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Matthew Holt

The Must-See Digital Health Startups of 2014

Sep 16, 2014• 9

HEALTH 2.0

Ten new digital health companies will demo their products for the first time in the Launch! session during the Health 2.0 8th Annual Fall Conference being held in Santa Clara, CA on September 21-24. Launch! is a contest held at 12:00 p.m PDT on Wednesday, September 24th, where the technology is demoed in three and a half minutes. At the end, the audience votes for their favorites. Previous Launch! winners have included Castlight Health, Basis, and OM*Signal. This year’s finalists:

Symptify helps the user navigate a series of questions to narrow down the cause of their symptoms while also helping them find a nearby medical facility.

Open Source Health MyAVA, uses Open Source health IT for a collaborative patient – physician educational and informational sharing platform for women. Advocating everything from female health, fertility, to healthy aging.

Intake.Me is a communication and patient engagement product that allows patients to check-in for their doctor’s visit from anywhere and attach medical records stored in their own virtual private health cloud.

Livongo Health introduces the brand new InTouch, which is a diabetes monitor, advisory and coaching service, community, and communications tool—all rolled into one. The concept is so exciting that it’s got Glen Tullman out of his post Allscripts “retirement” and back into the startup game.

DaVinci.io builds apps with a mission – introducing a PHR that consolidates existing health records onto the user’s mobile device.Continue reading…

Interview with Adam Pellegrini Walgreens, VP of Digital Health

Sep 16, 2014

In less than one week, the Health 2.0 8th Annual Fall Conference will feature over 200 LIVE demos, 150 speakers, on over 60 panels and sessions focused on innovative solutions within health care technology. Indu Subaiya, CEO & Co-Founder of Health 2.0 interviewed Adam Pellegrini, VP of Digital Health of Walgreens ahead of his appearance at the 8th Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference. Adam will be participating in the Monday main stage panel “Consumer Tech and Wearables: Powering Healthy Lifestyles.” In this interview, Adam gives insight into Walgreens innovative API creating the seamless user experience.

Indu Subaiya: So you are leading up a number of very exciting initiatives at Walgreens in terms of digital health. Let’s begin by talking a bit about the API program and the developer ecosystem that you’ve built.

Adam Pellegrini: Absolutely. So Walgreens has been offering a very robust API program for quite some time – this idea that our stores in the online space should be really an omni-channel user experience. If you think about our stores, our stores actually have a lot of partners that actually have products in the stores.

So really, our API program is really about partners. It’s about bringing and facilitating the digital ecosystem together via API. So for us in the Health API space, it’s about how do we help all of these different apps leverage the ingredient technologies that Walgreens has created to create a seamless friction as user experience.

IS: You mentioned that the Health API has drawn a lot of members within the Health 2.0 community. Can you tell us a little bit about some partners there and how this is then connected to your Balance Rewards program?

AP: GenieMD is actually one of our partner apps that leverage our Refill by Scan, our personal health app that goes on both Androids and iPhones. And some of that could be really convenient and add a value to their app by embedding the API that we have for refilling prescriptions, the Refill by Scan.

mHealth – Beyond “There’s an app for that”

Sep 14, 2014• 3

By NIRAV DESAI

“There’s an app for that” popularizes the fact that over 1 million apps for smartphones and tablets have been developed to address anything, from small to complex, that people may want to do. In the world of mobile health, or mHealth, we’re prone to agree.

According to IMS Health, there are over 23,000 healthcare-related apps covering numerous clinical areas (from primary care to surgery), care sites (from home to acute care), users (from patients, to caregivers, to clinicians) and parts of the patient journey (from wellness to complex chronic disease). And, a recent study we conducted found that 70 percent of people use mobile apps on a daily basis to track calorie intake and monitor physical activities.

But the view of the mHealth world as just a proliferation of apps, while exciting and important, is flawed in several ways:

It ignores the fact that while apps may be primary user touch points in a mobile-connected world, they are not the only ones.
It leaves people with the idea that all you have to do to solve a problem is build an app. Often, the solution is much broader.

Healthcare is evolving beyond “there’s an app for that.” Here’s what’s happening…

Countdown to Health 2.0 2014: Exclusive Interview with ONC Chief Medical Officer Jacob Reider

Sep 13, 2014

Matthew Holt interviewed Jacob Reider, Deputy National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and Chief Medical Officer at the ONC, ahead of his appearance at the 8th Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference. Jacob will be participating in several panels at Health 2.0, beginning with the Monday main stage panel “Smarter Care Delivery: Amplifying the Patient Voice”.

In this interview, Jacob gives an overview of the HITECH program, the question of interoperability, and the broad adoption of technology in health care as an industry.

Matthew Holt: So, let’s touch base on a couple of things. You’ve been in ONC some time now. Let’s talk about how the general HITECH program has gone and is going. If you were to get to rate it, the spread of EMRs and the usefulness of them, their usability, how would you say we’re doing so far?

Jacob Reider: I think we’re doing very well. Some of your readers know I went to college at a place that had no grades. So I’ll give you the narrative score.

The narrative score is that the program has been very successful achieving the goals that were defined at the outset. So the first iteration of the program, stage one, was all about getting organizations to adopt Health Information Technology, and I think all of the metrics that we’ve seen have validated that the program has been quite successful in accelerating the adoption of Health Information Technology, in both hospitals and practices. That doesn’t mean that we’re finished, but the vast majority of these organizations have now adopted Health Information Technology. Are there additional goals that we’d like to be able to meet? Absolutely, we’d like to see interoperability working better. As you mentioned, we would like the products to be more usable, and therefore, safer.

We’d like to see patients even more engaged than they currently are, so they have more access to the information in their records. We’d like to solve a problem that we’re starting to see in the industry, which I started to call hyperportalosis, which is that in any given community, there may be many portals that patients are expected to log in to. So we’re trying to think about how those problems can be solved in the next iteration of the HITECH program.

What Would You Give Up For a Virtual Doctor Visit?

Sep 13, 2014• 1

By Girish Navani

With the fast adoption of smart phones, tablets and wearable devices, the way people communicate, travel, eat and entertain have all been simplified. Why not streamline the way we experience healthcare as well? A study released in May 2014 from MDLive discovered that 82% of young adults 18-34 would prefer consulting with their doctor via a mobile device than show up for an appointment. Twenty seven percent of patients confirmed they’d be willing to give up shopping for a month, skip their next vacation, even refrain from showers for a week—if it meant they would be able to access their doctor via a smart phone! These results, along with the multiple surveys and studies conducted in the past year, confirm that a new way to conduct healthcare services is in high demand.

The solution to changing up the healthcare system sits at the center of three key advancements: patient engagement, population health and electronic health records (EHRs). At eClinicalWorks, we consider these components of healthcare to be like a three-legged stool where two cannot stand without the other. We recognized this need as an opportunity within the healthcare IT space and created healow in order to provide our customers and their patients with a platform to schedule doctors’ appointments and get immediate access to medical records via an online interface or mobile app. healow empowers doctors and patients by packaging personal health records (PHRs), healthcare tools and appointment scheduling together, making the data readily accessible to patients and their doctors from the palm of their hand.

PRICE INCREASE TODAY 9/2: Health 2.0 8th Annual Fall Conference

Sep 2, 2014• 1

Hope you had a fantastic Labor Day weekend! Now that you’re back, don’t forget the 8th Annual Fall Conference PRICE INCREASE is TODAY, Sept. 2! Join over 2,200 attendees as we showcase over 200 LIVE demos, innovative solutions and thought leadership on over 50 panels, with 150+ speakers over the course of four days on Sept. 21-24 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Highlights of speakers and sessions include:

Keynotes from Dr. Eric Topol (Scripps Health),Patrick Soon-Shiong (NantHealth), Indu Subaiya(Health 2.0), Matthew Holt (Health 2.0), Bernard J. Tyson (Kaiser Permanente)
Health Care Data Analytics will show how genomics, non-invasive diagnosis tools, and integrated data collections are uncovering new discoveries, promoting personalized medicine, and new care protocols.
Consumer Tech and Wearables: Powering Healthy Lifestyles showcasing the NEW Health 2.0 Wearable Tech Runway with new solutions from companies such as Adidas, OM Signal,Walgreens, Withings, WebMD, Samsung
Electronics, Qualcomm Life, and many more!
New Landscapes for Digital Diagnosis showcases tools for providers and consumers, while demonstrating new ways in which both communities are reaching the proper diagnosis.

New conference features:

Traction: Brings together series A ready companies center stage as they vie to get the nod as the most fundable startup from venture capitalists and corporate investors. Notable judges and mentors include:
- Jack Young, Qualcomm Life Ventures
- Esther Dyson, EDventure Holdings
- Andrew Colbert, Ziegler Corporate Finance
Pharma & Hospital Roundtables: During these invite-only sessions, participants will discuss how their institutions create and utilize cutting-edge technologies to tackle complex health care issues ranging from care coordination to data exchange and how digital health is changing the pharmaceutical landscape from the earliest phases of research to clinical trials to the way consumers interact with their products in the real world. Email Kim Krueger (ki**@********on.com) for more info.
Bootstrapped Bootcamp: Have less than $2M in total funding? This year’s exhibition hall includes premier space for companies with less than $2 Million in funding to get traction and visibility in front an audience of over 2,200 health care professionals, thought-leaders, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs. Reserve your space to demo your technology LIVE in our exhibit hall and enjoy a pass to the conference.

including many more new panels, sessions, and speakers found on the agenda online!

Limited S tart –up rate applications are available – submit yours today. Really tight on budget or a student? Apply to volunteer.

XPRIZE Names 10 Finalists in Tricorder Competition

Aug 29, 2014• 1

By Kim Krueger

XPRIZE announced the 10 finalist teams competing for the $10M Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a 3.5-year global competition sponsored by the Qualcomm Foundation for teams to develop a consumer-focused, mobile device capable of diagnosing and interpreting a set of 15 medical conditions and capturing five vital health metrics. Launched in January 2012, the competition encourages the development of a device much like the medical Tricorder of Star Trek fame.

The Tricorder prize is something we’ve supported since its launch, and last year at the 7th Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference, we got to host part of another XPRIZE competition: the Nokia Sensing CHALLENGE, a $2.25 million global competition to accelerate the development of sensors and sensing technology that is smaller, lighter, and capable of capturing true clinical data on a personal level. The teams on display were examples of how Health 2.0 technologies are pushing the boundaries of access, diagnosis, and discovery.

The recently announced finalists for the Tricorder prize promise to be equally impressive as they work to move the science fiction of the Star Trek Tricorder to science reality. The ten teams represent diverse backgrounds from non-profits to academia to start-ups, and include:

Aezon (Rockville, Md.), led by Tatiana Rypinski, a team of student engineers from Johns Hopkins University partnering with the Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design.
CloudDX (Mississauga, Canada), a team from medical devices manufacturer Biosign and led by company chief medical officer, Dr. Sonny Kohli.
Danvantri (Chennai, India), a team from technology manufacturer American Megatrends India and led by company Director and CEO, Sridharan Mani.
DMI (Cambridge, Mass.), a team led by Dr. Eugene Y. Chan of the DNA Medicine Institute partnering with NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Dynamical Biomarkers Group (Zhongli City, Taiwan), a team of physicians, scientists and engineers led by Harvard Medical School professor Chung-Kang Peng.
Final Frontier Medical Devices (Paoli, Pa.), a team led by the founders of Basil Leaf Technologies—brothers Dr. Basil Harris, an emergency room physician, and George Harris, a network engineer.
MESI Simplifying diagnostics (Ljubljana, Slovenia), a team from diagnostic medical device manufacturer MESI and led by company CEO, Jakob Susteric.
SCANADU (Moffett Field, Calif.), a team from Silicon Valley-based start-up SCANADU led by technology entrepreneur and company co-founder and CEO, Walter De Brouwer.
SCANurse (London, England), a team from diagnostic medical manufacturer SCANurse and led by biomedical engineer and company founder, Anil Vaidya.
zensor (Belfast, Ireland), a team from clinical sensor and electrode company Intelesens and led by chief technology officer, Prof. Jim McLaughlin.

Matthew Holt had a chance to speak with Grant Campany, the Senior Director of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE and Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE, about the finalists and the competition. We’re excited to follow these teams on their quest and see how their technologies change our world. To hear more, take a look at the interview below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAr3PKFbK7w]

Kim Krueger is a Research Analyst at Health 2.0.

Startups Seeking Series A? Apply to Pitch at Traction at Health 2.0!

Aug 28, 2014

Calling all digital health startups! If you are actively seeking Series A funding, then apply to Traction: Health 2.0’s Startup Championship. The deadline for applications is Aug 29th, so don’t miss out on this great opportunity.

Traction has plenty to offer for anyone who is interested in learning more about the digital health industry and to see some of the hottest startups of 2014. Between the startups pitches we’ll feature two panel discussions by industry leaders who explain current trends in digital health investment.

The Corporate Investor Perspective:

Joe Volpe of Merck, Noah Lewis of GE Ventures, and Jack Young of Qualcomm will share their perspectives on what criteria are most important for digital health investors. Get the scoop on the must-haves for young startups seeking funding.

Help Bring Health 2.0’s Panel to SXSW!

Aug 18, 2014

Its that time of year again! Time to choose your favorite panels for South by Southwest (SXSW) and we need your help again to get us into the select few!

In case you’re wondering what a panel at SXSW means, let us fill you in. Panels are a chance for companies to share ideas and each year companies duke it out for as many “thumbs up” as they can get for their chance to foster collaboration and innovation of the greatest minds in techs.

Health 2.0 is no stranger to the SXSW stage. In 2012, we hosted one of the most well attended health sessions at SXSW Interactive titled, “Sensor Technologies: The Future of Health” and we know that this year’s panel, “Turning a Pilot into a Success” is sure to be an even bigger hit!

That’s where you come in! We need you to cast your votes for our panel this year. While you’re at it, tell your friends, family and followers to vote for Health 2.0’s panel. With your help, we’ll deliver another great panel in 2015!

So please give your “thumbs up” for Health 2.0 today (you’ll have to log in to vote) and help us spread the word!

Giving Startups their Big Start: How Developer Challenges Make the Difference

Aug 15, 2014

By The Health 2.0 Challenge

The best way to get your startup noticed is to have your product validated by experts in the industry. As a young startup connecting with that community of experts can be quite difficult. Participating in a developer challenge can not only lead to funding and credibility but provides a valuable testing ground for products.

What is a developer challenge? These virtual competitions build on the concept of their in-person cousin the code-a-thon/hack-a-thon, prompting teams to develop technologies to address some of healthcare’s most complex issues. Over 3 – 6 months teams work on design concepts and prototypes for a variety of challenges sponsored by all types of organizations from charitable foundations to for-profit companies. Final submissions are judged by a panel of industry experts and winners are awarded cash prizes.

Health 2.0 has run over 75 challenges in the past 4 years and awarded over $6M in funding to burgeoning digital health companies. But its not only money that draws teams to these competitions, participants gain validation of their product, publicity and market access.Reflecting on the past few years, we want to share the successes of these challenges.

Ready? Here we go!