February 28th, 2013

With $41M Now In The Bank, Health Catalyst Wants To Help Solve Healthcare’s Big Data Problem

Screen shot 2013-02-28 at 2.55.27 AM

With big data playing an increasingly critical role in healthcare and with the pervasiveness of archaic infrastructure and lack of data portability in health systems and hospitals, data warehousing startup Health Catalyst sees a big opportunity to help fix this problem. And, at least for now, investors appear eager to buy in. In January, the startup raised a whopping $33 million in series B… → Read More

November 4th, 2012

Healthcare Finally Moving Past Wang-Like Legacy Systems

Rock Health Report on Digital Funding Q3

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

August 3rd, 2012

Procured Health Nabs $1.1M From Bessemer, Athena Health Founder To Help Reduce Health Costs

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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

June 24th, 2012

Supreme Court Decision On Obamacare Has Little Relevance To Healthcare Disrupters

Supreme Court

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

June 4th, 2012

Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall(ed Garden)

Reagan Berlin Wall

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

May 6th, 2012

Strategic Healthcare Investors’ Investment Thesis

IBM - Healthcare costs

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

December 9th, 2010

Hospi: Meet Panasonic's Awesome Healthcare Robot (Video)

Not too many people know that Panasonic is a quite prolific maker of robots, but big P has actually been quite active in this area in recent years. Case in point: Hospi, a cute hospital robot and one of the winner’s of this year’s Robot Awards (as selected by the Japanese government). It was first publicly shown in 2004. → Read More