Happy Pi Day!

This mornin’, our hard-working editorial team welcomed three entrepreneurs to our offices in downtown San Francisco. In exchange for a demo, we offered up a slice of home-cooked apple pie (courtesy of Twilio).

For the next office hours on March 28, we’re extending the invite to health and med-tech startup founders. We want to hear about your challenges, biggest successes, and any upcoming news.

Can’t make it to office hours? If you work at a disruptive healthcare company, don’t forget to register for HealthBeat on May 20-21. HealthBeat is our inaugural event to showcase how information technology is driving out inefficiencies in healthcare.

So, we tempted you with the pie… Just fill out the application form to apply for office hours on the 28th! The deadline to apply is Tuesday March 26 at 12pm PT.

Med-tech is off to a bold start this year with a hot acquisition, which will serve to consolidate the market.

Epocrates Inc., a medical applications company based in Silicon Valley, is being scooped up by AthenaHealth for $293 million. According to a company press release, AthenaHealth will pay $11.75 per share, a 22 percent premium to Epocrates’ Friday closing price.

Massachusetts-based AthenaHealth provides cloud-based services and tools to doctors and hospitals. The company faces fierce competition from Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Quality Systems, as well as Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, which is retooling after a protracted drama with its board. 

Epocrates is an attractive prospect for AthenaHealth, as it has built up brand-name recognition with doctors. AthenaHealth estimates that it is has been used by 338,000 U.S. physicians to pull up short summaries on drugs, including information about side effects and interactions.

“Capturing mindshare has been an uphill battle for Athena for years, and the addition of Epocrates to the platform is a step in the right direction,” said Greg Bolan, an analyst with Sterne Agee & Leach Inc, in an e-mail interview with Bloomberg.

The acquisition will help the company gain an iPhone app and expand into the lucrative electronic medical records (EMR) market.

“I have been an admirer of Epocrates since it first emerged and have watched the company grow consistently, one app download at a time, as it has cemented itself into the consciousness of America’s physicians,” said Jonathan Bush, the president and CEO of AthenaHealth in a statement. “Together, we’re excited by the opportunity to redefine the mobile toolset for care givers,” he added.

Atlanta-based WebMD, the largest source of medical information on the Web according to Comscore, will cut 250 jobs in the coming month as part of an ongoing effort to save $45 million per year.

The company will lay off 14 percent of its total workforce across all offices, a direct result of a disappointing third-quarter. As the Atlanta Business Journal originally reported, about half the employees at the company’s headquarters may be affected. It is unclear which departments will experience the worst layoffs, but early reports suggest it will be sales, video production, information technology, and editorial. The cuts come at a short-term cost increase: They’ll cost the company approximately $8 million in its first fiscal quarter of 2013.

In an official statement to the press, the company revealed that it will also put into effect other “cost-saving actions” during the first months of 2013. We have reached out to a spokesperson from WebMD for comment.

The company is seeing a decline in advertising from large pharmaceuticals, its bread and butter. In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has tightened regulations on how big pharma can advertise. In addition, WebMD is facing competition for these ad dollars from a host of startups that offer consumer-friendly health information. Competitors include HealthTap, which provides patients with an online link to thousands of physicians, and Everyday Health, which provides medical news and information.

In November, the company announced that revenue had declined from $135 million during the year-ago period to $117 million. Despite the fact that traffic continues to grow (reaching an average of 107.2 million unique users per month and 2.56 billion page views in Q3), advertising and sponsorship income took a downward turn. CEO Cavan M. Redmond admitted that the company would need to adapt in an increasingly “challenging and changing” marketplace.

“Becoming leaner and more nimble will enable the company to extend our leadership in this highly dynamic and increasingly demanding marketplace,” said Redmond, in a statement. “In addition, anticipated changes in U.S. healthcare will provide meaningful new opportunities to link the needs of patients, consumers, and healthcare professionals to enable them to navigate their care. We are moving swiftly to implement these operational changes and new market initiatives.”

All eyes are on healthcare technology startups, but the space is still treated with caution by angel investors and the venture capital community alike.

Most investors don’t have the specialized knowledge to understand the pain-points that doctors and healthcare providers face, and many will not see return on investment in three to five years, the period they are typically willing to wait. It takes a special kind of investor to fund a health tech company.

New York-based online trading platform SecondMarket may have a solution to the problem, as part of its broader plan to stimulate investors’ interest in verticals like healthcare and education. SecondMarket’s members are used to buying up shares in consumer-focused companies like Twitter and Foursquare.

“Our members might be interested [in a space] from a macro-perspective, but they don’t feel comfortable enough to deploy capital,” said Jeremy Smith, SecondMarket’s CSO in a phone interview.

The company has teamed up with digital health accelerator Startup Health for the month of December to offer its members’ access to white papers and webinars produced by independent parties, and curated by Startup Health.

Since its inception in 2011, Startup Health has enrolled 23 startups in its intensive three-year program. The program favors companies that have already raised a small seed round, and offers them mentorship and a professional network to maximize their chances of success.

“You can’t expect our members to put in capital and hope for the best,” said Smith.”We’ve created a program to help them get educated.”

SecondMarket’s investors are encouraged to pour thousands of dollars into promising health tech startups, as well as Startup Health’s new fund. According to a document available to SecondMarket’s network of accredited investors, Startup Health is building up a $7.5 million Innovation Fund to support up to 100 digital health and wellness startups. The new fund will take a 2 to 10 percent equity stake in each startup.

The hope is that this will provide health tech entrepreneurs with sufficient capital to test the market opportunity, and in a position to raise venture funding later down the line.

Healthcare image // lenetstan, Shutterstock 

QuantiaMD, the website and mobile app for doctors to brainstorm and collaborate on tricky cases, has raised $12 million in venture capital funding.

The Waltham, MA. based health IT startup will use its funding to engage more physicians, and add them to the growing network. Over 160,000 physicians are currently registered — representing about 25 percent of doctors in the U.S.  The technology is secure and encrypted — so it’s safe for doctors to discuss sensitive patient information and offer practical tips.

To remain at the top of their field, doctors need to stay up-to-date on the latest research.. In they past, they communicated through fax and email. It wasn’t an easy task for the founding team to change this behavior, but the persistence is paying off.

“We are replacing antiquated methods, and therefore it takes time to encourage adoption,” said Eric Schultz, the company’s CEO, when asked about the greatest hurdle to growth.

The company is showing signs of traction with its target market: Physicians that regularly use the system spend an average of 45 minutes per week sharing their insights, and asking for clinical advice from the pool of over 500 experts from major medical institutions.

Once they sign-up, they can set up a profile page, review research, access relevant discussion forums, and privately reach out to other physicians. Doctors are keen adopters of tablet devices and smartphones — about third of them exclusively use the mobile app.

QuantiaMD makes it easier for hospitals, pharma’s and health insurance providers as a means to reach doctors — which is key to the company’s business plan. “Most health plans and hospitals still rely heavily on homegrown portals, fax and mail to communicate with physicians,” said Schultz. With the funding, the company will also invest in sales and marketing efforts to reach the top pharmaceutical companies. To succeed, it will need to beat out competitors like Doximity, the “Facebook for doctors” and Sermo, an online community for physicians.

The funding round was led by existing investor, Fuse Capital.

Top image via Shutterstock

L.A.’s thriving tech community is not letting up on its ongoing effort to make the rest of the country more fit and healthy.

Launching today, FitKit prompts you to take a free lifestyle assessment quiz and then doles out personalized guidance from nutritionists. The quiz was designed by nutrition experts Dr. Robin Bernhoft and Dr. Nick Bitz. It asks questions about how much alcohol you consume per week, stress levels, eating habits, and more.

“America is a land of malnutrition,” said Dr. Bernhoft, who recently joined the founding team. “Practically everyone has vitamin and mineral deficiencies which make them feel less energetic, get sick easier, have less endurance.”

On the backend, cofounder Josh Haynam explained that an algorithm works to “analyze and connect user’s lifestyle patterns with nutritional deficiencies” and pairs them with appropriate nutritional supplements. It’s ideal for people who can’t afford a one-on-one session with a nutritionist but are overwhelmed by the range of products on the market that claim to improve joint pain or boost immunity.

The cofounders, Haynam, Matthew Clark, Rohit Seth, and Ethan Paulson (pictured with Dr. Bernoft), hope to use technology to make nutrition more accessible. ”Health and fitness has been jaded by outrageous claims and false advertisements,” Haynam told me.

Haynam is a 20-year-old economics student at UCLA. He founded the company in three months after a football accident in which he broke two bones in his foot. During his recovery, he was prescribed a variety of supplements by several nutritionists, setting him back thousands of dollars in medical bills. But he couldn’t find transparent advice online. It was then that he hit on the idea for FitKit.

FitKit is easy to get confused with FitBit, one of many new companies vying for dominance in the personalized health space. FitBit makes money by using data about your health to tailor a fitness plan, which will likely be the monetization strategy for this company if it succeeds in growing its user-base. The companies recently partnered so you can integrate your FitKit data into FitBit’s quiz to improve its accuracy.

You’re emailed recommendations, but as of today, you can also purchase nutritional supplements directly from the site.

It’s early, but it is already evidence of traction — FitKit offered its beta to friends and family, but told me they have been garnering hundreds of signups per day and are spreading by word of mouth. It’s a recent graduate of StartEngine, a local tech accelerator. Through that program, it raised its first $20,000 in seed funding, and has grown to a team of seven people.

Haynam considers sites that specialize in selling nutritional supplements like VitaCost as the major competitors. However, in the long-term, FitKit may rival later-stage startups like WellnessFX that offer online health consultations and have pioneered a data-driven approach to health.

LumoBack, a mobile solution for perfect posture, has come a long way since winning a DemoGOD award in 2011. The Palo Alto-based team is working with a slew of physicians and physical therapists to scale a technology that can help millions of Americans benefit from better posture.

“Awareness and active correction of posture is critical for successful prevention and treatment of low back pain,” said Taylor Miller, a physical therapist based in Los Altos, CA. There are many causes of back pain (carrying heavy bags, walking in uncomfortable shoes, etc.) but according to Miller, posture is the critical component.

Monisha Perkash, the company’s chief executive officer, said that in some cases, users will notice an improvement in less than a week. ”The hard part is remembering to sit up straight. We give you real-time feedback so you’ll develop a better, more natural way to hold yourself,” she said.

The three founders, who met at Stanford, have already raised $75,000 on Kickstarter’s crowd-funding platform to bring to market a wireless sensor that detects whether you’re sitting or standing correctly.

LumoBack’s wearable sensor patch is worn on your waist or lower back and connects wirelessly to an iPhone 4S or iPad 3. It provides a vibration when you slouch. The app can process trend data to determine whether your posture is steadily improving over time.

The idea for LumoBack came from co-founder Andrew Chang, an engineer and lifelong back-pain sufferer whose health significantly improved when he enrolled in posture classes. Perkash, whose husband is a spine and sports physician at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, immediately saw the merits of a technology that would bring the benefits of these classes to a broader market.

The market opportunity for posture is significant: 80 percent of us will suffer from back pain at some point in our lives. As VentureBeat reported last year, back pain is a leading cause of missed work days and disability claims, amounting to an estimated loss of $50 billion per year.

In April, the startup raised $1.1 million in first-round funding from a handful of investors, including Innovation Endeavors and Morado Venture Partners.