Just when you think that we’ve innovated all that we can, something new comes along and completely blows our mind. It could be an advancement in hardware, software or just a new way of thinking of things. Humans are pretty resilient when it comes to thinking up new things to tinker with and making our lives easier. This year was pretty awesome when it comes to innovation, and not the… → Read More
Healthcare has long been a technology paradox. There have been few places further out on the cutting edge of technology than biotech and medical devices. In contrast, healthIT has been in a time warp (see Why It’s Good News HealthIT is So Bad). Nearly 20 years after the advent of the web, the dominant healthIT vendors have thrived on a business model and technology architecture that harkens back… → Read More
Editor’s note: Michelle Snyder is executive in residence at InterWest Partners focusing on the transformative role that mobile, social, and data can play in the healthcare industry. You can follow her on Twitter.
It’s hard not to read an article about the healthcare system these days without some reference to the demise of the patient-physician relationship and the risk this poses to us as… → Read More
Doctors social network Doximity has raised another $17 million at a ballpark $80 million valuation led by Morgenthaler Ventures. The company’s series B financing also included participation from returning investors, Emergence Capital Partners and InterWest Partners.
The announcement today follows the company’s $10.8 million series A raise in March of last year and brings the company’s total… → Read More
Entrepreneurs are inherently risk-takers. But, the tech industry today needs more of the type of risk-takers who go against the grain by actually tackling big, difficult problems. I mean the type of trenchant problems no one likes to talk about and take years to solve.
Like this: Today, we live in a world where more than one billion people are unable to afford (or do not have access to)… → Read More
Procured Health, a startup that aims to help hospitals better discover, evaluate and adopt quality medical devices, is today announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from a flock of angels and VCs. Investors in the startup’s first round included Zimmerman Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, NaviMed Capital’s Bijan Salehizadeh, CEO of Bloom Health Abir Sen… → Read More
When I’m not writing for TechCrunch, my “day job” is working with healthcare providers the disruptive innovators who are reinventing healthcare and slaying the healthcare cost beast as a byproduct. In some cases, these are entrepreneurs. In most other cases, they are pioneers within existing healthcare providers fighting to make changes within otherwise slow-moving organizations. → Read More
It was only a matter of time before healthcare providers would start prescribing mHealth apps as soon as they proved to be as or more effective than prescription drugs. Happtique, a mobile health application store and app management solution startup will launch a trial of mRx. They claim this is the first program to enable doctors to prescribe mHealth apps to patients. mHealth pioneers are calling… → Read More
Today, I participated in a meeting at the White House described as an “expert roundtable on patient access to health data” hosted by Todd Park (Chief Technology Officer of the United States), Farzad Mostashari (the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology), Leon Rodriguez (Office of Civil Rights) and Peter Levin (CTO Veterans Administration).
Being at the White House within a… → Read More
A big win for healthcare expense-tracking platform Simplee, fresh off its $6 million Series A from earlier this month: the company is now announcing a partnership with top HSA provider in the U.S. ACS (a Xerox company). This is the first major HSA partner for Simpleee, which now introduces its service to ACS|BNY Mellon’s The HSA Solution’s 800,000 members.
While perhaps not as exciting as a… → Read More
Founded in 2009 by Scott Sangster and incubated in healthtech accelerator Rock Health’s inaugural batch, HealthInReach has been on a mission to combat the high cost of healthcare and put consumers back in control of their healthcare by creating a transparent online marketplace for comparing the quality and price of health providers and procedures. The startup has built a consumer-focused (or… → Read More
It’s always refreshing when a startup tackles a real-world problem instead of building another photo-sharing/local reviews/social calendar service. Case in point: TenderTree, a company that’s trying to improve the way people find reliable care for their aging family members, and then pay them for their work.
A recent participant in the latest 500 Startups batch with less than a million in… → Read More
This is the second part in a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare.
Healthcare IT departments have focused much of their attention on the $19 billion portion of the stimulus bill that is providing billions of subsidies for the adoption of electronic health records. While this is logical given the available money, it is paying for health IT systems optimized for the “do more, bill… → Read More
This first part of a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare focuses on the expansion of the venture business beyond traditional venture and large strategic investors. In the second part, I will outline the backdrop for the investment thesis that strategic healthcare investors are using to guide their capital allocation.
Healthcare providers are finding their “play it safe”… → Read More
Currently, the federal government is poised to level the playing field for healthtech startups. An unprecedented wave of innovative healthtech startups has been developing over the last few years. You can see them at conferences such as Health 2.0, TechCrunch Disrupt, TEDMED and demo day events that Blueprint Health, Healthbox, Rock Health and StartUp Health host. Nonetheless, the health sector… → Read More
It will be virtually impossible to succeed in the new reimbursement model without recognizing what has long been said, but little done about it — “the most important member of the care team is the patient.”
Having implemented or reviewed over 100 health IT systems, there is one common purpose at the core of the architecture of these systems — how to get as big a bill out as quickly as… → Read More
A group of women is re-entering the workforce today and reshaping how products are made across key tech sectors like health & wellness, commerce and social products. Not only do they have the experience of raising families, but they’ve been business and technology leaders earlier in life. They’re becoming founders and leaders at startups and in the very companies they’ve been buying products… → Read More
Whither health insurance? A former medical advisor to the Obama Administration who happens to be the brother of former Presidential Chief of Staff predicted in the New York Times that by 2020 health insurance companies will be extinct. Nearly two years ago, I penned a piece entitled Health Insurance’s Bunker Buster. It outlined two key reasons that health insurance — as we have known it the last… → Read More
Education and healthcare are typically held up as the industries least affected by the technology revolution, however this has begun to change. From Bill Gates to millions of students and parents, the Khan Academy has impressed many of us and inspired teachers to flip the classroom lecture/homework model on its head as described in the video below. Similarly, doctors are now recognizing similar… → Read More
The significant adoption of smartphones among physicians has not only led to an explosion of medical apps aimed at healthcare providers, but it has also cultivated an emerging trend of health and wellness apps aimed at empowering patients.
While great innovation is happening in the health and wellness mobile ecosystem, it’s difficult for patients and physicians to navigate through the large… → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave. Pharmaceutical companies are in trouble… → Read More
“A good scalpel makes a better surgeon. Good communication makes a better doctor.” The future of medicine in the U.S. is clear. The days of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement are numbered as it has produced one of the most inefficient healthcare systems in the world. While there are many unknowns regarding the future model, one thing is crystal clear — highly effective… → Read More
As healthcare goes through massive changes, health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn’t do) when faced with a similar situation. In the late 90′s, the following dynamics were present:
Owning printing presses was a de facto barrier to entry allowing newspapers unfettered dominance.
Newspaper companies bought up… → Read More
I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in healthcare. It’s telling that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done — apply information technology to streamline processes. “Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said. “Traditional… → Read More
In the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, at the turn of the 20th century, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed nearly half the workforce. Starting in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. Long story short, food now accounts for 8% of household budgets and 2% of the workforce. As a wide array of small… → Read More
NYC-based Blueprint Health, a health-focused member of the TechStars Network, is announcing its inaugural class of startups today. The Winter program, which begins on January 9th, will be taking place in a 12,000 square foot loft in SoHo that will be shared with the NYC-based members of Health 2.0 starting later this month. Part of the loft may also be turned into a co-working space for other… → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter@chasedave.
I can’t think of a product or service that both… → Read More
Fifteen years ago the Internet was revolutionizing global communications and computing so companies were looking for the most advanced markets to test their technologies. Locales such as Korea and Singapore portended the future. Today, no less than reinvention of healthcare is taking place. A key question is which locales will provide a similar testbed for healthtech. It’s not always the obvious… → Read More
In several of my past pieces, I have written about the importance of a disruptive model of care and payment called Direct Primary Care (DPC) such as The Most Important Organization In Silicon Valley That No One Has Heard About. As the DPC models scale, they become a great option for individuals and small business. However, larger organizations have another option at their disposal that I’m as… → Read More
While Microsoft has been the most successful platform company in history, it periodically has flirted with vertical market-specific businesses with only mixed success. In virtually all cases, it ends up exiting the vertical business. At times, this has been with great financial success, like Expedia, for example. In other cases, not so much. The latest exit is in healthcare. Microsoft is folding… → Read More
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