The 9 wireless health investments so far this year

By: Brian Dolan | Apr 14, 2011        

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Brian Dolan, Editor, MobiHealthNewsIn the short three months since 2011 began already investors have announced or disclosed to the SEC nine investments in various mobile and wireless health startups. More than a year ago we tallied up the 15 venture capital deals announced during all of 2009. Clearly investment in mobile health and interest has come a long way since then — this year also saw the planned launch of Rock Health Fund, an incubator for medical app startups.

We just put the finishing touches on our newest paid research report: Mobile Health Q1 2011 State of the Industry, which includes a round-up of the most important news and announcements from healthcare providers, payors, mobile operators, pharma companies, regulators, investors, research firms and more. Here’s a look at the round-up of investment deals we covered during the first quarter of 2011 in order of deal size:

1. Cellnovo – $48 million – Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners (EdRIP), Forbion Capital Partners; Auriga Partners, NBGI Ventures, and Credit Agricole Private Equity and others – The company is known for its wireless-enabled insulin pump and is now touting its “iTunes-like” software platform.

2. Doximity – $10.8 million – Emergence Capital Partners and InterWest Partners – Doximity is a medical communications platform that uses social networking technologies to enable doctors to communicate securely with one another.

3. Basis – $9 million – Norwest Venture Partners and Doll Capital Management – The company’s device called Basis Band measures the wearer’s heart rate and other vital signs.

4. HealthTap – $2.35 million – Mohr Davidow Ventures and Esther Dyson, Mark Leslie, Aaron Patzer – Healthtap plans to create an “expert health companion” that improves interactivity between physicians and patients.

5. Massive Health – $2.25 million – Felicis VC, Greylock Discovery Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Charles River Ventures – Massive Health is still in stealth (which it calls ninja) mode, but it says it will create smartphone apps for chronic disease management.

6. BL Healthcare – $2 million – Verizon Ventures, n/a – BL offers a touchscreen home health monitoring hub among other devices and services.

7. Toumaz – $2 million – Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong – Toumaz’s CE-marked Life Pebble device includes a single lead ECG, skin thermometer, and an accelerometer, which enables it to track physical activity.

8. Sproxil – $1.8 million – Acumen Fund – Sproxil uses text messages to authenticate pharmaceutical products in Africa with a scratch-off code.

9. Endomondo – $800,000 – SEED Capital of Denmark – Endomondo provides GPS tracking of any distance sport.

For more of our Q1 report visit the MobiHealthNews research store here.

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Hospitals won’t ever go completely wireless

By: Brian Dolan | Apr 14, 2011        

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iPad medicalLast month Aruba Networks, one of the big enterprise wireless networking vendors, added device access control specifically for Apple iOS devices to help hospital IT departments and other CIOs to better manage the growing number of Apple devices finding their way into hospitals and the enterprise.

Aruba customer Boston Medical Center plans to institute a “bring your own device” (BYOD) to work policy because of the high interest among its healthcare workers in using their personal iPads on-site.

“We are about to open up our BYOD to work and the iPad is the driver of that,” Boston Medical Center’s manager of data, voice, and security networks Lee Cullivan wrote in an email. ”[The iPad] will be our first non-hospital supported mobile device officially allowed on the network.”

Cullivan said his center uses Citrix to enable iPad users to access parts of the center’s electronic medical records system.

“[The BYOD initiative will] save IT a ton of time and money but also help hospital personnel to feel like IT is an enabler. In the past IT has always said no to personal devices but with device fingerprinting, and the ability to place personal machines into specific roles that deny access at the controller level, IT looks good again,” Cullivan said.

Aruba Networks Director of Healthcare Solutions Gerry Festa told MobiHealthNews that the role of wireless networks is changing dramatically. What was once a network primarily used to service clinicians at their workstations or on laptops is now being used for many more devices.

“Overall we are seeing an onslaught of devices,” Festa said. “That includes hospital provided devices, employee brought devices, patient devices, guest devices. Of course, these devices are running different types of applications that require different levels of service engagements.” Keep reading>>

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QxMD updates app at same time supporting medical research is published

By: Neil Versel | Apr 13, 2011        

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QxMD iPad CalculateIn hopes of rapidly pushing new knowledge into clinical practice, mobile medical calculator developer QxMD has collaborated with a major journal and a research team to introduce an app based on new research at the same time the study lead presented the evidence at a conference.

Monday at the annual World Congress of Nephrology, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Dr. Navdeep Tangri of Boston-based Tufts Medical Center presented a paper in which he discussed an equation he and colleagues developed to calculate the risk of renal failure and the need for dialysis in patients with chronic kidney disease. Right about the time Tangri was speaking, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the paper online and QxMD unveiled an update to its Calculate by QxMD medical calculator for the iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry platforms based on Tangri’s predictive model.

Knowing a patient’s age, gender and test results for estimated kidney function, urine protein, blood calcium, phosphorus, bicarbonate and albumin levels, the model helps determine the probability of kidney failure two and five years down the line for someone with Stage 3 to 5 chronic kidney disease, according to Tangri’s paper.

Dr. Daniel Schwartz, founder of Vancouver-based QxMD, said this was the first time a mobile medical app had been released simultaneously with the presentation of new medical research. Schwartz tells MobiHealthNews that he and Tangri wanted to speed the acceptance of this new model into the practice of nephrology. Keep reading>>

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Students use mobile to fight malaria, help vision-impaired

By: Neil Versel | Apr 13, 2011        

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Neil VerselMobile healthcare is on a roll, and you can partially thank the next generation.

Health- and healthcare-related projects took the top four spots in the U.S. finals of the Imagine Cup, an annual student technology competition sponsored by Microsoft.

Four students from Arizona State University won the contest over the weekend in Seattle with a creation that combines a custom-designed digital camera, a touch-screen Windows tablet PC and Microsoft OneNote software to help vision-impaired students take notes in class. The competitors, Michael Astrauskas, David Hayden, Shashank Srinivas and Qian Yan, share an $8,000 prize and win a trip to New York City in July for the ninth annual worldwide Imagine Cup finals. Microsoft also will make a $25,000 donation to ASU in their names.

Their project, called Note-Taker, presents a split-screen view so students with low vision can watch live video of the teacher on one part of the screen and type or hand-write notes on the other half.

The runners-up for software design, four grad students from around the country, found a way to help far-flung health workers diagnose malaria on a smartphone in hopes of treating the deadly disease and containing potential outbreaks. They won $4,000 for fitting a Samsung Focus (running Windows Phone 7, of course) with a microscopic camera lens to take a picture of a blood sample and developed an app to measure malaria parasites in the blood.

“It actually draws a red box around the clusters of malaria, and it actually notifies you how many it found,” team member Tristan Gibeau, of the University of Central Florida, told Reuters. And it works while offline, so it’s suitable for use in remote villages. When they do have Internet access, users then can upload data from their phones to a central tracking system for epidemiological purposes.

“It’s going to make a difference in trying to contain the outbreak of malaria,” Gibeau is quoted as saying. He’s reportedly trying to develop similar apps for other blood-borne disease. “In the big picture, it’ll hopefully help in the fight against most diseases out there and make everybody’s life a little easier,” Gibeau said. According to Reuters, the team is working on commercializing the technology.

Notably, one of the developers—and winners of the $4,000 second prize—is Wilson To, who is studying comparative pathology at the University of California, Davis. A year ago, To was part of the team that won the national Imagine Cup for building a mobile microscope.

Taking third place and $3,000 were a duo from the University of Central Arkansas who developed a mobile phone-based system for people with skin cancer to monitor their conditions. And in fourth place, worth $1,000, was an app to help improve child vaccination rates in underserved communities.

What’s remarkable about these results is that the Imagine Cup is not a healthcare competition. The theme for this year’s contest was: “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.” Not the toughest healthcare problems, but any problem at all that students wanted to address. Some 74,000 students in the U.S. entered, and the top four in the software category all found health-related issues that they decided to tackle with mobile technology.

That’s the power of mobility in healthcare.

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Ohio doctors develop women’s health app

By: Brian Dolan | Apr 13, 2011        

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OhioHealth Duet AppOhioHealth’s physicians teamed up with mobile software company eProximiti to create a mobile app that aims to improve women’s health. The partners have released the free-of-charge app, called Duet Health to provide soon-to-be mothers with information about their pregnancies using their iPhones or Android device. OhioHealth is a not-for-profit group of 18 hospitals, 23 health and surgery centers, home-health providers and other healthcare service providers that serve 40 counties in the state.

The organization’s app provides educational text, images and video detailing anything from screening tests to info on the stages of fetal development and common pregnancy related problems. In addition to the informative aspects, the app also offers timely appointment reminders, links women to their doctor’s office phones, and provides directions to hospitals where OhioHealth physicians deliver. Duet Health sports a customized personal home screen with the patient’s due date which signals the program to give updates about gestation periods and needed screenings. Additionally, the home screen hosts a note taking feature where women can write reminders of issues they want to discuss with their doctors. While the main focus of the app is pregnancy, it will also offer information on other women’s health issues.

Sixty patients at Grant Medical Center and Riverside Methodist Hospital have been testing the application since March:

“This is something that empowers patients to be more informed when they arrive for their office visits,” said OB/GYN Andrew Bokor, MD, Grant Medical Center, one of the first physicians to offer the application to his patients.

Other popular pregnancy-related apps for iPhone users include Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter My Pregnancy Today app, MedHelp’s I’m Expecting app, and Whattoexpect.com’s app Pregnancy Trackers, according to MobiHealthNews’ own app report last September.

The app launch is right on the heels of another big mobile announcement targeted at mothers: Text4Baby recently affirmed that it plans to reach 1 million mothers by the end of next year. The service currently reaches more than 157,000 mothers. A couple of important distinctions between the two offerings: While Text4Baby is a less sophisticated offering of one-way information texts it works on almost every single mobile phone. The OhioHealth offering has more advanced features but for now only works on Android and iPhone smartphones, and that will likely limit the potential user base to a minority of the organization’s patients.

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Korea Telecom pilots mobile-enabled diabetes management

By: Brian Dolan | Apr 12, 2011        

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KT logoLike many parts of the world, South Korea is facing an aging population and a rise in medical care costs. Looking for ways to save money while taking care of its increasing patient rolls, the country is turning to mobile health as a way to manage chronic illness. Qualcomm, the Gyeonggi Province of Korea, Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) and Korea Telecom (KT) announced today that they are partnering on a project called Self Quality Care. The project will use 3G applications and services to provide patients and care providers with health information and reminders to manage chronic disease and promote healthier lifestyles.

During the project, KT will gather data from diabetic patients’ Ubcare glucose meter measurements and transmit them to its u-Health Platform using the 3G Health Home Gateway. Additionally, the company will provide web service solutions and smartphone applications that will enable patients and health workers to better manage diabetes. The glucose meter provider, Ubcare, will work with KT on creating software that will communicate with hospital medical record databases and the u-Health Platform using Internet and mobile services.

“In this project, KT plans to link devices such as smartphones, tablet PCs and IPTV devices with medical treatment systems in order to develop a service that will improve the management of chronic diseases and encourage a healthier lifestyle,” said Lee Suk-chae, chief executive officer of Korea Telecom in the release. “The project also aims to maximize the effects of treatment and KT will continue to provide the u-Health service to those areas of medical management that need to be improved.”

The program is part of Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Initiative, a program that brings wireless technology to underserved communities around the world. The company has been working in South Korea on various mobile health projects over the last couple years–partly because South Korea was one of the first countries to deploy 3G nationwide. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, a non-profit, government funded organization, will oversee the implementation and evaluation of the project. Keep reading>>

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