as they are in real life. Those devices will serve a dual purpose, as doctors and other professionals use the same mobile phone to call/text home as they do to access patient information.

We’re already hearing concerns from clinicians about BYOD around the loss of privacy for personal communications, the idea that personal devices may compromise professional behavior, and the concern that procedures may not be clear around professional vs. personal use on personal devices. BYOD in this environment requires a shift in culture that revolves around transparency. Without it, policy-makers and users will butt heads and neither side will achieve what they’re after.

Application deployment

Currently, there are more than 20,000 mHealth applications in the marketplace, and that number is growing across all mobile platforms. Most hospitals are using application layer firewall and unified threat management in order to deploy and monitor applications safely and securely, and remain in compliance with HIPAA.

These strategies have proved to be beneficial when it comes to personally owned devices. However, they also raise concerns about performance degradation and scalability. Deploying and supporting diverse applications can be troublesome, especially with the magnitude of devices involved. IT and the mobile workforce must have the same goal in mind — patient safety and protection. From there, they can put clear policies in place.

Ruggedized devices

Hospitals are not the safest place for a mobile device. There are fluids and other harsh operating conditions that can be challenging. The conditions are drastically different from those of a standard office. At the same time, it’s unlikely that clinicians have the safeguards in place to protect their devices from cross-contamination from hospital to hospital.

The question is, should the responsibility of the sanitation and hardening of the personal device fall on IT, or should the clinician assume responsibility when deciding to use their own device in the treatment of patients? This factor cannot be ignored when deploying a BYOD strategy.

Final thoughts

BYOD isn’t a passing fad. It’s here to stay, and organizations need to establish strategies and best practices to handle this ever-changing landscape. The organizations that successfully deploy BYOD initiatives have the ability to transform clinical workflows, streamline processes, improve physician access to information, and improve overall patient care.

Chris Crowell is President and CEO of Enterasys. He works with several healthcare organizations looking to expand WiFi for BYOD. Some notable customers include Henry Ford Health System and Western Maryland Health System.

Doctor using tablet via rangizzz/Shutterstock

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Cloud storage startup Box is pushing into the health care vertical, regulatory challenges and all.

Box’s team has spent a year researching the space and ensuring that the product is HIPPA compliant. The team is aware of the challenges reaching the target market — physicians and health administrators have tread carefully with it comes to new cloud-based technology.

“We want Box to be the cloud solution to manage all content in the health care sector,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie (pictured, above) in a phone interview. Levie lists myriad use cases; physicians can use Box to access your medical information from their iPads, and researchers can use its collaboration tools to share sensitive information.

In fact, over the past year, box sales in the health care industry grew 81 percent. The company claims to have hundreds of customers in this sector, including  Henry Ford Health System, Beaumont Health System, HealthTrust Europe, and Johns Hopkins HealthCare Solutions.

In the past, the most sensitive records were stored on film, tape, and paper charts. But as data gets digitized, hospitals, physician practice groups, software and hardware companies, consulting firms, and affiliated health care organizations are grappling with how to keep it secure.

However, a positive sign for cloud vendors is that doctors and health administrators routinely use tools like Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox in their personal lives but do not use these tools to share patient information. Security breaches at hospitals are an ongoing problem.

For this reason, Levie sees a major opportunity for a highly-secure cloud company to succeed in the health industry. “Basic file sharing is very challenged,” he explained.

And with a health care push in mind, Box made a strategic investment in DrChrono, a tablet-friendly electronic medical record (EMR) provider, and is working closely with the team. This is just one of many partnerships the company expects to strike with health care IT vendors. Other current partners include Medigram, TigerText, Doximity, and HealthTap.

The company has also brought on Missy Krasner, Morgenthaler Ventures’ executive in residence, who was one of the founding members of Google Health. Krasner said a “simple and elegant solution” like Box is often optimal for doctors; a lesson she learned at Google.

“Doctors want the ease and simplicity and horizontal nature of tools like Box and Google Drive,” Levie said in agreement.

Box is also exploring other verticals, such as financial services. While it does not intend to build a full vertical solution for health, it hopes developers and partners will want to team up and use Box’s platform to build more sophisticated applications and tools.

Aaron Levie photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Interested in learning more about how cloud companies can jump into health care? Aaron Levie is a keynote speaker at our upcoming HealthBeat conference on May 20 and 21. 

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

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Alvaro Fernandez is the CEO of SharpBrains.com.

This month, President Obama launched the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, which the administration calls “a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind.” The president announced $100 million in funding to kick off the research project, likening the effort to previous “grand challenges” like the human genome mapping initiative and the Apollo space program.

As the president noted, we can identify galaxies light years away and study particles smaller than an atom, but “we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.” For that reason, the BRAIN Initiative is welcome news.

However, it’s unlikely to move the needle because, unlike previous national projects, it lacks adequate funding and actionable objectives that can capture the imagination of innovators and the public at large.

The U.S. needs more commitment to brain science

To put the BRAIN Initiative’s $100 million in funding into perspective, consider that the European Union has allocated $1.5 billion for its Human Brain Project, and China’s Brainnetome initiative has been operational for almost a decade.

In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health, one of the primary beneficiaries of the BRAIN Initiative, is taking a $1.6 billion dollar hit due to current budget battles.

So while the $100 million in BRAIN Initiative funding is a good start, it’s not nearly enough. And the need for a broad, concerted effort to tackle brain-based challenges couldn’t be more clear or urgent: According to a recent RAND Corporation study, the cost of caring for patients with dementia in the US is already at least as expensive as treating cancer or heart disease, and the cost is expected to double by 2040. Yet, the attention and resources allocated to brain health and mental well-being today pale in comparison to those devoted elsewhere.

The BRAIN Initiative needs actionable goals

When President John F. Kennedy articulated his vision for the US space program in 1961, he outlined a clear objective: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

The BRAIN Initiative could benefit from a similar clarity of purpose. In his speech, President Obama alluded to new insights into Alzheimer’s disease, autism, strokes and traumatic brain injury that research could produce. But bold initiatives call for audacious objectives: To capture the public’s imagination and inspire cutting-edge scientific innovation, the BRAIN Initiative should “go big,” embracing clear goals and working backwards to achieve measurable progress towards those goals.

As it has been articulated so far, though, it comes across as one more interesting basic research project disconnected from those pressing societal priorities.

Digital health entrepreneurs have a role to play

Is there an alternative approach? Yes. Start with the societal goal in mind, and chart the most likely path to make a groundbreaking difference there. For example, relatively inexpensive assessment tools distributed over the Internet can generate valuable data to expand understanding of cognitive functioning, and Big Data analysis can yield amazing insights that have immediate applications in health, education and productivity. Public-private partnerships could help advance the BRAIN Initiative’s goals.

Other countries have already successfully tried these approaches:

• In Canada, a brain health check-up application is providing valuable data for individuals, while gathering information that will provide insights for public health policy decisions.
• The United Kingdom’s National Health Service has rolled out computerized therapies as a first-line treatment for anxiety and depression.
• In Singapore, quantitative EEG monitoring and training are building students’ concentration capacity.

To inspire progress, focus on fitness

Although the BRAIN Initiative is often compared to the moon project, perhaps the better opportunity would be for it to draw inspiration from JFK’s fitness initiative. In announcing that program, President Kennedy said, “The strength of our democracy and our country is really no greater in the final analysis than the well-being of our citizens.”

The truth of that observation applies to brain health as well as physical fitness. Practical goals related to brain health and a call to action that inspires all Americans — including innovators in the digital health space — would make for a smarter BRAIN Initiative.

I wish the best for the new BRAIN Initiative. It’s always good to have more research dollars and new research tools. But this small initiative is no substitute for the concerted effort we’ll need to plan and implement in order to optimize the brain health and performance of over 300 million Americans and over seven billion brain-owners worldwide.

Alvaro Fernandez, named a Young Global Leader in 2012 by the World Economic Forum, is the CEO of SharpBrains.com, a leading independent market research and think tank tracking health and productivity applications of neuroscience. He has been quoted by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Reuters, and Associated Press, among others.

Image credit: Liz Henry/Flickr

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Google’s former lead health strategist has launched a new website SmartPatients that helps cancer patients connect with each other, and learn more about their disease.

Physician turned entrepreneur Roni Zeiger (above, left, with his cofounder) told me he left Google to form the company with Gilles Frydman, who founded the Association of Cancer Online Resources (ACOR), the world’s largest collection of online cancer communities.

The site was previously invitation-only, but after three months of testing and developing the product, it is ready for a public launch.

Cancer patients are currently using the site to access the latest information about clinical trials, join conversations with other patients, and learning about other types of cancer. It’s primarily designed for patients, but is also being used by caregivers and doctors.

“Cancer communities are siloed,” said Zeiger by phone. “There are missed opportunities for learning across boundaries,” meaning that certain symptoms are shared by patients with different strains of cancer.

The key to the company generating real revenue is that patients offer feedback about clinical trials.

SmartPatients is already teamed up with various foundations and nonprofit organizations, including the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, and Cancer Commons. A partnership with WorldOne, the company that acquired Sermo, one of the largest online communities for physicians, will provide doctors with an opportunity to listen in to the conversations among patients.

However, the company makes clear that while it plans to make money through voluntary surveys and insights, it will not share personally identifiable information about patients. The business model is designed to help partners in the health care industry incorporate the patient perspective into future clinical trials.

SmartPatients is a self-funded effort, but the founders are hoping to raise a round of funding in the coming months.

What innovation can we expect to see in health care? We’ll be examining the theme of the “Smart Hospital” at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s conference on May 20 & 21. 

Eric Peacock is the co-founder and CEO of MyHealthTeams.

A recent statistic from the CDC reported that 1 in 50 kids in America will be diagnosed with autism. Chances are, someone in your life will be affected by it – perhaps your friend’s son or a daughter of an employee in your company or even your own child. By the end of this decade, more than a half a million of these kids with autism will become adults with autism. Unfortunately, our health care system is woefully unprepared to handle this epidemic growth.

The bigger problem is that autism is just one of about 50 chronic conditions overwhelming the healthcare system. One in two Americans has a chronic condition right now. Autism, breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, psoriasis, and depression are just a start of the long list.

If you’re one of the people diagnosed with a chronic condition, this is probably what you’ll do:

1. Drink from fire hose – You Google like you’ve never googled before to learn everything you can about autism
2. Piece together some semblance of an action plan – Based on your Googling, you’ll write down a laundry list of critical (and maybe not so critical) to-do’s. For a child with autism, it would include: speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral analysis, experimenting with diet, getting into the right school districts, negotiating the right services, finding the right insurance, and so on.
3. Try to find others who have been in your shoes – Instincts set in and you say, “Why does it feel like I’m reinventing the wheel here? I want to find other people who have been in this situation and learn from them.” You want perspective and validation from those people – not just your doctors.

Providing the right information and regular support for patients is something the health care system will never, ever be able to do on its own. A big part of the solution will come from startups like us, but probably not from the likes of Facebook. Here’s why:

People expect mass market functionality for niche market needs

We’ve launched MyAutismTeam – a social network for parents of kids with autism, MyBCTeam (for women diagnosed with breast cancer), and MyMSTeam (for people with multiple sclerosis), and a lot of members signing up came from Facebook groups. Why? On Facebook they couldn’t refine their search beyond just folks with autism, or women with breast cancer. The 32-year old woman with stage 2 invasive lobular breast cancer who was thinking about how to have kids after chemotherapy wanted to find 20 or 30, even 100 young women just like her – not every woman with breast cancer. People expect to be able to find others just like them and learn from them. They expect it to be as easy as finding an old high-school friend on Facebook.

Your Facebook friends aren’t who you need

Facebook is good at connecting us with people we already know. Your Facebook friends probably don’t know the first thing about parenting a child with autism or dealing with multiple sclerosis. The social networking paradigm needs to be changed to make it easier for you to connect with total strangers who just happen to have exactly the same health condition as you.

People don’t want to share their health details with everyone on Facebook

Women with breast cancer don’t want to debate the pros and cons of a tram versus flap breast reconstruction on a site where the guy they dated in high school could potentially read it. Of course, Facebook groups offers some protection from just anyone dropping in, but it’s not enough to really address the concerns of these women. The plain fact is that people want to do social networking about their condition with other folks who get what they are going through.

If you build it, they will come (after a lot of effort and continuous iteration)

People facing a chronic condition are busy. In addition to an already busy home life and career, they now have appointments and treatments galore, with very real side effects slowing them down. You just can’t expect these people to find you, so you need to reach out to them using every scrappy marketing tool you can think of to rise above the clutter.

Once they find you, they’ll become loyal, raving fans of your social network – as long as you listen to what they have to say. My company MyHealthTeams releases a new version of each of our sites about every week,based on feedback from our users. And we’ve gone so far as to make sure we launch a separate social network for every condition we address. That kind of focus is tough for a mass-market player to pull off., but I’m happy to say that when you do, the rewards are great.

Original doctor photo via Shutterstock; Illustration by Tom Cheredar

Eric Peacock is the co-founder and CEO of MyHealthTeams. MyHealthTeams believes that if you are diagnosed with a chronic health condition, it should be easy to find the best people around to help you. To date, they have launched MyAutismTeam (for parents of kids with autism), MyBCTeam (women with breast cancer), and most recently MyMSTeam (individuals with multiple sclerosis).

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Funding for digital health startups skyrocketed in the first quarter of 2013, according to a report released today.

Companies in the health care IT space raised almost half a billion dollars (approximately $493 million) in a single quarter. A report from Mercom Capital Group, a global consulting firm, found that 104 startups received funding this quarter compared to 51 in the previous quarter. Many of the early-stage deals were fueled by health accelerators, which have popped up in recent years, including HealthBox and Rock Health.

A recent shift is that the majority of the startups that received funding are marketed to consumers rather than practices, and these include telehealth, mobile health, and scheduling apps for patients.

This trend in favor of consumer health technologies has proliferated despite the increasing interest in electronic health records (EHRs), which doctors are being pushed to adopt by 2015 — or risk paying penalties.

“The enormous market opportunity in consumer-focused health has appeared to pique the interest of investors and is likely to continue to grow as witnessed by the surge in VC activity,” said Raj Prabhu, the CEO of Mercom Capital Group.

While investment in health IT continued at a “torrid pace,” Prabhu’s research team found that mergers and acquisitions remained steady. There were 46 in the health IT space, which is on par with the previous quarter.

The top five health deals of the quarter?

• Health Catalyst for a $41 series B round .
• xG Health Solutions for a $40 million round.
• NantHealth for a $31 million round.
• Fitbit for a $30 million round (although this was reported as an intent to raise).
• One Medical Group for a $30 million series F round .

For more in-depth research, which projects a record year for digital health, check out Rock Health’s report.

Investment in health IT is one of the key themes that will be discussed at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s upcoming health conference. 

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

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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

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Paul Sonnier is Head of Digital Health Strategy at specialty life sciences consulting firm Popper and Company.

There’s been discussion recently about a lack of life science venture capital enthusiasm for emerging digital health companies. I happen to feel that this concern is misplaced. I engaged industry and opinion leaders on this subject plus have my own thoughts on the digital health funding environment.

In his latest article in Forbes, contributor David Shaywitz characterizes life science venture capitalists as just “kicking tires” on potential digital health investments, citing fears from prominent investor Nimesh Shah that innovations in digital health are “merely a bubble,” and that these firms lack a “real biz model.”

Shaywitz bases his position on quotes from venture capital executives, but also from the $1.4 billion that was invested in digital health last year, which he says is a fraction of all the life science VC money available. He responded to my post in the Digital Health LinkedIn group that this “reflects the uncertainty that many investors feel regarding whether viable business models will emerge.”

While $1.4 billion doesn’t look like much on the surface, it’s a jump of 46 percent from the year before which, as digital health company Qualcomm Life’s Rick Valencia points out, represents “impressive numbers for such a nascent industry.”

It’s also important to note that this jump (albeit from a smaller start) looks even better when compared to funding in biotechnology and medical devices, which is down 15 percent and 13 percent respectively, during the same period of time. These figures indicate that life sciences VCs are in a state of general paralysis, or at least lethargy.

One possible issue with the nascent digital health industry is that it’s not an obvious fit for life science investors or venture capital firms.

First, it’s not the same as healthcare IT, which is already a source of confusion for a few investor firms. Second, it’s the convergence of many sectors and technologies—wireless sensors, devices, genomics, social networking, mobile technology, the Internet, consumers, and, yes, healthcare IT.

As Valencia wrote, “digital health investments have the legal and regulatory complexities of life science investments, but the business models and investment horizons of tech investments. So, neither the tech VCs nor the life science VCs are natural fits for digital health investments.”

There are often many nuances unique to each digital health startup—it’s not a one-size-fits-all market. This presents a learning curve for potential investors, whether they’re already investing in digital health or not. In other words, it’s difficult to leverage cookie-cutter investment strategies.

Marc Newman of TeleCenter points to other emerging areas of digital health that could be revolutionary, if allowed to mature. Newman highlights “omics” companies, which optimize low-cost sequencing, big data, and artificial intelligence outfits to “enable patterns to be recognized from sensors and point of care measurements,” and phenotype assessments and matches to genotypes. Newman eloquently states that, “The risk is high, but the valuations are low, and the market opportunity is large.” This scenario used to excite early-stage investors.

It’s said that time and cost are innovation’s enemies. We now stand in a place where we can potentially benefit from the reduced time and cost that are part of innovations in digital health, as some distinct categories emerge and partnering strategies open up opportunities to scale. But we also stand in the middle of complex regulatory approvals and longer time horizons that have become recognized as “normal” in healthcare. Like most truly disruptive innovations, funding and innovation require alignment but are often not the simplest of propositions on either side of the equation.

In addition to his role at life sciences consulting firm Popper and Co., Paul Sonnier is founder of the 16,000+ member Digital Health group on LinkedIn and a mentor at digital health startup accelerator Blueprint Health. The above story originally appeared on Popper and Co.’s blog and is republished here with permission.

Health apps image via IntelFreePress/Flickr

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Today Fenwick & West released a study stating that the number of life science financings continued to decline in 2012, falling by more than $5 billion over the past five years.

This sector reached a high in 2008. However, venture capital for life sciences “fell off markedly” after the 2008 recession and has not yet recovered. Fenwick & West estimates that fundraising fell from an average of $7.8 billion a year in 2007 and 2008, to $2.5 billion in 2012, and the percentage of venture capital fundraising allocated to life sciences declined from 19 percent in 2009 to 12.5 percent in 2012.

“The life science venture financing environment remains challenging, with an increasingly short supply of capital, despite factors such as aging world populations and rising living standards in developing countries that will help support long-run demand for life science innovation,” said partner Matt Rossiter. “While funding from corporate investors, wealthy individuals and disease foundations is helping to fill some of the gap, entrepreneurs that plan to seek venture capital financing would do well to carefully consider factors, such as capital efficiency and a faster path to exit, that can increase the odds of raising scarce funding.”

The shortage of venture capital has led to a few key trends that Fenwick & West identified in the market. First, life science venture capitalists are making fewer new investments. Pricewaterhouse Cooper and the National Venture Capital association reported that 2012 saw the fewest “first time” investments in life sciences companies of any year since 1995. Those who are investing are more likely to back companies with less technological or development risk, such as those involving smaller clinical trials or an accelerated regulatory pathway, or that require less capital to reach commercial markets.

With venture capital lagging, large life sciences companies are playing an increasingly significant role in supporting startups through partnerships, funding, and/or mergers and acquisitions. M&A activity remained fairly consistent in 2012, although a majority of life sciences companies that went public were priced below their target range. In its analysis, Fenwick & West found that companies and investors are taking steps to achieve earlier exits as a result.

The good news is that valuations for the venture-backed companies continued to “trend modestly upward” from 2011. “Up rounds” outpaced “down rounds” 52 percent to 17 percent, which partner Barry Kramer said suggests that while raising venture financing is becoming more difficult, those companies that do raise additional money are doing so at improved valuations.

Interestingly, the decline in life sciences funding occurred at the same time as funding for digital health shot up dramatically. in 2012,  digital health and healthcare IT companies attracted $1.4 billion in venture funding, representing a 46 percent increase in dollars and a 56 percent increase in the number of deals from 2011. While investments in biotech, biopharmaceuticals, and medical devices may be dwindling, the same is not true for companies working in health consumer engagement, data analytics, or technology to make practicing medicine more efficient.

Shifts in national policy, cultural attitudes, and mobile technology has changed the way people relate to their bodies and the way clinicians practice medicine. Along with these shifts comes a change in the business surrounding healthcare, and the types of companies that attract investor and consumer attention. However, Rossiter said this survey has an important subtext, begging the question of whether venture capitalists are “over-correcting.”

“Has Life Sciences Venture Capital swung too far the other way, pulling out when we need drugs and treatments that are effective and reduce the overall system cost?” he asked in an email. “In a few years, VCs may look back and ask, ‘Did we miss an opportunity?  Did we pull out just when there were a lot of good companies to invest in and make a lot of money, when we could have had our pick?’

Read the release. 

Should human genes be patented? The Supreme Court is weighing in today in a landmark case,  Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 12-398., that will have an enormous impact on the future of science, technology, and medicine.

At the center of the debate is Utah-based Myriad Genetics. Scientists at the biotech company discovered two genes — BRCA 1 and BRCA2 — that are associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. Since then, it claims its tests have been used by more than one million women to determine if they have an increased risk of developing these cancers.

The company patented these discoveries — the “synthetic molecules we isolated and created in the lab to provide life-saving tests,” the company’s CEO explained in an op-ed in USAToday.

But Nobel Prize-winning geneticists argue that the patent will stifle research and medical diagnostic testing. Because of its patents, Myriad can prevent other researchers from testing, studying, or even looking at these genes, and it also holds the exclusive rights to any mutations along those genes, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The U.S. patent system’s rules stipulate that you can’t patent a product of nature or a law of nature, even if research took years and proved costly. For this reason, Albert Einstein did not patent the law of relativity.

A parallel can be made with a rare East African plant, which has a variety of medicinal uses. It might be plausible to patent a drug that comes from the plant, but it would be unreasonable to patent the plant.

“Over the past 20 years, at least 41 percent of our genes have become the intellectual property of corporations,” genomics professors Christopher E. Mason and Jeffrey Rosenfeld argue on the ACLU’s blog. “These patent claims contradict an intuitive sense that our DNA is no less ours than our lungs or kidneys,” they continue. The ACLU also claims that the patent has allowed Myriad to charge patients exorbitant rates for its test.

Until recently, the medical profession largely shunned patents. A favorite quote that has been liberally used by Myriad’s opponents is from Dr. Jonas Salk, who invented the polio vaccine. Rather than file a patent on the vaccine, he reportedly said, “There is no patent … could you patent the sun?”

Dietrich Stephan led a research team that identify the genetic causes for Autism, ALS, Alzheimer’s disease, and more.

Human geneticist Dietrich Stephan says he’s been following this debate closely since 2006. Stephan is the cofounder of Navigenics, a genetics diagnostics company acquired by Life Technologies Corp. in 2012. Stephan agrees with the ACLU, and is concerned that patenting genes will be detrimental to patients.

“You should be able to give patients gene sequencing information that will benefit their health,” he said in an interview. “Patents may prevent that.”

According to Stephan, the likelihood of the Supreme Court siding with Myriad Genetics is low. Myriad will still own the brand and have the highest-precision test in the market. So even if three competitors emerged tomorrow, Myriad will still out-perform in sales.

“Even so — competition is a good thing,” he asid. Collaboration is another issue as many of these genes will be used together to form the basis of a test — “more and more it’s not a single gene that is diagnostic,” said Stephan.

Efrat Kasznik, an intellectual property lecturer at Stanford University, said the patent system offers inventors a limited monopoly (20 years from filing) in return for public disclosure for their innovation. But not every finding can be patented. Similarly to a mathematical equation, the Supreme Court may rule that our human genes can never be owned.

Dietrich Stephan will speak at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s upcoming healthcare and innovation conference in San Francisco on May 20-21. 

Top image via Shutterstock 

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

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That’s one of the questions that Sarah Hanson, a 19-year-old developer and entrepreneur, asked herself. Especially since she knows exactly what she wants to do with her life already.

Last year, Hanson helped her grandmother find a assisted living home. It was time-consuming, tedious, and a horrible experience — exactly the kind of problem that an aspiring entrepreneur loves to find.

Because, of course, solving problems is the core of any business.

UPDATE: Sarah Hanson may not exist, may be a hoax

Source: 32auctions

Sarah Hanson

So she funded a startup to make finding care homes for the elderly easier and better. She built a functioning first version of the product, and she’s looking for funding in an innovative source: her own future income. This past week she successfully raised $125,000 in seed money by auctioning off 10 percent of her future income for 10 years.

Hanson talks about her experience, why she auctioned off her future income, and how she plans to build the business:

VentureBeat: You sold 10 percent of your future earnings for 10 years. Does that make you feel free? Or burdened?

Sarah Hanson: I’ll say this. Is this the most ideal path? No but it’s a path that gives me freedom of time, and that’s the most valuable asset I have.

VentureBeat: What made you decide to do this?

Hanson: The idea of sitting in classes, taking tests, writing papers, et cetera, for the next three years, learning a lot of things that won’t be applicable to my career, seems pointless to me. A lot of people go to college to figure out what they want to do. I know. I started playing around with code when I was 12. So for me, it doesn’t make sense to spend the time and money that it would take to get a degree.

Everything I need to learn to be the best I can be is available online at no cost. Some people need the structure of a class to learn. I learn best through doing, through creating which I can do for free.

When you want something you get creative. I want to fully devoted to Senior Living Map to see what I can make up it.

This money is my runway. It gives me a 1-2 year window of time to put all my effort behind growing Senior Living Map into hopefully something that can provide income for me for the indefinite future.

It’s an opportunity to never be an employee, never work a job I hate, never have a boss. It’s an opportunity to invest all my time in something I love, creating something hopefully other people love.

All reasons that will keep me highly motivated.

VentureBeat: Who bought your 10 percent of your future income?

Hanson: I’ve exchanged a couple emails with the winning bidder. She’s asked that I keep her name confidential.

She lives in San Francisco. I’ll be flying down there next week to meet with her.

She’s a pretty accomplished person in the tech world. I’m not sure if there’s any point in mentioning that. I’m sorry; I can’t get more specific. The last thing I want to do is piss her off

VentureBeat: You only got three bids, but it turned out to be enough. How many requests or inquiries did you make?

Hanson: I emailed 1,000 investors I found on angel.co to make them aware of the auction. It was quite a tedious process, but I figured I’ve got one shot at this, I’ve got to try my best to get myself the best shot of getting bids.

VentureBeat: You’re planning to start a company, Senior Living Map. Is this an underserved market?

Hanson: It’s started; the site exists at www.seniorlivingmap.org.

Is it an underserved market? Based on my experience of going through the process of finding a senior living home for my grandmother, I would definitely say yes.

My definition of being an underserved market is the lack of a solution that provides the maximum amount of value with the minimum amount of complexity … a line that I have to give credit to Aaron Levie for. …

Currently, the dominant model for finding a senior home for your parent, relative, or other loved one is to use a “Care Adviser,” who would take into account the type of home and care you are seeking and then provide some recommended options at no cost to you.

Sounds great, right?

But how does the Care Adviser make money if they are not charging you for their services? Well, when you choose one of the locations they recommend, that facility will pay them a “placement fee,” which is often thousands of dollars.

Hmmm … is it just me or does that seem like a conflict of interest? Are people really getting recommendations for the best matches, or rather the homes that the Care Adviser stands to profit from the most?

There may be a home that is a perfect match for your parent or relative; however, if your Care Adviser doesn’t have a contract with them, there’s no motivation for them to even mention it to you.

That’s why I created Senior Living Map. I wanted to create a resource that lists all senior and assisted living facilities available so that people can be equipped with information to determine what senior homes are the best match.

I view Care Advisers like travel agents. Before Expedia,  you had to book travel through a travel agent. They controlled all the information. Travel sites like Expedia came along and gave all the power to people and made travel agents irrelevant. They provided people will all the information they needed to make travel decisions on their own.

That’s what I want to do with senior housing. I want to provide a super-simple resource for people that provides them with a robust amount of information so that they can make a decision on their own without the need to go through a third party.

It’s really shocking to me that no site exists that does that but I’m excited that I have the chance to be that site. It’s probably because senior homes aren’t a very sexy or glamorous thing so it doesn’t get much attention

VentureBeat: What’s your monetization plan for the site?

Hanson: That’s something that’s to be determined. There aren’t any ads or anything on the site currently to generate money.

I feel like the site will evolve over the next year, and I feel like if I make a decision on how the site will make money today it will steer me away from creating the best user experience because it may conflict with how the site will generate money.

It’s like companies that are being disrupted by the Internet. They are so use to making money a certain way that they have a hard time going away from what made them as powerful as they are.

The problem with that is you’re fighting against an inevitable force that will slowly take the company to its grave.

My number one focus is on creating the best experience possible for users. Once I feel like I’ve reached that point, I’ll figure out a way to layer some business model over that experience that makes the most sense.

VentureBeat: Does the 10 percent of future earnings include anything you make from Senior Living Map?

Hanson: Yeah. The 10 percent includes any income I receive from any source for the next 10 years.

VentureBeat: Are you a developer or programmer?

I coded the site myself. I’m an army of one.

VentureBeat: What kind of features do you want to add to the Senior Living Map? Reviews? Testimonials? Inside camera shots?

Hanson: The site is pretty bare-bones right now. Long term, I’d like to make it much more robust with all the things you mentioned and more. Also, additional filters so that just like booking a hotel or flight on a travel site, you can narrow down your options to something very specific. Like a home that only accepts women or a home that speaks a certain language.

It’s quite an undertaking to collect all that data but that’s the long term goal of the site.

VentureBeat: Why’d you choose 32auctions to run the sale?

Hanson: 32auctions doesn’t have any closing fees like eBay and other auctions site do.

VentureBeat: And how is your grandmother doing in her home?

Hanson: She’s doing good It was a bit of a process, but we ended up finding a great place for her where she seems to be happy.

She says they take good care of her

Image credit: ShutterStock/Sold at auction

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Started a health-tech company? Apply for the Innovation Showdown at HealthBeat 2013 in San Francisco by April 19.

Facebook and Twitter are not the appropriate venues to share that your back is feeling achy or that your bowel is acting up.

Launching today, HealthKeep is a place for people to post about their everyday aches and pains and ask the community about potential symptom relievers. Unlike Facebook, it’s completely anonymous (rightfully so), so you won’t need to hide the gory or embarrassing details.

“People love to share about their health, but because of privacy issues, they shouldn’t use Facebook,” said founder Lyle Dennis (pictured, above) by phone. Sign up for a profile, and you’ll be asked about previous surgeries and procedures, as well as your date of birth, but your name will never be requested.

The site was founded by Dennis, a physician, a neurologist and self-described technofuturist. Dennis has been developing the site with a technical cofounder for over three years, so its database is fairly extensive: The site has profiles for every practicing physician in the country, which those physicians can “claim.”

Once a physician claims their profile, they can use the site to interact with patients and share resources, including medical discoveries and relevant articles. HealthKeep plugs into about 50 mainstream news sources, so it’s easy to share information.

For patients, it’s a means to interact with a community with similar health issues and keep a record of symptoms. If you post that you’ve developed a rash, this will remain on your “health timeline” and might be useful for your primary care physician to track.

HealthKeep’s user community is still small, as the founders haven’t done much marketing, but the company hopes to eventually compete with WebMD or HealthTap, which offers tips and advice from physicians.

I ask Dennis whether he envisions the site being used by hypochondriac types who obsessively monitor their health. “The majority of people assume they have cancer, no matter what the symptoms are,” he observed. “The site might help to allay these fears.”

In the future, Dennis plans to make money through targeted advertising. The site is a self-funded effort, and he hopes to close a seed round of venture or angel financing in the coming months.

Would you use something like this to share information about your health? Leave your feedback in the comments section below. 

Syros Pharmaceuticals, a company that aims to revolutionize the treatment of cancer and other diseases, announced today it has raised $30 million in financing from Flagship Ventures and ARCH Venture Partners.

This is the company’s first round of institutional funding, making the $30 million figure even more remarkable.

The capital will be used to fast-track discovery and development of gene control medicines.

The life sciences company is developing breakthroughs in gene control. The company identifies master switches for disease genes, opening a new approach to novel therapeutics, according to an emailed company statement.

“Discovery of the switches for genes critical in disease opens a completely new approach to helping people with serious illnesses such as cancer,” Dr. Simonian said in a statement.

Syros Pharmaceuticals integrates gene control research and drug discovery with disease biology and genomic data. Its initial focus is on cancer, but the platform will be applicable to other areas in the future.

Cofounded by pioneers in gene control research, Syros has named biotechnology and pharmaceutical leader Nancy Simonian, M.D., as its CEO. Simonian previously oversaw the development of drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, multiple myeloma, and mantle cell lymphoma.

Syros Pharmaceuticals is based in Watertown, Mass., and is working to establish partnerships with other companies working to disrupt oncology and other therapeutic areas.

Image credit: geneticdesigns/Flickr

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

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The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT just released its budget plan for 2014, which would increase its $61 million budget to $78 million, a 28 percent jump. But it’s a little-reported line item that’s causing a stir among entrepreneurs — a proposal to boost fees for electronic health record vendors.

The ONC is the division within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that leads many initiatives laid out in the Affordable Care Act.

The funding boost in the Obama administration’s proposed budget is a response to the expanding marketplace for health IT. The ONC reports that a new “revenue source” is needed to help it handle the “increasing workload.”

A little-reported line item proposes amped up fees for electronic health record vendors and is a cause for concern for entrepreneurs.

The $1 million user fee “would provide ONC with the necessary resources to meet the increasing demands of health IT vendors,” the plan stipulates. Sources tell me it has a 50 percent chance of being authorized by Congress.

It’s unclear at this point how the ONC would levy the user fee, but it’s plausible that it would be passed down to doctors.

Lauren Fifield, a senior strategist for the free electronic medical record startup Practice Fusion, said the user fee would not be a strain on the industry. The bigger concern is the “high likelihood” that the ONC will use these funds to take on more projects and soon require higher user fee revenues.

Already, EHR vendors are speculating that a user fee charge is the ONC’s way of assuming regulatory authority. “This would be agency creep,” said Fifield, and urged the FDA, FCC and ONC to come together to clarify their roles.

Health IT startups may eventually face charges on revenues akin to the maligned 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices.

Fifled said this might also create confusion and overregulation for electronic health record developers and entrepreneurs. “The user fee is a slippery slope that could create an even more dysfunctional health IT market,” she said.

Also featured in the 126 pages of program descriptions are several health IT initiatives, including a commitment to examining patient safety, and data security. We’ll be discussing these topics and more at our upcoming HealthBeat conference.

Doctor with electronic health record // Shutterstock

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

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