Best in Healthcare For 2013

2013 was a great year for consumer healthcare technology. This year, 95 million Americans have used mobile phones as health tools or as search devices to find healthcare information, paving the way for a more connected and health conscious 2014.

To continue with my annual Year in Review, I present some of my favorite companies and posts in 2013.

A big thank you to my readers for your support, ideas and input.

-Alexis

Best New Entrants into Wearables:

• Misfit Wearables — Self-tracking wearable, incredibly elegant and striking
• Withings Pulse — Self-tracking wearable, Withings’ first entry into the physical activity tracker space
• Goji Play — Self-tracking indoor cardio wearable, transforms any cardio machine into an interactive gaming workout
• OnTheGo Platforms — Smart glass app development platform that focuses on exercise apps and more
• Updated versions of the Jawbone UP, Fitbit Force and Nike+ FuelBand SE

Best Smart Fabric Concepts:

• Athos — Athletic apparel made with smart fabric and sensors to measure every muscle exertion, heartbeat, and breath
• OMsignal  — Embedded sensors in the apparel monitor your heart rate, breathing, and activity

 Best Fitness Apps:

• RunKeeper — GPS app to track outdoor fitness activities
• Moves — GPS app to track daily activity continuously, shown on a timeline
• Charity Miles — GPS app that tracks and lets you earn money for charity when you walk, run, or bike

 Best Personalized Coaching:

• Sessions — Simple, individual, and thoughtful fitness program to help you get healthy
• Wello — Online workouts with a Certified Personal Trainer in real-time on your mobile device over live video

A New Twist to Common Items:

• HAPIfork — An electronic fork that monitors eating habits and alerts you when you eat too fast
• Beam Technologies — A smart toothbrush that monitors oral hygiene and reports habits to a smart app
• Withings Blood Pressure Monitor — Measures, calculates and tracks changes in blood pressure on graphs

Best Up and Coming:

• PUSH — Tracks and analyzes performance at the gym; measures power, force and balance
• Emotiv Insight — Multi-channel, wireless headset that monitors brain activity to optimize brain fitness and measures cognitive health and well-being
• Scanadu Scout — Medical tricorder to measure, analyze and track vitals
• MC10 — Stretchable electronics that conform to the shape of the body to measure and track vitals

Best for Healthcare Providers:

• Pristine — Develops Glass apps to help hospitals deliver safer, more coordinated, more cost effective care
• Informedika — Marketplace for electronic test ordering and results exchange between healthcare providers
• IntelligentM — Data-driven hand hygiene compliance solutions for hospitals to dramatically reduce healthcare-acquired infections

Interview: Steven Yaskin, CEO of Informedika

Informedika has created a one stop online marketplace for healthcare providers to choose, discover, compare and select lab services, therapy providers and nursing home vendors at the click of a button. They have created a platform that is not only EMR agnostic, but also free to use.

I caught up with CEO, Steven Yaskin to learn more about Informedika. Steven describes the company’s mission as, “We are connecting doctors to healthcare vendors – diagnostic labs, radiology centers, physical therapy trainers, sleep centers, nursing homes, assisted living and many, many more. Doctors are at the top of the food chain in terms of referrals and now all vendors are finally at their fingertips.”

The Informedika marketplace empowers doctors to place electronic orders through an online ecosystem, which eliminates faxes, paperwork and mistakes.

Eliminating paperwork, Informedika shows all patient imaging data.

Informedika has taken a grassroots approach in getting their name out, focusing more on building a strong product than spending money on marketing. So far it’s worked – doctors love the flexibility and transparency that Informedika gives them. As Steven notes, “In healthcare you don’t have adoption by doctors unless you have all the vendors tied to them – local and nationwide labs and services. We have an all-inclusive catalog of pharmacies, sleep centers, labs, etc.  When doctors log into their existing EMR software, they may only see one lab but when they log into Informedika they see all their options.”

All local and nationwide options on one interface for labs.

Steven states that a big problem with healthcare data is that not all the medical record companies are cooperating and a lot of startups become bystander victims because of this. How does Informedika fit smoothly into the healthcare system? “We aren’t relying on doctors and vendors or patients to upload data. Because we sit in the streams of electronic fax data flowing between doctors and labs, we can aggregate that data into medical charts directly. We are EMR agnostic and doctor agnostic. We are creating a patient centric repository, regardless of what software a doctor uses – we don’t compete with EMRs, instead we make their data more robust.”

Health 2.0: How to Use Data Around You to Lead a Healthier Life

Health 2.0 once again exceeded my expectations with their 7^th Annual Fall Conference, this year in Santa Clara. Needless to say, I have too much to share in just one post. Today I’ll focus on Tuesday’s morning hot topic, Big Data. In rapid fire, leaders in health data aggregation and comprehension spoke and presented demos.

Here is a snapshot of a few companies that presented in Big Data: Tools and Applications for Individuals.

Ben Wolin, Co-Founder and CEO, Everyday Health

• Everyday Health has self-learning data algorithms that personalized your healthcare exploration. Using over 6.9 billion data points, 4.5 billion newsletter opens and many fancy data algorithms, they are able to tailor healthcare information for you
• Essentially, they are the Pandora for health, but with much more data
• They have proved $2.3 billion in healthcare savings so far

Gideon Mantel, Executive Chairman, Treato

• Treato lets patients comment on their prescription drug use and then shows how those drugs fare alongside their comparable medications
• Using crowdsourced patient data, you can easily see which medications cause which types of problems for patients
• Below, Tecfidera (BG-12) has worse feedback then Copaxone and Tysabri for MS treatments. You can dig in deeper on the website to see exactly why, and what patients have listed as top concerns for the drug

Philippe Schwartz, President, Withings

• This year Withings, maker of the smart body analyzer scale and blood pressure monitor, has come out with an activity tracker, the Withings Pulse
• The device can differentiate between walking and running automatically as well as measure your heart beat
• A more detailed post on the Pulse to come!

John De Souza, President and CEO, MedHelp

• MedHelp has created apps to track a variety of health events, such as women’s health, diet and mental health
• They are releasing an app that lets you get instant feedback on your lab results, and grants you access to health coaches who can give you advice when something doesn’t look right (such as cutting back on salt if your lab tests show high cholesterol)
• The app also allows for involvement from your friends and family into helping you keep a healthy lifestyle. As Peter Tippett, CMO & VP of Verizon said, “Social is what drives change in individuals – it’s the little nudge that helps you quit smoking, it’s not you, it is your surround sound.”

Marvin Ammori, Co-Founder and CEO, Silica Labs

• Marvin showed us how Google Glass can be used in healthcare, from recording a doctor-patient interaction so that the patient can rewatch the interaction later, or by recording a surgery so that a specialist far away can help, or by creating a surgery checklist for a surgeon in the operating room
• Glass can even be used in the battlefield to tap into the activity monitors of soldiers to tell a medic which injured fighter needs the most immediate help

Bill Davenhall, Global Manager, Health and Human Services, ESRI

• I’ve posted on ESRI before – I think it is an excellent tool to see geographic health information
• The ESRI Geomedicine application lets you see the heart attack rate as well as the toxic release inventory of an area
• Every triangle is something that is bad for your health in your neighborhood
• The dashboard also gives a walk score (San Francisco at 97, is excellent)

Diagnostics For All: Simple and Low-Cost Diagnostic Tests

Diagnostics For All (DFA) is a nonprofit organization working on bringing healthcare to places with limited access to precise and affordable care. One of their main projects is to create cheap and convenient diagnostic tests using their patterned paper technology that only needs a drop of blood to give a result. This technology is essentially a piece of paper grooved with wells that are filled with assay reagents. As a drop of blood is placed on the paper, the assays change color to reflect the result of the test. About the size of a quarter and much cheaper than traditional tests, these point of care indicators are also lightweight and durable, easy to use, reliable and simple to manufacture.

Currently they are focused on making a test for liver damage, which is a known side effect from taking drugs given to tuberculosis and HIV patients. In poorer countries, these paper tests could replace having to use traditional labs and all the equipment, electricity and turnaround time that goes along with them. DFA is working on using their paper based tech to test for other diseases and has garnered support from large foundations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Innovation: V-Chip for Quick Blood Tests

As described in the December 18th publication of Nature, The V-Chip is a bar-chart chip that houses 50 wells, each loaded with antibodies that react to blood. Blood contains biomarkers, which are proteins that indicate the normality of your biological processes. For example, changes in a biomarker can reflect and correlate to the risk or progression of a disease. When you inject your blood sample into the chip, the biomarkers in your blood react to the pre-loaded antibodies in the wells. Enzymes prompt oxygen to be released in accordance to the amount of the triggered biomarker, which pushes the blood in each well up the chip to create a graph.

While it might take some time before the V-Chip sees commercial production, its ease of use and quick turn-around time makes it an attractive diagnostic tool. Perhaps one day it can be used to spot various diseases and indications of cancer right at the point of care.