HealthCatalyst is the latest health technology startup to benefit from the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

The startup, once known as Healthcare Quality Catalyst, provides health care data warehousing for 81 hospitals and health systems, serving 20 million patients. The company claims to be the only data warehouse that is specifically built for the healthcare industry.

This makes it ideally positioned to take advantage of Obamacare, which mandates that health providers and hospitals shift to to electronic records.

“Almost every hospital and hospital system will need a data warehouse to organize, visualize and utilize its data to address the $750 billion of waste in the U.S. healthcare system,” said Norwest Venture Partners’ Pramod Haque in a statement. He said that Health Catalyst can meet this need and boasts a “pipeline of health systems that are demanding the company’s solutions.” Its current customers include Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Texas Children’s Hospital.

The Salt Lake City-based company raised a mammoth $33 million in funding from a roster of venture capital firms. The second round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Sorenson Capital. Haque will join the board of directors, and Frank Bullock, Sorenson Capital’s managing director, will assume a role as a board adviser.

It’s rare for a publicly traded company to be concerned when its stock price gets a dramatic increase, but that’s exactly what happened to MedBox earlier this week.

MedBox produces marijuana vending machines used in hospitals, pharmacies, doctor’s offices, and “alternative medicine clinics,” which is code for medical marijuana dispensaries. The machines use a pre-registered biometric scan to identify authorized users, track and restrict drug usage, and deliver secure reports about those that use it. The company, which was awarded a U.S. patent on its “herb” dispensing machines, has generated over $8 million in revenue since launching in 2010.

And due in part to voters in Washington and Colorado legalizing marijuana for recreational use, MedBox’s stock has experienced quite a dramatic boost. The company’s shares went from $4 on Monday to $215 by the end of the week, which prompted MedBox execs to lower investor enthusiasm, reports Marketwatch.

Obviously, investing in a business that’s highly reliant on a substance that the federal government considers illegal — despite several state-level legalization measures and widespread usage from the general population — is risky. At the same time, it could be worth the risk to get in early at a company that already has its foot in the door for an extremely lucrative new industry.

MedBox represents a very legitimate business that’s focused on the health care and medical industry, and it wouldn’t be difficult to expand its target customers should marijuana finally become legal across the country.

And while most people are still debating whether or not state rights supersede federal law, my first question was “how long is it going to take for the tech industry to take hold of this brand new marijuana industry?” If MedBox’s stock is any indication, the answer is not long at all.  That said, I’m not just talking about marijuana social networks, either.

Dispensing and inventory monitoring machines are definitely one area where tech companies can shine, but there’s also plenty of room for innovation in agriculture tech as well. Of course, all of this is dependent on marijuana being legal, which would legitimize it for the business world.

Via BoingBoing

Doximity is on a roll! Shortly after announcing that LinkedIn’s cofounder had joined its board, the free networking tool for physicians pulled in its second round of venture capital funding.

The $17 million series B round was led by Morgenthaler Ventures, with participation from Emergence Capital Partners and InterWest Partners.

“We’ve been following Jeff Tangney and the Doximity team for more than three years,” said Rebecca Lynn, partner at Morgenthaler Ventures. “We’ve had an extensive thesis in the Health IT space for some time, and Doximity stood out as a company that is solving a significant problem in a sizable market.”

The company started as a LinkedIn for doctors, and this year it added a newsfeed feature that allows doctors to post messages to colleagues they are connected with on the platform. A smart move – Doximity has grown rapidly since securing its first round of funding 17 months ago because doctors have few other options. They cannot use traditional social networks, email, or SMS texting to discuss patients, which is considered a violation of privacy.

“Simple communications between doctors is one of the most challenging problems in the healthcare industry today,” Jeff Tangney, founder and CEO of Doximity told me.

Doximity hopes to connect doctors so that they can collaborate on cases, identify the right candidate for a referral, send private messages to each other, converse about the latest research, and gain exposure for their practice. It has experienced rapid expansion and recently announced that one in seven physicians in the United States have signed up.

The company deals with sensitive health information, so it has needed to ensure that it meets privacy standards. As founder and chief executive Jeff Tangney explained in a recent interview with VentureBeat, “Unlike traditional social media, Doximity enables doctors to securely discuss patient care in a private, closed, HIPAA-secure environment.”

Read more here about how the company is tackling the fifth-largest cause of death in the United States by reducing medical mistakes and errors resulting from miscommunication.

In May, Konstantin Guericke, LinkedIn’s cofounder, joined the board of the San Mateo-based startup. This is the kind of heavy-weight support that the company needs to compete with startups in the space: Sermo, QuantiaMD, and DocBookMD.

Doximity received its first round of funding, $10.8 million in total, from Emergence Capital Partners and InterWest Partners in March, 2011. Its chief executive, Jeff Tangney, previously founded Epocrates, a mobile medical data company.

Image credit: ShutterStock