Departure

The recent 5+ months has been a roller coaster. From doing a crazy amount of company research to obtaining industry knowledge and hanging out with the movers of this field. With the primary objective of better understanding the mobile health / digital health ecosystem. My passion for knowledge and care for others drove me to do this, not the money (like there was any to start with anyways).

While I had other opportunities to enter successful enterprises, I held steadfast to the healthcare world. Recently there has been a new opportunity for me to help by providing information and work on the front lines of helping people obtain new medicines.

I have taken up a business development position that helps license pharmaceutical drugs into an Asian market. Playing as side of the Asian company. This position will be challenging but leaving this website is even harder.

I am now seeking for people who are passionate about the digital health system that are willing to write blogs and update the company list as necessary. If you are interested, please email me.

 

I would like to thank the support from all those individuals that have came to this blog and those other bloggers to continue to provide innovative news sources. Such as MedCity, Mobihealthnews, Xconomy and all those that follow and believe in the digital health industry.

This Week in News 02/17/2012

Funding Related:

Cloud computing in healthcare could see more venture capital from KPCB (Another fund that seems to be increasing digital health investment)

Chronic pain device from Neuros Medical gets new investor

StartUp Health to launch inaugural class next month, gets AT&T backing <– more incubator than funding, but ATT backing is always good.

MetroHealth raised a record $10.8M in donations last year

Cuffless blood pressure device startup nets $5.9M

M&A Related:

CardioNet buys ECG Scanning & Mobihealthnews Version

Lumeris, three Blue plans to acquire NaviNet

Partnerships:

Microsoft, GE Announce a ‘Caradigm’ Shift in Healthcare

NextGen, Humana ink EHR deal

Qualcomm Life, iSonea to offer mobile asthma monitor

Apollo, Dell ink partnership

Telemedicine kiosk company signs technology integration deal with Sprint

VMware teams with Peake Healthcare for medical imaging cloud (Will be interesting to see how other companies will compete with this partnership)

Business:

Health IT Factors Into Leapfrog’s Hospitals Rankings

At FutureMed, IBM Doctors Advocate New Approaches to Medicine

Bosch sues three competitors over Health Buddy patents (make sure you patent your stuff!)

How allowing emergency rooms to share health data saved Memphis over $1m/year, interview with Mark Frisse MD

Rent-A-Center saves $700K in first year of telehealth contract

Ex Sun Microsystems CEO goes into healthcare: Xconomy   VentureBeat   FastCompany <– Huge deal, this guy is brilliant and is connected to the core powerhouses in Silicon Valley. I would beg him to take all my money. (and it isnt much)

Mobilizing a Revolution: How Cellphones are Transforming Public Health

How To Pivot Faster Than Your Competition 

Dr. David Albert’s roller coaster ride in developing the iPhone ECG app

GSMA: mHealth Market Worth $23B by 2017

Good Reads:

HIMSS: McKesson, RelayHealth to unveil Better Health 2020 initiative

The perils of mobile health

Improving health searches, because your health matters

T.R. Reid talks about the good news in U.S. healthcare

First interactive medical iPad iBook arrives in Apple’s bookstore, free to download

3 medical devices for iOS we’d like to see–plus lessons on mHealth app design

This week in news 2/11/2012

Funding related:

ALung secures $10M ahead of artifical lung system’s launch in Germany

 TigerText nabs $8.2 million to secure health text messages

Teleradiology group Foundation adds another $1M in funding

IA Ventures raises $105 million to invest in Big Data companies **

Neurostimulation company Checkpoint raises $1.7M, looks to CE Mark

M&A related:

Boston Scientific to hit the acquisitions trail | Wall Street Beat (Implication, may have shift in strategy of company products)

 IBM acquires mobile enterprise developer Worklight

Mobile Health Imaging Provider DMS Health Technologies Acquired by Platinum Equity (umph, Private Equity)

Heart monitoring company CardioNet makes $6 million acquisition

McKesson acquires peerVue

Partnerships

Greenphire and Merge Healthcare form partnership

Siemens partners with ViiV, Tocagen on new personalized medicine tests

Business:

What makes an awesome Board Member? (must read)

How to Create Realistic Financial Projections (must read)

Med tech tax: IRS releases guidance on 2.3% levy, Paulsen calls for a vote on repeal

Lumosity sees brain games taking off as 20 million sign up for mental gymnastics

Southern Illinois Healthcare taps Merge

The Most Influential Business Book Of The Last 30 Years

How Europe is Growing Health Apps (good read)

 eRx makes steady gains in California, report shows

How a medical device company used $4M in angel tax credits to land $5M

Stanford StartX Graduates Tackle Cell Therapy, Mental Health, Batteries

Survey: 27 Percent of CIOs Say their Firms Already have Mobile Apps While 22 Percent are Planning one

Good Reads:

Texting helps with at-risk pregnancies, Partners plans to expand program

Check-Cap X-ray Radar Pill Sliding Toward Commercial Introduction

Remote monitoring system gets important upgrade in the UK, including physician notifications

Why we need to go from e-patient to i-patient

Eric Topol: Patients Need To Demand, “Show Me My Data!”

Big pharma marketing could teach the FDA about communication

iPads and health care – health IT managers slow down physicians’ clinical adoption

The real reason why physician groups want to keep using ICD-9 codes

Two Studies Find that Patients Want Access to their Health Records, Including Clinical Pathology Test Data

NASA nanosensor sniffing technology adapted for smartphones, could be used for disease detection (same tech from last week, but another news perspective)

PositiveID’s FDA-Cleared “iGlucose” System Gains AT&T Certification and Access to its Network

IT giant India can’t digitise medical records, say docs (spelling error and all)

Endosync brings cloud-based wireless endoscopy to the iPad: iMedicalApps exclusive hands on review

Few SMS health applications have been evaluated

March launch for SkyLight’s smartphone-microscope adapter

Next generation health IT is not anchored to a desk

Gympact takes a different approach to healthy incentives: get fit or get fined

Best Practices: How mHealth Can Decrease Readmissions (we see this over and over again, but still good info)

No, the FDA is not assaulting mobile technology, Washington Times editorial misguided (good read)

UCLA and eResearchTechnology launch remote health monitoring study for COPD (would love to see the results!)

Demand exceeds supply for some health IT jobs

Software is about to eat chronic disease and save us $2 Trillion per year

This week in news 02/03/2012

Funding related:

Glooko Raises $3.5M To Connect Glucose Meters To iPhones For Tracking Diabetes

Bain Capital Ventures closes new $600 million fund (related because they invest in healthtech)

Venture investment in Midwest healthcare startups rose 10% last year

drchrono moves to next level with $2.8M investment

Health IT firm Infina Connect closing in on $1.2M fundraise

M&A related:

McKesson buys into Canada pharma network for $1.2B

Partnerships:

iRobot grows alliance with inTouchHealth (Including a 6 million dollar investment)

Business:

US$ 1.3 billion: The market for mHealth applications in 2012

Expert says HIT mergers must be transparent

Medicare Advantage premiums down 7 percent on average, enrollment up 10 percent

mHealth Alliance Opens Membership to Organizations with Vested Interest in Mobile Health

For iPad to succeed in medicine, significant software innovation needed

Docs use iPads, but don’t see them as game-changers

Why It’s Good News HealthIT is So Bad

IBM’s Watson, Cedars-Sinai and WellPoint Take On Cancer

Juniper Research: Usage of Remote Health Monitoring to Reach 3M by 2016

What Makes An Awesome Board Member?

Minnesota: A healthy appreciation for HIT

Healthcare employment growth predicted to skyrocket through 2020

Good reads:

PDAs assist in learning process of undergraduate clinical students, but smartphones deemed more favorable

We are all health illiterates: navigating the health system in a sea of paper and financial haze

Analytics and the future of healthcare

The iPad v. LCD monitor for diagnostic imaging (Morning Read)

mEducation: A new way of learning

Startup converts massive medical text to interactive iPad form

Healthcare Technology: A Competitive Advantage in Improving the Patient Experience

QuantiaMD launches tool to combat physician burnout

Physicians lack brand loyalty, cost pharma billions (Note: implications is that this can possibly translate into mhealth/digital health areas, albeit unlikely.)

Unique Health Startup UnitedPreference Plans to Use Tailored Spend to Incentivize Healthy Choices

Healthcare IT Needs More Crazy CIOs

Website Smackdown: Mayo Clinic vs. Cleveland Clinic (more website design, helpful for those that want to make a better website)

5 books early stage biotech and pharma entrepreneurs should read

4 reasons patients aren’t managing their care

Effects of a short text message reminder system on emergency department length of stay

Study: Virtual coach improves activity levels for overweight, obese

Quantified Selfers, Imagine a Day When You Won’t Quantify Anything

This Is NASA’s Cancer-Sniffing Cellphone Sensor

This week in news 1/27/2012

Funding related:

Don’t be fooled. Funding for early-stage biotechs is suffering

Venture capitalists remain bullish on medical devices, healthcare IT

FitBit raises $12M for personal fitness-tracking devices

The future of healthcare investing: Q&A with Chrysalis Ventures’ Alan Ying

Drchrono Raises $2.8M From Yuri Milner And Others To Help Bring Medical Records To The iPad

M&A related:

Healthcare M&A spending rises 11 percent in 2011

Healthcare IT and pharma M&A strongly supported by investment firms in 2011

Partnerships:

Allscripts aligns with M*Modal

Challenges:

Verisign Announces Internet Infrastructure Grant Program

McKesson Foundation Launches “Mobilizing for Health” Research Grant

J&J’s Janssen Launches $250,000 Challenge to Improve Transition Care

Business:

Six Lessons in Entrepreneurship

Why You Need an Advisory Board

Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart, Rich, Or Pretty

12 tips for mobile health randomized controlled trials

Five Common Flaws in Mobile Marketing Strategies
Good reads:

Mobile is doctor’s helper as technology revolutionizes medicine

Social media role in tracking virus may become a model for future

Should Every Patient Have a Unique ID Number for All Medical Records?

Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012

Mobile tools help physicians, patients track medication adherence

Report: Healthcare only accounted for 1% of data breaches in 2010

US government to require device manufacturers to disclose payments to doctors

Could self-tracking lead to mobile hypochondria?

Innovative technologies can markedly enhance safety

Telehealth Reimbursement by Medicare to Increase, Possibly by as much as 25 Percent

AT&T offers to secure tablets, messages for healthcare

Can a Smartphone-Based Ultrasound Raise $4 Million?

UnitedHealthcare mobile app to manage patient prescriptions

5 points concerning patient engagement and health IT

Gaming for Better Health

How Humana became a leader in mobile engagement, interview with Julie Kling

How Healthcare is Helping the US Economy

Quest Diagnostics seeks to grow its healthcare IT business

Kaiser Permanente Takes Millions Of Medical Records Mobile With New Android App

Blue Shield California looks to mobile to engage members

GE Centricity Advance Ceasing Operations

Healthcare CEOs map out their view of the future

How Many People Go Online For Pharma Info?

West Wireless launches health policy center in Washington DC

mHealth Regulatory Coalition Asks FDA to Revamp and Republish 2nd Draft of mHealth App Guidelines

Chopra resigns from White House

 

This week in news 1/20/2012

Funding / Acquisitions:

Sharecare acquires Little Blue Book, raises $14M

Partnerships:

Microsoft, Healthrageous join Ford to research in-car health monitoring

QuadMed partners with MDLiveCare on telehealth initiative

Interesting:

Health IT company with cancer treatment tool rebrands for expansion

Is Your Leadership Innovative?

 

I am pivoting back.

When I first started this blog, it was in hopes of writing more about business and less about news, with my core being the mobile health list. (Which I will soon rename into the digital health list.) However, at the beginning of the new year, there has been an amazing amount of news with partnerships, fundings and others, which have caught my eye. This shall be no more.

From now I am going to try pivot back to my original intention. I would still like to be a news source in the future, but as of now I would need to either dedicate time to one or the other.

What does this mean?

1. I am going to do weekly updates on partnerships, VC funding, Product launches, M&A and Exits instead of keeping up with the daily humdrum releases. Eventually I would want to push news faster, but now is not the time.

2. The mHealth / Digital Health list will be updated more frequently

3. There will be far less posts, but the density of information would be higher.

I hope you all bear with me during this transition. Thus far this site has already been wildly successful and making an impact.

Richard Holm

IPO Q4 2011 values released by PWC

In short, healthcare IPOs were decreased from eight (Q4 2010) to three (Q4 2011) but value was higher on average at 264 million vs 686 million respectively.

Also in the report, PWC feels that the IPO market is coming back, while the overall deals were low it is slowly coming back.

Below are the values of all IPOs from 2008

To read more, go to their site here.

 

2011 VC investment up 22% to $28.4 billion USD (compared to last year)

PWC Moneytree and NVCA released values today on the VC situation. In general VC investment has increased to 28.4 billion USD in 3,673 deals. But

“While venture capital investment grew in 2011, it is important to note that deal volume growth
did not keep pace with dollar growth,” said Mark Heesen, president of NVCA.

While the data discusses about all sectors, my primary focus is on healthcare. Biotechnology investment in 2011 was at 4.7 billion USD in 446 deals (average 10 mil per deal). Medical devices investment is at 4.3 billion in 323 deals (average 13 mil per deal). Information for the HIT sector was not included, if anything it would have been batched with IT.

Medical devices + Biotechnoloy amounted for 27% of total fundings.

Full Press Release from PWC is at PWCMoneytree: 2011(PDF)

This week in news

A few notable articles:

Healthcare Delivers Technical Knockout at CES – Forbes by Dan Murno

Things Entrepreneurs Should Avoid When Raising Capital – Techcrunch by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

Mobile health is dead. Call it digital health every time – MedCity News by Chris Seper

Enabling Collaborative Healthcare Delivery – Whitepaper by MobileHealthcareToday