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Funding chases clinicians, not consumers
 During the winter, rabbits and squirrels are scarce so birds of prey need to focus on larger prey to survive. They hunt goats, antelopes and caribou. Fewer investments, bigger pay-offs.
Yes, it’s July, but thanks to the current economy it’s still winter for investors. While it may be sunnier in the emerging wireless health industry than elsewhere, recent events have helped your Taxonomist-In-Chief here at Mobihealthnews distinguish the squirrels from the goats.
Last week Qualcomm confirmed that it was “reviewing its options with LifeComm,” a start-up that aimed to equip consumers with mobile phones that had preloaded health services and applications onboard. Qualcomm has incubated LifeComm since 2005 and said that “current capital market conditions… have prevented LifeComm from raising the third-party capital necessary to fully develop its initial launch product.” LifeComm had the misfortune of being a squirrel during goat season.
Prominent bird of prey and venture capitalist Michael Goldberg of Mohr Davidow Ventures recently explained his firm’s investment strategy for wireless health companies, which also breaks down the difference between squirrels and goats: “We have certain investments that are more consumer-centric in various other areas, but, [for wireless health] we tend to focus on clinically-centered ones. If you provide information that enables a guide to clinical decision,” Goldberg explained, “that’s a more well-practiced process of driving adoption in a physician audience than trying to stimulate consumer demand, which is a different business model.” Goldberg is intent on hunting the bigger prey — those start-ups that have a clinical focus.
Goldberg’s firm has invested in Corventis, whose wireless remote monitoring service enables clinicians to better determine a patient’s cardiovascular health. Companies like Corventis are, in some ways, following trail blazers like CardioNet, which has its own cardiac monitoring service already on the market. CardioNet has also secured reimbursement from CMS for its service. It’s no squirrel.
As we have noted before, Qualcomm’s focus in the U.S. wireless health market is on the clinical side: For example, it helped incubate CardioNet, which had its IPO last year. Qualcomm has also invested in Triage Wireless, a wireless platform that continuously monitors vital signs to keep clinicians connected to their patients whether in transport, in the emergency room or in general inpatient units. Qualcomm also has close ties to clinically-focused start-ups Proteus Biomedical, Isis and MicroCHIPS among others.
In 2009 venture capital firms invested in clinically-focused wireless start-ups like neonatal start-up Monica Healthcare, cardiac monitoring start-up eCardio and sleep monitoring start-up BiancaMed. It’s a goat’s world.
Of course, the squirrels, consumer-facing wireless health services, will have their day: ABI Research just predicted that 15 million wireless health devices will be in the market in just three years.
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White House: Excited about wireless health
Last month, Dr. Dan Fletcher, who is an adviser in the White House Office of Science and Technology shared the Obama administration’s views on the emerging wireless health opportunity. Fletcher’s remarks included challenges for the industry as well as ways it can best engage the federal government. Fletcher’s presentation was part of a summit in Washington D.C. organized by CTIA, the wireless industry association.
The White House is excited — remember BlackBerry One?
“The administration is excited about these technologies because they address two of the key objectives of the administration: That is, living up to the commitment of healthcare for all Americans and using and applying technology solutions to address major problems. In my office we have a lot of support for these types of technologies,” Fletcher said.
“Of course, we shouldn’t forget, that the president, himself, who in addition to Air Force One and Marine One now has BlackBerry One, which provides information for him directly,” Fletcher joked. “When it comes to technology there is a great interest in seeing the growth of this industry not just because of the healthcare implications but because this provides an opportunity to develop new technologies that provide growth in jobs, provide an expansion in health communications infrastructure, provide an opportunity to connect the electronic health records, which have received so much attention, with, as we heard from Voxiva, more patient-oriented delivery of healthcare information.”
“Ideally, we would be able to stimulate a marketplace for mobile health technologies both here and abroad,” Fletcher said.
White House backs Voxiva’s Text4Baby
“I want to talk about two different examples of the ways the administration is eager to move forward on these technologies. One is identifying public-private partnerships. There is one under development, called Text4Baby, that would allow for the delivery of periodic messages to expecting mothers reminding them of basic healthcare needs. The aim of using that same technology that is in everybody’s pockets, text messaging capability, and builds on the work that Voxiva has done with assistance from CDC. The government can play a role in this by helping to reach those populations most in need for this information and identify the ways in which expanding this overall infrastructure might impact healthcare.” Continue >>
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| The sorry state of Palm Pre medical apps
When the Palm Pre App Catalog first launched in early June it had no medical apps to offer, but among the few applications the App Catalog launched with was an emulator app by MotionApps that promised to bring applications from old Palm platforms to the new Pre. In other words, if you are a health practitioner who has relied on a Palm Pilot for the past ten years, now you can upgrade to a new Palm Pre and use the same applications with more or less the same user experience.
This is set to change soon — hopefully. Palm recently announced that 1.8 million applications have been downloaded from its App Catalog, which is a surprising figure given the relatively few apps (in the dozens) available. The number of Palm Pre devices sold is also only in the hundreds of thousands. Last week Palm announced that its Mojo software development kit (SDK) was now available to any developer. Up until now the SDK was only available to a limited number of developers, so now it’s time to see if developers are still interested in developing applications for the Pre platform. On the medical app front, competition is sparse for the Pre. We hope to hear about some new Palm Pre medical apps soon.
Meanwhile, The Palm Doc Chronicles blog has done a nice job of keeping up with all things Palm-related for healthcare workers, including which of the old Palm applications work on the Palm Pre through the emulator application. While their list of proven apps is still rather short, it serves as a snapshot of the only medical applications available for the Palm Pre.
Read on for a slideshow of the applications from legacy Palm OS devices that now work on the Palm Pre through the emulator app. It’s never been more true: What’s old is new again for Palm in the medical world. Play Slideshow>>
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| Sleep monitoring start-up scoops up $9.8M
BiancaMed, a Dublin, Ireland-based developer of monitoring technology for sleep apnea diagnosis and other sleep or breathing related conditions, has raised €6 million ($9.8 million) in its second round of venture capital. The company’s technology includes contact-free wireless sensors for heart rate and breathing.
Seventure Partners led the latest investment round with return investors ePlanet, Enterprise Ireland and ResMed chipping in as well
BiancaMed said it will use the money to expand its core executive team and accelerate the launch of its consumer products with its “go-to-market” partners. The company also noted it would use the investment to develop additional products that target unmet needs like sleep apnea and disease management.
“BiancaMed is a unique company with a breakthrough technology in the massive, $20 billion global sleep market,” Seventure General Partner Isabelle de Cremoux said. ”With technology and market potential already validated through partnership agreements with leading corporations and an impressive product pipeline in new areas such as heart failure monitoring, BiancaMed offers a compelling investment opportunity for us in the Life Sciences area. BiancaMed is Seventure’s first investment outside of continental Europe and we look forward to working with Conor and other members of this entrepreneurial executive team.”
For more on BiancaMed’s latest round of funding, read the company’s press release after the jump. Continue >>
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| CallMD joins ADAM’s Mobile Health Network
ADAM recently announced that CallMD, a website that offers medical advice, diagnosis and treatments, has joined the Medzio Mobile Health Network and will be included in the network’s free iPhone application. The Medzio app, which launched earlier this year at the Health 2.0 event in Boston, combines symptom navigation, first aid info, GPS-enabled local listings for care centers (with maps and directions) and a feature called Health Talk, which aims to connect consumers with experts to share thoughts about health topics.
The app and ADAM’s Mobile Health Network are quickly becoming a who’s who of players in the mobile health space. Members and contributors to the app currently include: ADAM, CallMD, Dr. Greene, Health 2.0, Healthcare Blue Book, HealthiNation, HelloHealth, Livestrong, Norton Healthcare and Organized Wisdom. (Read more about the partners here.)
As part of the deal, CallMD will also license ADAM’s multimedia encyclopedia and Symptom Navigator for its new website.
“Mobile consumers use our service because the traditional health services and nurse lines just don’t work for them anymore,” said Curt McCallister, vice president of medical programs at CallMD. “We selected A.D.A.M. after evaluating several consumer health information providers and found the A.D.A.M. content and tools to be unsurpassed. We were also looking for a partner that could provide more than just health articles, and A.D.A.M.’s Symptom Navigator web and mobile device tools allow us to provide additional information to our clinicians. We were especially excited to be able to partner with them on the Medzio iPhone application, which we believe will have a huge impact on the way people seek and receive care.”
For more on the CallMD deal, read the company press release after the jump. Continue >>
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| Report: 15M wireless health devices by 2012
According to a recent ABI Research report, 15 million wireless devices will be in use by early 2012 to remotely monitor the well-being of elderly or at-risk people. For the next two years at least, most of these devices will consist of medical devices with cellular technology built-in, according to the report.
“Wireless telehealth systems can reduce healthcare costs in a couple of ways,” ABI research practice director Sam Lucero stated in a press release. “First, for patients with chronic conditions, wireless telehealth’s ability to monitor and track their status allows many problems to be nipped in the bud before they require expensive hospitalization and treatment. Second, the traditional approach to home health care requires regular visits by nurses to check on patients’ condition. By providing that same information automatically, wireless telehealth systems can reduce those labor and travel costs.”
As always, ABI believes the real sticking point is and will be Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement for these devices and services.
“The industry believes reimbursement for telehealth systems should be more comprehensive and straightforward. Proposed legislation is generating optimism,” Lucero stated.
For more on the report check out this article from eWeek
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| Beth Israel Deaconess ups mobile security
CareGroup Health System CIO John Halamka recently wrote about the strategy his facility, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is pursuing to comply with new Massachusetts Data Protection regulations. The new regs require organizations to take extra precautions to secure information, including data on mobile devices at the work place. (If you are not familiar with Halamka, he holds a number of positions, including Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician.)
Halamka revealed a few interesting metrics during his brief post:
“At BIDMC, we have nearly a 1000 Blackberries and hundreds of iPhones,” Halamka wrote. “The Blackberry has well developed enterprise control features, so we’re starting our mobile security effort with them… There are an amazing array of settings to secure Blackberries,” he continued.
BIDMC has some 3,000 supporting physicians and about 18,000 faculty, according to Halamka’s blog Life as a Healthcare CIO, so I am surprised to read that the facility has only 1,000 BlackBerry devices and only “hundreds” of iPhones among its 21,000 workers.
For more on BIDMC’s security initiative, read Halamka’s blog post here.
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| Report: 73% of US wants to track vital signs
A recent survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 73 percent of consumers would use biometric electronic remote monitoring services to track their condition and vital signs — a key metric for determining interest in many wireless health services. The PwC report had a number of other interesting metrics:
“More than half of people who went to a hospital emergency department in the past year said they went for a reason other than an emergency, for example, their doctor’s office was closed or they couldn’t get an appointment in an acceptable time.”
“Electronic interaction with providers and payers: One-half (50%) of consumers surveyed said they’d be willing to seek healthcare through the Internet or other computer technology as a substitute for a face-to-face, non-emergency visit. Of those, e-mail consultations was the preferred method of interaction (76%), followed by telehealth, question/answer fee-based consults and an online forum/chat room monitored by a doctor.”
“Use of telehealth technologies: Telehealth, the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications, such as video conferencing or bio-metric remote monitoring, is expanding access, particularly to specialty physicians for patients in remote and underserved areas. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of consumers said they would use biometric electronic remote monitoring services to track their condition and vital signs.”
For more on the PwC report, read the company’s entire press release after the jump. Continue >>
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| Wireless sensors for caloric intake? Easy.
The California Healthcare Foundation’s iHealthBeat recently conducted a podcast interview with Shankar Sastry, dean of engineering at the University of California-Berkeley and Monica Levy, senior director of research at Manhattan Research. Both Sastry and Levy discuss the state and promise of wireless-enabled healthcare tools. Sastry notes that continuous wireless monitoring will be challenging type of service for our healthcare reimbursement system. Here are some more notable quotes from the interview:
“The cell phone is perfect because it’s like a wrist watch you carry around, I think the idea of having access to electronic medical records is transformational in that it changes electronic medical records to be personal health records,” Sastry said. ”So I think that going forward there will be a huge consumer push to be able to both record and analyze data and the cell phones are gradually becoming not just a place for repository and also for analyzing data, but also as a distributive sensor network in the sense that the cell phone can interrogate other sensors which are attached to your body.” Continue >>
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| Continua Board adds Qualcomm, Ascension, CA
The Continua Health Alliance has added three companies to its board of directors: Qualcomm, Ascension Health and CA. The industry alliance of now more than 200 healthcare and technology companies works to ensure global interoperability between personal telehealth solutions.
Continua’s board of directors already includes representation from Cisco, Intel, Medtronic, Kaiser Permanente, Panasonic, Partners Healthcare, Philips, PwC, Roche Diagnostics, Samsung and Sharp.
“Qualcomm pioneered the wireless healthcare market in 2003 with its first partner Cardionet, and for the past six years has been working with new partners in the medical field to create technologies that transform healthcare. We are excited to bring this expertise to the Continua Health Alliance,” said Clint McClellan, senior director of business development for Qualcomm’s Health and Life Sciences. “Qualcomm believes wireless connectivity is key to the future of healthcare, and we are looking forward to helping companies in the medical device, pharmaceutical and health service industries innovate creative connected health solutions and establish new business models.”
For more from the newly appoint directors of Continua, read the organization’s full press release after the jump. Continue >>
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| WebMD launches Medscape CME app
We reported their plans back in May, now it’s here: WebMD Health has launched a Medscape CME iPhone app for physicians. Medscape Mobile is a free iPhone and iPod Touch app that includes information for more than 6,000 generic and brand-name drugs, herbals, supplements and antidotes, a drug interaction checker, clinical reference tools, medical news and continuing medical education (CME). The app also includes contact info for more than 400,000 physicians, 57,000 pharmacies and 6,000 hospitals. The company is building a version of the application for the Blackberry platform, too.
WebMD is also known for its consumer-facing application, WebMD Mobile. The company told mobihealthnews that the app has generated 700,000 downloads since launching for the iPhone last November.
On the CME front, WebMD will be facing competition from XM radio station ReachMD, which launched its own CME iPhone app last fall. We caught up with ReachMD earlier this year to discuss their application and other plans for the iPhone.
For more on WebMD Health’s latest iPhone offering, read the company’s press release after the jump. Continue >>
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| VA, mVisum conduct mobile EKG pilot
While The Department of Veterans Affairs recently announced plans to suspend a number of its health IT projects, reports of one mobile phone-based EKG trial illustrated the kind of innovations the VA has been incubating. One of Sprint’s and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion’s key healthcare partners, mVisum is working with the VA to test a system that aims to get critical medical information to a physician while they are on their way to a patient’s bedside. The technology enables fast transfer of clinical data to a smartphone for review.
The VA has already tested the system internally and found that of 600 EKGs read on a BlackBerry device, 599 were correct diagnoses. Given the accuracy, the trial may point to the potential of this system for remote diagnosing for areas that might lack specialists.
To ensure security, the VA uses a GE Muse server and digital EKG. The mVisum software can detect when an EKG is taken and it makes a copy of both the EKG and its internal EHR. Because the whole system is server-based, the EKG is never stored on the phone, so when the physician logs out the data is gone.
For more on mVisum and the VA pilot, read this report from OhMyGov
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| PillCam not as effective as colonoscopy
A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that the use of a wireless pill camera, like Given Imaging’s PillCam, in its current generation, is not as effective as a traditional colonoscopy procedure.
PillCam is an alternative to endoscopy, which requires the insertion of a long tube into a patient, a procedure that often necessitates sedation. PillCam’s camera takes some 60,000 photos as it makes its way down the esophagus, into the stomach and through the intestines over a span of about eight hours. The PillCam can help doctors diagnose small-intestine conditions, including Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, tumors and ulcerative colitis in patients 10-years-old or older.
The PillCam has a special coating that makes it slippery when wet and a bit easier to swallow. Once ingested, a monitoring device around the patient’s waist uses a low-powered radio frequency to receive the images from the capsule as it transmits.
For the colonoscopy study, however, researchers found that the capsule screening had a sensitivity rate of 64 percent and a specificity rate of 84 percent in detecting polyps that were at least 6 millimeters in size, while rates for detecting advanced polyps were 73 percent and 79 percent, respectively. Continue >>
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The World Health Care Congress Leadership Summit on Wireless Health
July 27-28, Boston
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July 27-29, San Diego
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The Inaugural Medical Device Connectivity Conference & Exhibition
September 10-11, Boston
This innovative conference and exhibition focuses on the integration of medical devices and information systems. The conference will feature in-depth coverage of strategy and implementation as well as legal/regulatory issues. Keynote speakers include: Tim Gee, Medical Connectivity Consulting and Julian Goldman, MD, Partners HealthCare Biomedical Engineering.
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ATA Mid-Year Meeting
Sept. 24-25, Palm Springs
The Third Annual ATA Mid-Year meeting is one great meeting combining two great tracks & showcasing the latest in products and services:
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October 8, San Diego
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