PingMD, a New York startup, initially launched a few years ago as an app to help digitally-savvy parents communicate with their kids’ pediatricians. But after analyzing how tens of thousands of patients and doctors were communicating during their pilot, they decided to expand their scope. This month, they relaunched their app for iOS and Android as a service that enables doctors to securely communicate with their patient, as well as peers. And on Wednesday, the company said it had raised $2.5 million from angel investors, including Matthew & Stewart Greenfield, Ernest Pomerantz and Jessica Nagle. The round follows $1.33 million raised last year.

According to a 2010 New England Journal of Medicine study analyzing communication in a Philadelphia doctor’s practice, the average doctor in that practice took 24 phone calls a day and wrote 17 emails on top of seeing a full load of patients, processing their prescriptions, reviewing lab reports and completing all the other tasks that come with the territory.

“There’s a lot of call volume going on,” said CEO Dr. Gopal Chopra, who co-founded PingMD with his wife Dr. Manju Chopra. “And the indirect cost is the time spent trying to get you [the patient] an answer.”

Even though electronic medical records and digital practice management tools can enable doctors to look up patient information and history more efficiently, Chopra said the call volume can be difficult for doctors. And that’s especially true for those doctors who are open to emailing or messaging with patients through mobile phones or other more secure services.

Through PingMD, doctors can enable patients to securely message them with text, as well as relevant pictures and video, and they can easily loop in other doctors and nurses in their practices as well as other specialists.

For example, if you have a weird rash on your arm, you could send a note and picture to your doctor and then she could reply with her feedback, as well as add a dermatologist to the circle.

While Chopra estimates that response times on email and other secure messaging systems tends to average 72 hours because the message is routed through an administrator and then the doctor, the average response time on PingMD is an hour (although it can take from a few seconds to several hours depending on the severity of the case).

To make money, PingMD takes a software-as-a-service approach, billing itself to hospitals and physician networks as a way to gather data about how doctors are communicating and spending their time and how the hospital should allocate their resources. At the moment, Chopra said they’re piloting PingMD with several institutions and physician networks.

The startup is one of several companies attempting to help doctors improve their productivity and prepare for an influx of new Obamacare patients. American Well and Sherpaa, for example, work with employers to help patients and doctors connect via video chats and phone calls. HealthTap targets consumers with a service for messaging and querying a network of doctors. And Ringadoc offers doctors a simple service for handling after-hours calls and streamlining patient communication.

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According to a recent Reuters article, parents in several states are up in arms about inBloom, a $100 million project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and others to create a massive database of student data. In fact, it said that parents in New York and Louisiana, as well as the Massachusetts chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and Parent-Teacher Association, had written to state officials in protest, citing privacy and security fears.

But while privacy and security concerns are certainly warranted (information about children is obviously not to be handled lightly), supporters of the project say they believe that by shifting the conversation from risks to benefits, those fears could be assuaged — and some say the health care industry can provide a positive example.

On a panel Monday at the SXSWedu education technology conference in Austin, Stephen Coller, a senior program officer at the Gates Foundation closely tied to inBloom, said the electronic medical records (EMR) legislation that accompanied the stimulus package played a crucial role in elevating public discussion and action around patient access to their data, and he’d like to see something comparable happen in education.

Privacy concerns related to health data certainly continue and, he acknowledged, the EMR effort is still in early days. But Coller emphasized that electronic records helped raise public dialogue around patient data and empower people to believe that they should be able to access their data.

“Unless you give parents access to data and you make them aware that they should have access to data, we’re not going to make fundamental progress on this issue,” he said. “We seem to be heading in the right direction in health care, the debate in education shouldn’t be that different.”

Right now, the conversation around privacy and student data is full of misinformation and irrationality, he said, and too many schools believe it’s only the vendors, not the parents and schools, who own student data — but by focusing on outcomes he hopes that could change.

Already, companies like Bellevue, Wash.-based Dreambox Learning are showing how adaptive lessons and real-time reporting can personalize instruction. Startups like Kickboard and Civitas are starting to show schools and parents the value of capturing and analyzing student data. And, at SXSWedu this week, several vendors are demonstrating the applications of inBloom (we’ll have more on that later this week.)

But Coller raised another interesting idea: a “digital student report card” (which, he said, President Obama once surfaced on the campaign trail in 2008) that, like an EMR, would give parents a digital record of their child’s educational progress.

“The notion that every student in this country is entitled to a digital report card, to me, seems like a fundamental civic right and strikes me as non-controversial,” he told me after the panel. “To any parent in the system, it would seem like a sensible idea – it’s their child, their school system, their tax dollars. The fact that they don’t have a line of sight into where their students are… has to improve. And I think it begins with putting more power in the hands of parents and caregivers.”

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Founded in 2011, 100Plus last month launched a mobile app that combines data analytics and game mechanics to encourage people to engage in healthy activities.

In the acquisition, 100Plus’ five-person team will join Practice Fusion’s data and product development teams, with Chris Hogg, co-founder of 100Plus, becoming the associate vice president of data science. The company would not share financial details.

Ryan Howard, Practice Fusion’s CEO, who is also a co-founder of 100Plus, said he and Hogg first met a couple of years ago when Practice Fusion challenged about 50 teams to hack anonymized patient records to come up with interesting applications. Hogg created a tool that found patients’ “health twins” and then predicted their future health based on the trajectories of those twins – an application not so unlike 100Plus, which similarly generates health predictions based on datasets, from sources like 100Plus and the CDC, and user behavior.

Practice Fusion, which entrepreneurs named in a recent survey as the health tech startup most likely to hit a $1 billion valuation in the next five years, offers doctors’ offices free electronic medical records software but plans to build out patient-facing consumer applications.

“We’ll be launching other consumer apps and we see 100Plus as dovetailing beautifully with that,” said Howard, adding that while the 100Plus app will continue to exist in its current form, they’re not sure if it will be a standalone app or live within the Practice Fusion umbrella.

Although older companies like eClinicalWorks and AllScripts dominate the electronic health records industry, Practice Fusion offers doctors a free version of what can be expensive software (the Practice Fusion version is paid for with advertising) and its plan has been to out-innovate rivals. With 100Plus, it could give patients a mobile app that feels more like a consumer app than a clinical tool to facilitate communication with doctors. For example, with beautiful photography and fun language, the app currently prompts users to “drink more water” or “walk your neighborhood” and Howard said those prompts could ultimately come from doctors through Practice Fusion.

Since launching, Howard said 100Plus has shown impressive outcomes in a pilot with a large system, and it has raised $1.25 million from Greylock Partners, Felicis Ventures, Band of Angels and Founders Fund.

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A recent survey from InterWest Partners compared the perspectives of health tech entrepreneurs and investors on areas of opportunities and challenges in health care information technology.  When asked “which companies are most likely to be worth over $1 billion within the next five years?” both groups ranked Practice Fusion, Castlight Health and ZocDoc in the top three (although investors put more weight behind Castlight and entrepreneurs gave more votes to Practice Fusion). But what was most interesting is that, while just five percent of entrepreneurs said that none of the companies would hit a $1 billion valuation, nearly one-quarter of investors indicated the same thing.

Writing about the results, InterWest’s executive-in-residence Michelle Snyder (who created the survey), explored a few possible reasons behind the split. She wrote:

It could be that those well-versed in the realities of healthcare IT investing realize how difficult it is to scale quickly, gain dominance and/or navigate the regulatory and reimbursement environment. It might be the realization that most good companies get acquired before they get the chance to reach $1 billion (Humedica being the most recent example). Or it could just be that some of them were shareholders in many of the high-profile, healthcare technology companies of the bubble 1.1 era who promised IPO filings but ended up with Chapter 11 filings.

Investor caution in health tech could also be connected to more general concerns that the venture capital market is shifting (or broken, as some say) and that too much money flooding to startups at early stages could leave tons of startups in the deadpool.

InterWest’s survey, which included 140 entrepreneurs and 50 investors, showed that the two groups are divided on other topics as well.  Both groups agreed that big data/analytics will be a hot area for investment (more than 50 percent of investors and entrepreneurs indicated this). But investors said they plan to put more money behind insurance exchange/benefit selection, care coordination and clinical-decision (as Snyder notes, these are areas that will see growing markets thanks to the Affordable Care and HITECH Acts), while entrepreneurs expected to see more investment in telehealth and mobile diagnostics.

Also, while both groups said that engineers are the hardest candidates to recruit, about 30 percent of investors and just over ten percent of entrepreneurs said that CEOs are difficult to find.

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But New York-based Hello Health is one company trying to change that with an electronic health records (EHR) platform that helps doctors and patients make the shift to digital.

The company on Monday announced that it had raised $11.5 million from First Generation Capital, which follows a $10 million round raised last year.

As more doctors move their patients’ health information online – incentivized by the federal government – Hello Health says it offers physicians a platform that is not only free, but helps them earn additional revenue.

Through its Web-based system, physicians can share lab results and other information with patients in a HIPAA-secure environment, as well as enable patients to schedule appointments and upload documents. But instead of charging physicians (like many of its older rivals), Hello Health charges patients a monthly subscription fee of $5. Hello Health takes a percentage of the fee and the physician gets the remainder.

“It’s more of a partnership than a simple SaaS model,” said Steven Ferguson, vice president of physician marketing for Hello Health.

With the new funding, Ferguson said the company, which is a subsidiary of Quebec-based Myca Health, plans to build out new features, including those to better manage patients’ medical charts and streamline referrals.

When it launched in 2008, Hello Health was intended to be more of a consumer-friendly concierge service. (And, interestingly, one of Hello Health’s original co-founders, Dr. Jay Parkinson, has gone on to launch Sherpaa, a concierge-like service, paid for by employers, that provides round-the-clock access to doctors.) But later, Hello Health pivoted into its current version.

While Hello Health may offer doctors an interesting business model, it has many competitors in the EHR industry, including public companies Allscripts and Cerner, and rising startup Practice Fusion, which also offers physicians a free option.

Image by RTimages via Shutterstock.

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Resilient’s technology is targeted at enabling the transfer of health records and other related information safely and securely over the Internet, CEO Kirk Loevner told me in an interview this week. The company has developed three proprietary software products that make up what it calls a “trust network” to allow healthcare providers to transfer information over the web.

Resilient, which started building its technology four years ago, has thus far funded its operations with angel investment money. The company will use its new backing to expand its development team and move toward full deployment of its products, Loevner said.

Resilient claims its technology gives the company an edge over other players in the medical records transfer space. “We actually have a very unique approach to this problem,” Loevner said. “All the traditional solutions out there trying to do health information exchange are really about point-to-point integrations, which doesn’t scale well on a national level, or Software-as-a-Service approaches, which can have trust and security issues.” With Resilient’s cloud-based distributed network model, each data owner can set the policy around who accesses what information, and the data can be easily brought up for auditing and metering purposes, he said.

According to Loevner, Resilient has built a generalized technology platform that could have applications in media, government, and defense. Resilient decided to focus its efforts on optimizing for the healthcare field because it’s an area sorely in need of tech innovation. “Healthcare is such a huge market, and it’s the most broken when it comes to information exchange,” Loevner said. “It was truly ripe for change.”

Indeed, although the healthcare industry’s adoption of technology is still in the nascent stages, the tech industry has started to take note of the current market opportunity in the space. With America’s aging population bringing a bigger focus on healthcare innovation, more tech startups, and more venture capital investors, are sure to crop up to meet the growing demand to bring hospitals into the 21st century.

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The health care system generates huge amounts of data: patient records, biomedical research, insurance claims. Data and the ability to manage large amounts of it is a major concern for hospitals, insurers and researchers. But cloud computing offers each of these players a potentially more cost-effective alternative to traditional data storage and management solutions.

The federal government’s recent moves to stimulate cost savings and greater efficiencies in the health care sector have focused on the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) in physician practices as a means to not only save money, but also to reduce medical errors and improve coordination of care. Cloud computing is a crucial part of health information exchanges, which allow health care providers, such as hospitals and individual medical practices, to integrate EMRs and better coordinate care if a patient needs to seek treatment in another city or from outside the network. Cloud-based EMRs promise to be disruptive innovations to traditional EMRs, which many small physician practices consider too expensive and complex.

Increasingly we find cloud-computing players — including SalesForce, Amazon, Dell, IBM and GE — offering such health care solutions in the cloud to address the needs of the health sector.

Despite the promise of substantial savings and improved quality of care, there are numerous challenges to address before cloud computing becomes the norm. Moving forward, vendors will need to address critical impact areas to build the trust of the health care sector include:

• Knowing when encryption is available in the cloud once the networks scale. Encryption adds to cloud-computing suppliers’ overhead costs. Some vendors, it is feared, may cut corners on encryption as services scale, exposing users to a greater level of risk in order to cut costs.
• In-house security for traditional IT services vs. out-sourcing the security function to cloud suppliers. Vendors will need to build trust and prove to customers that they are capable of providing the necessary level of security that can withstand outside hacks and security breaches.
• Private vs. public clouds for health data. Many fear that sharing a platform in a public cloud would compromise privacy regulations. Over the next several years, cloud suppliers will be working to meet the requirements of the HITECH Act that regulates the manner in which health data must be stored in the cloud.
• Personal Health Records. For now, many health players are watching the manner in which cloud computing plays out with PHRs before they rush headlong into adoption on the cloud for EMRs, given the greater complexity of EMRs across an entire medical practice.
• Banking and financial services. The health care sector could learn much from these areas; many privacy and security issues are similar. While HIPAA is often used in discussions of cloud computing to put a brake on things, in reality, HIPAA does not necessarily count out cloud computing.

Read the full post here.

Image source: flickr user Kable

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