Last week, he released a “personal API” that includes his own check-in data from Foursquare, along with information about his sleep, weight, steps and activity. At the Health Datapalooza in Washington, DC on Tuesday, he shed a little more light on to why he’s going public with such private data.

Since college, he said, he’s been a careful record-keeper of all kinds of personal information, creating special systems for logging everything from the books he’s read and the movies he’s watched to the lines of code he’s written and the runs he’s taken.

But all that data exists in isolation, making it difficult to draw out patterns and extract interesting value from it. By putting it all in one place and opening it up publicly, he said he hopes he can start a broader conversation about personal tracking and uncover more uses for Quantified Self-type data.

“I thought, let me just get the data out there and maybe my buddies and other interesting developers and hackers can make something of it,” he said. “Maybe they might notice something — some patterns in the data — that I hadn’t otherwise noticed myself.”

Selvadurai’s project reflects a broader trend toward making sense of disparate personal health data streams. Last week, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) launched the Health Data Exploration project to encourage individuals, companies and scientific researchers to join forces around the use of personal health data. And the Open mHealth initiative is another non-commercial effort aimed at enabling health data integration. Startups Tictrac and Human API are similarly interested in helping people find value in their personal data (although they tackle the problem in different ways).

At the Datapalooza, Selvadurai said that, in a way, behavior in the pro-sharing Quantified Self movement parallels that found on general social media outlets.

“We’re all trying to live like Hollywood,” he said. “In the Hollywood of old, [celebrities were] living in the public eye… [with] social media, we’re kind of emulating that but we’re our own paparazzi and Quantified Self data is a little bit like that.”

He also added that new tracking technologies are enabling the masses to improve themselves in the same way elite athletes do.

“[For athletes], everything is logged… and your coach knows it and your trainer knows it and that’s how you get to better performance,” he said. “And now we have access to the same tools athletes have to do these things.”

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After holding chief technology positions with the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland, last year he was appointed Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Health and Human Services. Ahead of a trip back West, Sivak talked with me about how open data (an increasingly hot topic in government) can drive big changes in health care, where digital health is evolving and why entrepreneurs should give DC a try. Take a look at a (lightly edited) transcript of our chat.

GigaOM: You went from fast-paced Silicon Valley to bureaucratic Washington, DC, what was the biggest adjustment challenge?  

Sivak: The most disconcerting thing, at first, is that because you’re working for an entity that is essentially operating on behalf of the taxpayer, there is this constant spotlight shining on the work that you do. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. In fact, I think it’s great — it’s the reason that, I think, I and a lot of other people actually do it. But you very quickly get used to it — you just kind of take it in stride.

GigaOM: At the SXSW Interactive conference you talked about how government can learn “Lean Startup” principles and other Valley-style ways of thinking. What can the Valley learn from DC?

Sivak: I’m a big fan of disruption and bending or breaking the rules to do interesting things. But, at the same time, I think it’s important to realize that there are some rules that are there for a reason and, in many cases, disruption needs a partner called sustainability. I exist in this massive agency right now — 90,000 people work for HHS — and while I’d love to activate the potential of every person there, it’s important to recognize that there are people who are well-suited and who actually should be working on the sustainability aspect … keeping the trains on time and that sort of stuff.  That’s something that’s often overlooked by people who come to it strictly from the Valley mindset.

GigaOM: You’re speaking to a group of entrepreneurs, programmers and designers at the Health Refactored conference [this] week about innovation in health care. HHS has put a lot of effort into opening up health data – which is obviously an important first step – but what else needs to happen to spur innovation?

Sivak: It’s a massively complex ecosystem and environment. [And] one of the things we can do as experts in this area and the government is help by educating people, by doing a better job of describing our data sets, by doing a better job or doing a job or basically explaining the problems that we have and the problems that we want to see solved. There are millions of examples out there of things that can be worked out but people just don’t know there are problems and don’t know it’s something that should be worked on. And that’s a place we can help.

GigaOM: It’s barely a year into your tenure at HHS. But when you look at where we need to go, how far along are we on the progress bar?

Sivak: We’re just at the very tip of the iceberg here. We’ve been working on this for a few years now, long before I got there. My predecessor Todd Park, now the CTO of the United States, kicked off the idea of the data that HHS has as being critical to revolutionizing the system. A few years ago, we started the process of data liberation — changing the default setting from closed to open within the department. That’s been the big focus and I think we’ve been successful with that but there are still pockets of resistance where people just don’t really understand what the value is and there are other complications, such as privacy restrictions and things we have to take very seriously.

GigaOM: What has to happen next?

Sivak: There are two other phases we have to start working on. The first one is around dissemination of that data – we have a website called healthdata.gov and it’s the one-stop shop for HHS data. To date, we’ve probably catalogued 40 percent of the data sets that exist at HHS, about 400+ data sets, and a much smaller number, 34 or so, have APIs attached to them. There’s still work to be done of the dissemination side, and that also includes some questions we’re wrestling with now. For example, an important feature should be an area where people can come and collaborate and discuss and ask questions and get answers. And we’re trying to decide whether that kind of forum should happen on our government website or on a third-party website that’s charged with potentially building that community.

The [other] piece is data education – explaining data better, teaching people how to work with the data in a better way and connecting people with experts in a relatively regular fashion so they can get answers to their questions, understand the best ways to use the data, etc.

GigaOM: Judging by booming investment, accelerator programs, startup launches, and other activity in the sector, digital health seems to be seeing a lot of innovation, but what kinds of innovation do you think are missing?

Sivak: The beauty of it is that it’s a massive industry and there’s so much room for people to innovate it’s insane. Some areas that I’m personally interested in and I think are interesting to the department, off the top of my head: there are tons of people running around right now with devices generating personal health-related data from Jawbones, Fitbits (see disclosure), mobile phones that capture stuff, you name it. But that data, right now, is very inactionable. There’s no advice, no pro-active suggestions, none of that – that’s one big area.

And integrating that personal health-generated data with clinical data, i.e. the stuff that your doctor generates, is massively interesting. Imagine that you have some kind of chronic condition, like diabetes, wouldn’t it be interesting if you stepped on a scale every morning or took your blood glucose everyday and that got automatically transmitted to your doctor? And the system that your doctor has in his or her office alerts him or her if you have some kind of a problem or if your stats are going in the wrong direction, so they can intervene early? I think that’s a massive area.

Also, nobody has figured out patient engagement yet. And there are some people out there, myself included, who believe that the patient is the single untapped resource in healthcare right now.

GigaOM: How can open data help support health reform and Obamacare?

Sivak: Data is one of the absolutely critical components to reforming our health care system. The big challenge with our system today is we exist in this transactional, fee-for-service environment. When you see your doctor see you in [her] office or he or she performs a procedure or test, they get paid for those things. The problem with that is the incentives are somewhat backward – it incentivizes transactions. It incentivizes people to go in to be treated when they’re sick, as opposed to being kept healthy. In order to fix it, we have to move to a system where we pay for value and outcomes.

In order to do that, we need the data. If we don’t have the data in terms of what happens when somebody gets treated with a certain drug or what kind of drug interactions exist or how effective a specific treatment is, then we’re never going to be able to incentivize the providers to do the right thing, And if you’re a provide or a doctor you’re not going to be able to figure out what the right thing to do is. Liberating this data is incredibly important to fixing the system.

GigaOM: Every though there’s been a lot of buzz about the Affordable Care Act, there’s still a lot of ignorance out there. A recent survey found that 42 percent of people polled didn’t even know it’s a law. How can data help people understand health reform?

Sivak: What that [survey] indicates is that we need to do a much better job talking about it and marketing the value of it. I think the way we can do that is through interesting and creative uses of the data. People don’t remember statistics… but when you tell the stories with the data, that’s what they start to remember. I heard a great quote the other day, which is perfect for this: the singular of data is anecdote. That’s what we have to get to if we want to sell the value of this thing.

GigaOM: What are some of the most interesting or promising uses of the data you’ve seen so far? 

Sivak: For the first time [last week], we released [hospital pricing data] in an easy-to-access public format. [It’s] the actual prices that hospitals charge Medicare for the top 100 procedures across the country and [it shows] that the prices that hospitals charge, even when they’re right next to each other are wildly different. It’s crazy. But here’s a fun little statistic: in the first day that this data set was available online, we had 110,000 downloads.

Another one of my favorite examples is what [healthcare data journalist] Fred Trotter is doing. I love [it], not necessarily because the work that he’s doing to build this social graph of doctors will determine anything interesting, but the fact that he had this idea. That he’s not a medical professional or a subject matter expert and he had this idea to take these two random numbers in a claim and use them for something that could potentially be interesting is what I think is incredibly indicative of the power of the stuff and bringing people in who are not subject matter experts.

GigaOM: You’re not just trying to convince entrepreneurs in the Valley and elsewhere to work on digital health, you’re trying to recruit them to work in government (at least temporarily).  What does DC offer that the Valley can’t?

Sivak: This is actually a very simple answer: because we can give you the opportunity to solve, literally, the most pressing problem in American society today.

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The amount of funding put toward health tech companies in January was up 172 percent over the same time last year, according to StartUp Health Insights, the database run by New York-based StartUp Health Academy, Investors poured nearly $272 million into 47 deals, with the biggest deal topping $45 million.

Here is a graphical snapshot of some of the January highlights:

Key takeaways:

• About a third of the funding went to seed stage and A-round companies, and more incubators and strategic investors are moving in at the early rounds — not just venture capitalists, who traditionally invest early on.
• The hottest sectors were data and analytics, mobile health and telehealth — all areas that are attracting attention as industry players look for ways to reduce costs, engage consumers and show outcomes.
• The most active investor was the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, which made three investments in January.
• On average, Series D rounds are 154 percent larger than they were at the same time last year, which StartUp Health says is consistent with a recent trend of many venture capitalists in the sector taking less risk by investing at later stages.

What new trends will we see in 2013? DNA laser printing and more sophisticated connected sensor technology, for example, are both just beginning to gain traction, saidUnity Stoakes, president and co-founder of StartUp Health. “One interesting thing to watch for will be the sources of funding for these early stage companies as capital shifts from life sciences and biotech to health tech and strategic investors become more active,” he said.

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That’s where Tictrac comes in. The U.K.-based startup, which launched in closed beta in April, aggregates data from all kinds of services — from apps like Runkeeper and Withings (which tracks weight, sleep and heart rate) to Facebook and Twitter  — to provide a personal dashboard of all your activity.

Specific apps and tools, such as FitBit or Sleepio already track and identify patterns within one kind of data stream. But TicTrac integrates with 30 APIs (with 50 more on the way) to enable people to understand the relationships between the various parts of their lives, in hopes of helping them accomplish goals and make better decisions.

“Life isn’t a silo,” said Blinder. “What’s affecting you in one aspect of your life will affect you in another.”

Through Tictrac, a user attempting to shed a few pounds could monitor his weight against his sleep patterns, physical activity, stress level and meals to see which factors may be contributing to weight change.  Or a runner could similarly look at his performance in the context of other internal factors, like sleep and stress, and external factors, like the weather and the music he listens to, to figure out how to improve.

Pairing those who create data with those who interpret it

The platform’s clean design and and infographic-heavy dashboard takes an almost Pinterest-style approach to displaying all of a user’s personal data. But in addition to just showing and aggregating a user’s personal data for self-reflection, Tictrac helps people organize their data around “projects” that range from losing weight and eating better to monitoring the development of a newborn and correcting posture.

Beyond helping people organize their data for themselves, Tictrac plans to pair users with data-driven coaches, doctors, teachers and other experts who can further personalize projects and draw custom insights from the data. For example, a patient suffering from migraines could choose to share that information with his doctor or someone on a weight loss plan could share online food diaries with a nutritionist.

No ‘ads’, but brand-sponsored projects

That kind of open environment also gives brands an opportunity to engage with users in an ongoing way, Blinder said. While the site doesn’t allow outright ads, it would let Huggies, for example, provide a project targeting new parents learning to care for a newborn or Gatorade offer a project for budding athletes looking to improve their performance.

Considering all the data flowing through the site, one concern for users could certainly be privacy, especially when it comes to relationships with advertisers. But Blinder said that unlike social networks, Tictrac makes no claim on a users’ data.  Users choose who gets to see their data and if they close an account, Tictrac will delete the data.

Over the past few years, the Quantified Self movement has steadily gained traction. But while its numbers are growing, it’s still mostly just enthusiasts who take the time to monitor and measure their every bodily function and activity, in addition to patients dealing with chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension who need to track their vital signs for medical reasons.  Ginger.io, a Boston-based startup, combines smartphone calling and location data, which it uses to help predict behavior changes, with patient-reported data to help healthcare providers and researchers support diabetes patients.  And Healthrageous, another Boston startup, targets enterprises with a platform that helps people with diabetes, hypertension and other chronic conditions monitor their different data streams and receive personalizedd support.

But as applications like Tictrac emerge and make it easy for those not necessarily managing a health condition to actually use the insights from their data, the Quantified Self movement could move closer to the mainstream.  Lift, the self-help app backed by Obvious Corp., similarly takes a general approach to life-tracking but requires users to input the data in the app instead of integrating with third-party apps.

To date, Tictrac has taken no venture capital funding and is still in closed beta with users in the five-digits. But if you’re one for resolutions, get ready because the startup aims to launch more widely around the start of the new year.

Image by Angela Waye via Shutterstock.

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In an article in the latest issue of Wired magazine, he argues that, in healthcare, “1950s-era thinking still rules the day, and irrational and inexplicable pricing is routine.”

“The health care industry plays a gigantic game of Blind Man’s Bluff, keeping patients in the dark while asking them to make life-and-death decisions. The odds that they will make the best choice are negligible and largely depend on chance. Patients need to have data, including costs and their own medical histories, liberated and made freely available for thorough analysis. What health care needs is a window sticker—a transparent, good-faith effort at making prices clear and setting market forces to work,” he writes.

Grove’s interest in healthcare isn’t new. Over the past couple of decades, after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and later Parkinson’s disease, he has not only invested millions in research, but supported a an innovation-minded graduate health program and become an impassioned advocate of reform.

In his latest piece, he says that healthcare costs have climbed, even as technology in the field – which typically drives efficiency – has advanced.

Entrenched biases among doctors and policy-driven investment patterns are partly to blame, Grove argues, but he adds that consolidation among healthcare providers only exacerbates the situation by further hindering data transparency.

What’s needed, he explains, is a “digital sticker” reminiscent of the so-called “Monroney stickers” glued to the windows of new cars.

Startups like Castlight, Simplee, CakeHealth and others are beginning to bring more price transparency to consumers by helping them comparison shop for healthcare providers and breakdown their medical bills and insurance claims into more understandable charges.

But Grove envisions new tools, reliant on computers developed explicitly for this purpose, that are even more comprehensive and provide information in real time. That will only happen if the healthcare industry, led by doctors, changes its mindset, he said, but the role of the patient is also critical.

At the Wired Health Conference in New York Tuesday afternoon, Grove spoke with Wired executive editor Thomas Goetz via Skype and, when asked where that motivation for change will come from, he simply replied: “From you and I being sufficiently pissed.”

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As more self-tracking apps and devices – like the FitBit, Nike Fuelband and apps that track sleep, mood, meals and other activities – find their way to consumers, that future certainly seems more likely. But how we actually interact with all those streams of data is an open and interesting question, particularly given the fact that a minority of consumers currently take advantage of health tracking platforms and even tracking our finances (which can sometimes have more immediate consequences) can feel like a chore.

One of the visualizations of Wolfram’s activity.

At the Wired Health Conference Tuesday in New York, Wolfram was asked by Wired writer and author Steven Levy about how data from sensors and self tracking software could be incorporated into the clinical experience of the future.

“How am I going to find out what’s wrong with me… is my doctor a Genius Bar now?” Levy asked.

Wolfram replied: “People will watch their health in a way that’s a little closer to the way that they watch their financial portfolios.”

Just like fluctuations in financial data can be symptomatic of a problem with a stock, he said, patterns from personal data from sensors and devices could help alert individuals and healthcare providers to medical problems. A combination of human intelligence, experience and data could be used to diagnose a problem and then algorithmically-determined drugs and devices could be used for treatment, Wolfram added.

Already, in a less comprehensive way, that model of data interpretation is emerging to help people manage chronic conditions and achieve specific goals.

Healthrageous, a Boston-based startup we covered this week, uses data from blood glucose monitors, blood pressure cuffs, accelerometers and other health-tracking devices to provide personalized, day-to-day support for patients with diabetes, hypertension and other conditions. Tictrac, a UK-based company, aggregates a wide range of personal analytics – from social media engagement, travel and spending to physical activity and meals – to help consumers complete personal projects (such as losing weight or monitoring the development of a new baby). Ultimately, the site plans to pair consumers with data-savvy coaches who can help analyze their information to help individuals progress.

But some say self-tracking won’t make its full mark on health until it’s combined with artificial intelligence that can monitor data for us and let us know when we really need to pay attention.

At the Wired conference Monday, Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired and one of the early creators of the Quantified Self movement, said that Quantified Self technologies are still at the phase of the early computer, which wasn’t very powerful until it was married with the Internet.

“In Quantified Self, a lot of the tools that we’re talking about will have a limited kind of effect until they’re brought on to the Internet and until we have some kind of artificial intelligence to give attention to… the data we’re accumulating and alert us when the patterns are there,” he said.

Image from argus via Shutterstock. 

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But, at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco Thursday, Clint McCellan, senior director of market development for Qualcomm and president and chairman of the non-profit Continua Health Alliance, said the real value emerges when all that data can be pieced together and correlated.

Referencing Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley’s talk earlier today, McCellan told GigaOM Pro analyst Jodi Ranck, “What he was saying about maps is, I think, the same about health. When you open up a map and it’s just one-dimensional… great. What he wants to know is [how do you] make it multi-dimensional.”

Interoperability between medical devices and applications has long been an obstacle for connected health. Continua Health Alliance, which includes 240 member companies worldwide, for example, was founded to create a system of healthcare products that can share information. But using Qualcomm’s 2net Platform launched in December, as well as its software developer kit released launched last month, McCellan said, companies are starting to be able to achieve the kind of interoperability that will give patients and doctors richer pictures of a person’s health.

Instead of just collecting information about a person’s blood pressure, sleep, weight and other vital signs, doctors will be able to see how they interact and recommend behavior changes based on them.

“Right now, it’s as if you’re driving a car without out a dashboard. You have no idea how much gas you’ve got, no idea how fast you’re going – if you’re going to get a ticket,” he said. “This radically changes all that.”

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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In an announcement Monday, the Condé Nast title said it was partnering with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a conference on the intersection of health, technology and science, and the future of healthcare. The “Living by Numbers” event will be in the same vein as Wired’s 4-year-old Wired Business Conference, and comes as investments and innovation in the sector continue to rise.

Earlier this month, we reported that, according to a recent study from digital health startup accelerator Rock Health, investments in health tech are up 73 percent over the same time last year. In the past year, the “Quantified Self” movement has also gained momentum, as consumers turn to fitness- and health-tracking devices, such as the Nike Fuel Band and the FitBit, to track their steps, calories burned and other physical activity.

“There are new opportunities to share data and collect data and analyze it,” said Brian Quinn, team director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio. “We see this data as a tool for helping us achieve [better health].”

In addition to the conference, Wired said it will launch a new health-focused vertical on Wired.com to give the title’s health tech coverage a dedicated destination. A Wired spokesman said the site is in the midst of a redesign and plans to launch the health vertical close to the conference. As readers migrate away from traditional platforms, the new vertical and conference gives Wired alternative ways to earn revenue.

Some of the conference speakers include Craig Venter, founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md. and leader of a team that mapped the human genome; world record holder Ashton Eaton, who will represent the U.S. at the 2012 Summer Olympics; Stephen Wolfram, CEO and founder of Wolfram Research; and Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body.

(Image by  Christos Georghiou via Shutterstock.)

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But Tomer Shoval, co-founder and CEO of health startup Simplee, believes that if consumers have an easy way to manage their healthcare financials and identify areas for savings and errors, those figures could be shaved. Simplee, which is like a Mint for health (with extra tutorials and optimization features), launched in January 2011 to provide consumers with a platform for storing, managing and paying their health care expenses. The company today rolled out a new system that automatically detects errors in users’ medical bills.

Over the past few years, as employers and insurance companies have shifted to consumer and consumer-driven health plans with high deductibles, Shoval said, consumers’ out of pocket spending has climbed. Between 2006 and 2010, he said, the annual amount an average family pays out of pocket has increased nearly 80 percent, from $2,0000 to $3,6000.

‘Disconnect’ between what consumers pay and what they understand

“There is a disconnect between spending more and more money and not knowing anything about it,” he said. “Our mission is to make it easy and simple for you to know where your money is going and why and help you get more for less.”

When a consumer signs up for the service, Simplee connects to all of his healthcare accounts and aggregates the data from health, vision and dental records. From a consolidated dashboard, users can see all of their medical expenses (including each transaction, their medical deductible status and total spending) and make payments directly from the site.

The new error detection system automatically scans each member’s healthcare records for several of the most common types of billing issues. For example, if a patient’s co-insurance cost (the percentage of the amount split with an insurance company that the consumer pays) changes from bill to bill, Simplee algorithms will flag the discrepancy as a possible error. The system also looks for keywords indicating a preventative service (which tend to be free) and if it spots one that requires a payment, it will notify the consumer. Along with the error alert, Simplee offers consumers a recommended next step as well as a way for getting in touch with their insurer to fix the problem.

Average error detected by Simplee recovers $100

As an example, Shoval referenced a Simplee user who was overcharged by more than $900 because his insurer mistakenly charged  him out-of-network rates for a procedure that should have been covered at in-network rates. The average error the system detects is $100, he said.

Simplee is part of a growing movement to bring consumers more information and services to manage their own healthcare. While some consumers may be wary of sharing their healthcare records with an as-yet untested third party, this latest error-spotting feature could show them the benefits of giving access to their personal data. (Simplee said it is very strict about privacy and will not sell user information.) The company declined to share the number of people currently using the site, but said it currently manages about half a billion dollars in member medical visits. As an indication of engagement, Shoval said about 60 percent of the members use the site at least once every three months, with the average user paying about $1,000 in medical bills through the site annually.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which last month raised $6 million in Series A financing, is similar to startup CakeHealth, in that both companies want to make managing healthcare expenses as easy and understandable as possible for consumers. But in addition to being a bit more mature than CakeHealth (which just launched in September and has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding), Simplee has a different business model. While CakeHealth intends to take a “freemium” approach that offers a basic option to consumers but will likely charge for value-added services, Shoval said Simplee (and all of its savings optimization services) will be free to consumers. The company plans to make its money through a software-as-a-service model and partner with employers, HSA banks and FSA/HRA administrators.

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Boston-based RunKeeper, which previously raised $1.5 million, is getting the new money from Spark Capital and Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures, which are joining existing investor OATV, the venture arm of O’Reilly Media, which is also chipping in this round. The money will be used to expand RunKeeper’s 14-person team to 40 people by the end of 2012 and build out its Health Graph API, the base of its new consumer health platform. Spark’s Bijan Sabet is joining the board, and Revolution Ventures President Tige Savage is joining as a board observer.

RunKeeper started out by integrating with fitness devices and apps one at a time, and in June, opened a Health Graph API to welcome all potential partners to build off its platform. The platform now has almost 40 integrations completed, with several hundred more in development. RunKeeper isn’t just working with apps and devices; it’s integrating with companies building atop this aggregated health data, such as corporate wellness platform Limeade, fitness rewards platforms Earndit, and fitness games  start-up Fitocracy.

Jason Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of RunKeeper, said the timing is right for a consumer health platform to gather and organize all the health information flowing from new devices and apps. He said the goal for RunKeeper isn’t to pursue any one particular opportunity exclusively but remain thin and horizontal, capturing and organizing a lot of data in various categories. That, he told me, will open up a lot of opportunities for RunKeeper and other companies looking to build upon its platform:

There are all these different opportunities once you have users and data, and we want to provide the platform and foundation that others can build upon. There are all these point systems emerging focusing on running, disease management, stress, cycling or sleep. On the one hand, it’s very powerful to track, measure and learn from each part of your health, but the flip side is the more these point systems proliferate, the more fragmented the experience becomes. And something has to be the glue to tie all these systems together and provide a central view. We think there are some big companies that will emerge in this category, and we’re hoping we’re one of them.

The company made a key decision last January to temporarily eliminate the $9.99 price for its RunKeeper Pro app and quickly made the price drop permanent. That helped more than more than triple RunKeeper’s users in the past year to more than 6 million people. And it helped set RunKeeper on its course toward becoming a health platform, as it looks to track more health information than just exercise data. Since launching in 2008, RunKeeper has tracked more than 350 million health data items from its members, who have logged more than 156 million miles.

RunKeeper is making some smart moves to capitalize on the growing momentum in health apps and sensor devices. It can only grow so fast by integrating health data itself but it’s got a good shot at being the central hub for the data coming out of these devices such as Jawbone’s UP, the Basis watch, Striiv, the Q Sensor and other devices.

I think this opportunity will only grow as more companies look to wellness programs to get their workers more healthy. Corporate wellness platforms can get up to speed quickly by incorporating the data coming from RunKeeper. As Jacobs said, there are a lot of opportunities emerging in mobile health, and RunKeeper is well-positioned, I think, to take advantage of it.

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