Palo Alto, California-based Jiff announced this week that it had raised $7.5 million in its first round of funding. The investment round was led by Aeris Capital and included participation from Jiff's founding seed investor Aberdare Ventures. The startup also announced that it had appointed former president and CEO of Robert Bosch Healthcare, Derek Newell, as its first CEO.

Too often patients forget what a doctor told them during an office visit by the time they have made it to their car, according to Jiff. The startup has taken that problem on with its first offering. Doctors give the same eight minute speech all day long to patients with similar issues, so Jiff wanted to help doctors create an app that captures that conversation and enables patients to revisit it as many times as they'd like. That saves time for doctors because it will hopefully lead to less follow-up calls and questions. With the JiffPad app for iPads, physicians can create JiffTalks that include images, voice, frequently asked questions, replies, finger gestures, and more all compiled into a video that can be sent to the patient via email to review at home.

These could help doctors better communicate to patients who don't speak English as their primary language. The talks could also come preloaded from medical industry associations and other medical thought leaders.

Jiff's current business model is to charge physicians an annual subscription of a few hundred dollars.

The startup's new CEO Derek Newell was previously president and CEO of Robert Bosch Healthcare, a remote patient monitoring company. Newell joined Bosch when it acquired Health Hero Networks, where he was CEO. Newell has graduate degrees in business and public health from UC Berkeley. Other Health Hero Networks alumns include Steve Brown, who now runs Catch.com, formerly Snaptic. Another Health Hero alum, Geoff Clapp, is now a mentor at the mobile and digital health incubator Rock Health.

More on Jiff in the press release below:

PRESS RELEASE: PALO ALTO, Calif., March 12, 2012 -- Jiff Inc., the developer of the first HIPAA-compliant private healthcare social network and digital health apps platform, today announced completion of a $7.5 million Series A financing round. Aeris Capital led the round, with participation from Aberdare Ventures, Jiff's founding seed investor. Jiff also appointed health care technology veteran Derek Newell as the company's first chief executive officer.

"Jiff has created a healthcare social network and digital health apps platform that has the power to transform how we experience healthcare," said Vince Kim, partner with Aberdare Ventures. "It's rare to find a team that is so deep in both consumer Internet technology design and healthcare. They are producing truly innovative products."

The financing will enable Jiff to deploy its healthcare social network, and to develop a suite of apps that will facilitate health, well-being, care and community. Jiff will also publish a software development kit to allow developers to create applications on the Jiff platform. Like the JiffPad, Jiff's award-winning iPad application introduced in 2011, the new applications will connect payors, providers and consumers in ways that were not possible before Jiff.

"As consumers and the health care sector grapple with the best uses of social media, digital health applications and mobile devices, Jiff will offer a secure and private digital health platform that is centered on the individual, not any one institution, and it is a technology that can scale to millions of users," Newell said.

Newell added, "To dramatically increase consumers' engagement and ownership in their own health, we must make it easy. Jiff is bringing that elegance of design to healthcare. That's why the company is called Jiff, 'Healthcare communication in a Jiff.' Simple. Elegant. Intuitive. Jiff is bringing that elegance of design to healthcare."

Newell brings to Jiff more than 20 years' experience growing and leading innovative health care technology and services companies. Prior to joining Jiff, Newell was president and CEO of Robert Bosch Healthcare. While at Bosch, Newell worked to build Bosch into the world's largest remote patient monitoring company. Previously, he was the CEO of Health Hero Networks, a US-based remote patient monitoring company, and the chief marketing officer of a leading disease management company. Newell holds graduate degrees in business and public health from the University of California, Berkeley.

"Over the next few years, the sources of health-related data will explode," Newell said. "There needs to be a company that aggregates that data and makes it useful for how healthcare is actually delivered. It needs to be useful and actionable for both the consumer and the provider. Jiff is filling that need."

Jiff Co-Founder James Currier said, "Combining Derek's deep healthcare and product knowledge with this engineering and consumer design team is not something the industry has seen before. Derek has hands-on experience in the challenges consumers and medical professionals face in remotely communicating and coordinating important medical data."

In conjunction with the financing, Kim of Aberdare Ventures, and George Rehm, J.D., managing partner of Aeris Capital, have joined Jiff's board of directors. Jiff co-founder, James Currier now serves as executive chairman.

About Jiff Inc.

Jiff Inc. provides the first HIPAA-compliant private healthcare social network and digital health apps platform. Jiff's platform allows consumers and health care professionals to build personalized and private communities of care in a HIPAA-compliant environment that connects people to their healthcare in a way not possible before Jiff. Founded in 2010 in Palo Alto, California, Jiff has assembled a world-class team of healthcare and consumer internet leaders to deploy a suite of elegant, effective and easy-to-use digital health tools that will redefine consumer and healthcare professionals' expectations for what can and should be done to improve healthcare.

The first application announced on the Jiff platform, the JiffPad, is an iPad educational platform that makes doctor-patient communications more effective and memorable by transforming conversations and images into videos that patients can reference and share from the privacy of their own homes. JiffPad won the Morgenthaler Ventures' 2011 DC2VC Start-up showcase and was honored as a finalist at the prestigious TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

SOURCE Jiff Inc.