With Funding From Floodgate And More, WellnessFX Launches A Next-Gen WebMD

Launching this week at Health 2.0 is a startup called, WellnessFX, which offers a simple value proposition: It wants to help average people take charge of their health. As the medical industry expands daily and more and more health and wellness data is driven online, it’s become increasingly difficult for people to collect, organize, manage, and interpret their own medical data — to both make decisions regarding their health and see actual results.

WellnessFX was founded in April 2010 and raised $1.85 million in seed funding from Voyager Capital and FLOODGATE (as well as a handful of other angels) the following November. Since then, the startup has been in stealth, flying under the radar, iterating, testing, and becoming HIPAA compliant.

The startup has a service that allows consumers and wellness experts to measure, understand, and improve their health by combining the latest advances in medical science with social media tools, and a smooth consumer UX.

Essentially, the team has created another Mint.com of health, putting it in the same space as Cake Health and Simplee, which are attacking the same goal. Though each differs slightly in its approach (and WellnessFX takes a more holistic approach), it’s a testament to the growing demand for online healthcare management — and what a pain in the ass current services have become.

How? First off, WellnessFX, like so many other healthcare startups, wants to offer consumers a preventative tool rather than something that only treats illnesses and ailments once they arise. With the growing affordability of diagnostic mechanisms (a nod to WebMD?), the platform gives users access to a community of expert practitioners that are there to help consumers navigate wellness options that are right for them — and make diagnoses. That expert advice can then be augmented by online consultations that let users talk to and email practitioners from home and set up appointments at convenient times (both in the evening and on weekends).

WellnessFX also aims to give its users access to current diagnostics, nutritional research, genetic data, and integrated therapies, as well as charts and graphs that make it easy to track complex lab results, genetic info, and your own health status.

Obviously, the goal here is to become an integrated web solution that gives consumers an easy way to manage the wealth of health information available online, as well as an easy way to track and measure their own personal health data. By aggregating the “biomarkers of the primary detractors of wellness”, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc., and combining those with feeds from self-tracking health and fitness devices, the team said, WellnessFX seems to be playing with the idea of becoming generation WebMD.

And speaking of WebMD, the startup also happens to be founded by Jim Kean, who founded Sapient Health back in 1995, which would later become the foundation of WebMD’s consumer facing business. The team has plenty of experience in the healthcare industry, and as the prediction that nearly all of us will be managing our health online in the next few years only becomes more true by the day — WellnessFX is certainly onto an important trend. But with some other nifty, lean startups navigating the same space, they certainly have their work cut out for them.

For more on WellnessFX, visit them at home here.