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

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)

Event Summary: Rock Health Demo Day

Today at the Rock Health Demo Day, I watched as 14 bright and eager CEOs presented their start-ups to an audience of supporters, mentors, partners, journalists and potential investors. These 14 companies, now graduating from the Rock Health seed accelerator, are focused on tackling a range of issues, from making pregnancy healthier, safer and less costly (Wildflower Health), to making at-home fitness more accessible, affordable and personal (Wello). Stay tuned for upcoming interviews and deeper dives into many of these businesses, but for now, here are a few photos from tonight.

Top: Jacob Sattelmair – Wellframe, Kevin MacDonald – Kit Check, Leah Sparks – Wildflower Health

Bottom: Jason Langheier – Zipongo, Alex Frommeyer – Beam Technologies, Jack Challis – CliniCast

You can learn more about these companies at Rock Health San Francisco 2013 Portfolio.

Fjord Kitchen Event: Making Wearable Technology Mainstream

Last night I attended Fjord’s When Will Wearables Go Mainstream? event at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Fjord is a premier digital service design consulting firm focused on the entire design workflow from smart management to concept development and branding. Creatively, the firm hosts Fjord Kitchen events where they pick an inspiring venue and introduce great food, people and topics together to establish entertaining and insightful discussions.

Hot topics throughout the night centered on the emergence of wearable trackers and how to balance simplicity vs. usability vs. actionability when creating a wearable device. For more insight from last night, check out Fjord’s Conversations blog.

Adam, Sarah, Bill, Sonny, Olof

Speakers:
Adam Gazzaley – Director, Neuroscience Imaging Center, UCSF
Sarah Rotman – Epps Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
Bill Geiser – CEO, MetaWatch
Sonny Vu – CEO, Misfit Wearables
Olof Schybergson – CEO, FJORD

Tradeshow: International Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

CES 2013 had a greatly expanded health and fitness related consumer device section of the tradeshow. I navigated my way through the massive exhibit floor along with over 150,000 other attendees from around the world. There will be a number of exciting devices of various price points aimed at physical and mental fitness coming to market this year and I will be sure to cover them in more detail as they are released. As for now, here are a few teaser photos from CES.

Health 2.0: Healthcare Innovation and Transformation

One of the liveliest conferences I’ve been to, this year’s Health 2.0 Annual Fall Conference did not disappoint with new product launches, lots of startup funding money, and yes, even an onstage skit. Speakers ranged from CEOs of large billion dollar companies – Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, self-made mega-brand entrepreneurs – Jillian Michaels, and BIG DATA personalized predictive health start-ups – Chris Hogg, CEO of 100Plus. The conference ends on Wednesday with DC to VC, a pitch-fest organized by Morgenthaler Ventures and Health 2.0.

Some facts from Health 2.0:

• $1.03BN in healthcare funding raised in 2011
• $1.13BN in healthcare funding raised in the first 9 months of 2012
• Biggest growth areas in healthcare startups: patient/provider communication and self management tools

Medicine X: The Future of Medicine and Technology

I spent the weekend at the Medicine X conference at Stanford University. For those of you who missed the exciting conference, you can check out some of the taped speakers at MedX Videos and Talks.

Here are a few startups I found particularly interesting:

Aidin was created for discharge planning professionals to make the process of finding post-acute care for their patients, efficient and easy.

SwiftPayMD is a payment system for physicians to capture and post charges for each day’s services, for quick and correct billing.

Symcat takes BIG DATA (hundreds of thousands of patient records) to estimate what your ailment might be through a series of questions.

 

Definitely looking forward to Medicine X 2013. See you there!

Event to Attend: Rock Health’s Health Innovation Summit

Yesterday’s Rock Health — Health Innovation Summit was high energy, informative, and thought provoking. If you missed it, check out the rockstars who presented here.

I spoke to some interesting businesses at the demo show, including health, wellness, and quantified self startups. I’ll be writing about these companies in the next several months so stay tuned!

Andy Grove, Co-founder, CEO, former chairman and now Advisor to Intel Corporation speaking about what we need in healthcare: cost analysis/accounting, willingness to approximate for the future, and facts – all the facts.

Event Summary: Social Media “Likes” Healthcare Webinar

eHealth Initiative and PwC put together an interesting webinar today on social media uses in healthcare and how customers and practitioners are reacting to it.

A copy of the report and slides can be found here: www.ehealthinitiative.org and www.pwc.com/us/healthsocialmedia.

Below are some interesting slides from the Chart Pack.