Sure, dozens of small projects and startups on Medstartr, a health-centric crowdfunding startup, have launched successful campaigns in the mostly sub-$30,000 range. But as Patricia Salber, CEO of Health Tech Hatch, told us this week in disclosing that her site was no longer supporting crowfunding alone, getting the crowds to open up their wallets for health startups can be a tricky proposition.

For companies peddling cool devices (like the Scanadu “tricorder” and Misfit’s Shine activity tracker), crowdfunding sites can be a great option for pre-sales and gauging consumer interest. And customers respond because they know they’re getting something tangible in return for their patronage.

But for software companies starting out, especially those that aren’t consumer-oriented, crowds can be fickle and hard to reach. The pool of people interested in a given topic might be relatively small and those who can invest a lot may want more than a T-shirt, certificate or good karma for their contribution. And, while a successful crowdfunding campaign can be a data point in your favor, a lackluster campaign might not give future investors or customers the impression you’d like.

Still, that doesn’t mean health entrepreneurs shouldn’t look to the crowd for support.  In the past year, plenty of options have popped up – from general crowdfunding sites like Medstartr to equity crowdfunding startups like Angelist, Healthfundr and VentureHealth. And if you’re a cash-hungry startup, you should give them a look.

But before you do, here a few tips to consider:

Know your peeps

Before you make a request of the crowd, figure out which crowd will care the most. One of the reasons why crowdfunding in health care is so interesting and compelling is that it can give patients a bigger voice. The lion’s share of the health care dollars spent is directed by big institutions and corporations. But, through crowdfunding, patients can identify the problems they think need to be solved.

“There are highly motivated crowds in health care,” said Alex Fair, founder and CEO of Medstartr.

On his site, the more successful campaigns are able to find and appeal to the advocacy groups, corporations, agencies and other partners that can help spread the word and reach possible supporters. And the right supporters (as well as those incentivized the right way) can help further magnify a message.

Learn the landscape

Crowdfunding in health care is relatively new, but it’s still full of several, very different options. There are pros and cons to each platform and it’s worth spending the time figuring out where you want to park your campaign.

MedStartr, for example, may have ambitions of hosting million-dollar fundraising campaigns. But, for now, many of its projects ask for less than $10,000, or even $5,000 dollars and its traffic tends to hover around 30,000 visitors a month, Fair said. On the other end, Indiegogo campaigns regularly raise several hundred thousand dollars and the site is far more heavily-trafficked, but it’s not a site known for health and medicine. And it doesn’t provide the same level of marketing or promotional support as MedStartr can.

In equity crowdfunding, Angelist has more cachet among Silicon Valley investors but Healthfundr and VentureHealth, while both are only barely a months-old, could ultimately do a better job of more actively pairing health-centric investors with entrepreneurs.

Have a plan.

Sure, you’d like to think that your campaign will go viral and become and instant, organic hit. But, chances are, if you want it to go anywhere, you’ll have to put a bit of “strategery” behind it.

Medstartr will help startups with basic promotion (and provide additional marketing services for a fee). But many sites take a mostly DIY approach and, regardless of the platform, you’ll need to figure out your specific goals and a plan for achieving them.

Unity Stoakes, co-founder and president of Startup Health, for example, said Angelist can be a great way to generate momentum for a seed- or A-round ready company if they craft a smart marketing plan, including a timeline for releasing the latest commitment figures from investors.

Remember, it’s not (just) about the money

Even if you don’t reach your funding goal on a given crowdfunding site, that doesn’t mean the campaign was a failure. Crowdfunding campaigns can be a helpful way to build buzz among potential future investors and customers.

While at least 40 percent of Medstartr campaigns don’t reach their goal, Fair said companies on his site have been able to connect with dozens of helpful corporate and health partners. He also estimates that the site has lead to $9 million in investments off the site.

Brad Weinberg, co-founder of health tech accelerator Blueprint Health, said that while it’s the exception, not the rule, that a company raises a significant amount of funding directly on Angelist, he still recommends it to startups.

“It is the best way to distribute information about a fundraise with very few downsides,” he said.

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Apigee manages, monitors and optimizes mobile application programming interfaces (APIs), which act as the glue connecting technologies, services and data sources across networks. So far Apigee has focused on the mobile industry, attempting to whip into shape the different network APIs used by hundreds of different carriers and present them to developers as a simple common interface.

Now Apigee plans to go after other industries such as healthcare and the airlines. Those industries have a lot of useful information, from frequent flier miles to health records, that developers would love to access if only it weren’t so fragmented. On Thursday Apigee announced what it’s calling the API Exchange, which essentially takes the model it’s devised for telecom and applies it to any other industry.

Healthcare companies and airlines actually have a lot in common in mobile carriers, said David Andrzejek, who heads up the Exchange for Apigee. Their industries are highly regulated and dominated by multiple, very large, vertically integrated companies using proprietary technology that is unfathomable to all but the most committed developer. “The barriers are normally just too high for any developer to build anything against,” Andrzejek said.

For the mobile carriers, the problem has always been that developers couldn’t just tap into a single API to use their location, presence or payment services – developers have to tap into the separate APIs of hundreds of carriers around the world. Consequently no developer wanted to deal with carriers, further marginalizing them. The mobile industry spent years trying to develop a common set of APIs that would present a unified front to the developer world. They failed spectacularly.

When Apigee took over the GSM Association’s OneAPI program, it pretty much gave up on the dream of standardizing under a single set of carrier APIs (which makes the program’s name a bit outdated). Instead, Apigee took to connecting all of the carriers’ different APIs to a single platform and then translating them into a single meta-interface that any developer could hook into. At Mobile World Congress this year, Apigee and the GSMA presented the initial fruits of that labor: an identity-management API any app developer could use to authenticate users via their phone numbers.

It’s still early days for the OneAPI project, but Apigee feels it’s learned enough dealing with the fickle mobile carriers to take on other big complex industries. Just like the carriers, airlines and insurance companies haven’t standardized under any common APIs, and for competitive reasons they’re unlikely to do so.

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The San Francisco-based company, which provides employers with health cost comparison products, said its new pharmacy tool is meant to help users shop for the best prices on their prescriptions. It allows them to search across different variables, including pharmacies, mail-order, generic/brand, quantity and other factors.

According to Consumer Reports, the average American spends $708 out-of-pocket annually on pharmaceuticals, and Castlight says people make drug-related purchases three times as often as they go to the doctor — so savings on pharmacy costs aren’t insignificant. But Ethan Prater, Castlight’s vice president of product, said that while cost savings was a factor, a larger goal of the product is to encourage consumers to be more engaged when it comes to shopping for their health care services and products.

“It’s a stepping stone to broader healthcare consumerism,” he said.

Pharmaceuticals comprise just 15 percent of what employers pay in healthcare costs. But if being mindful about drug costs helps employees become more savvy about general health care costs, the savings could be meaningful to employers and employees.

As health care costs rise and employers shift to high-deductible health plans that require their employees to bear a greater share of health care costs, companies like Castlight are trying to boost transparency and bring a new wave of consumerism to health care. Castlight, which has raised $181 million in venture capital and is believed by many to be the next digital health company to go public, is a leader in this space. But other companies addressing transparency issues in healthcare include ClearCost Health, Clear Health Costs and HealthInReach.

With Castlight’s mobile app, users can search from their doctor’s office to see if a less expensive therapeutic alternative (or drug in the same class) exists for a medication recommended by a doctor. Other savings could come from mail-order sites or pill-splitting, Prater said. While not all employers support the practice of buying larger, possibly cheaper, doses of a medication and then splitting it into the prescribed amount, Prater said that for those that do, Castlight provides the option. The tool also alerts users when it spots opportunities for cost savings.

Castlight, which counts companies like ConAgra as customers, says it works with employers who collectively cover 3.7 million people.

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That point was driven home yesterday during a Social Media Week panel I moderated on How Behavior and Patients Can Fix Health Care.  I was chatting with three health tech entrepreneurs, Dr. Jay Parkinson, co-founder of Sherpaa; Unity Stoakes, co-founder of Startup Health; and Derek Flanzraich, founder of Greatist, about how they and their organizations are changing health care, when one of the audience members commented that the conversation felt too “self-referential” and asked how to close the behavior gap in health technology. (You can see the whole discussion here.)

It was an entirely fair question – and one that I hope all health technologists ask themselves regularly. While technology, especially mobile devices, is more ubiquitous than ever, there are still disparities in broadband access, availability of digital tools and information about new services. The Pew Internet & American Life Project, for example, reports that Latinos (55 percent) and African-Americans (58 percent) are less likely than Whites (75 percent) to have a home Internet connection. Not surprisingly, Pew also says that those with more education and higher incomes are also more likely to go online for health care information – 78 percent of those who earn more than $75,000 vs. 45 percent of those who earn less than $30,000.

Keep early adopters happy, let them help spread the word

On the panel, Dr. Parkinson said that Sherpaa, which works through employers to provide 24/7 access to doctors via email and phone, targets companies like Tumblr and General Assembly because “you have to start with people that get it.”

“If Facebook or the iPhone started marketing to my parents first they wouldn’t have taken off,” he said. The economics of healthcare is slow (especially relative to the pace of technology) because it’s defined by the government, but by keeping early adopters happy and buzzing about their experiences with Sherpaa, he said he hopes they can gradually educate more and change the system.

Another way to bring the masses into the new health movement is by making it more accessible and relatable through trusted brands, said Flanzraich. In the last year, Greatist, a health and fitness content site that’s part Buzzfeed, part fitness magazine and part health journal, has seen its traffic climb sixfold to just under three million unique visitors. And he said those users, who are mostly from outside early adopter hubs New York and San Francisco, are drawn in because the site connects important health news to pop culture and other topics people already want to read about.

I also added that employers play an important role in bringing health technology to a wider audience. Using Fitbits and Nike Fuelbands that track activity and calories burned may seem like naval-gazing to non-techies, but they could start to mean more if employers reward people for activities logged on those devices, for example, with health insurance discounts or FSA (flexible spending account) credits. At first, it may be the more tech-forward employers that see the value in programs like this. But if companies like employee wellness startup Keas can show employers cost savings, devices that motivate behavior change could matter to even more populations.

Report: Better data collection could pinpoint and address disparities

As technology proliferates, innovation is also spreading organically into different corners of the world, noted Stoakes. For example, SMS-based efforts are enabling drug authentication in Africa and boosting immunization rates in India.

However, in the U.S., even though early adopter patients and doctors will lead the way, health innovators and policymakers can do more to bridge knowledge and behavior gaps. (At GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in March, I’ll be speaking with Aetna’s head of innovation about how big data can improve patient care and lower costs.) A report  presented at a White House Summit on “ehealth equity” this week outlines a few ways to do that. Written by consumer groups The Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, the Consumer Union and the National Council of La Raza, it offers several recommendations on how health information technology could reduce imbalances in care, particularly in communities of color, limited English proficient groups and immigrants and mixed-status families.

For example, it suggests capitalizing on mobile technology, designing web sites that consider differences in culture and health literacy and developing outreach strategies specifically targeting the underserved.

One area in health IT that could lead to particularly positive improvements is data collection and analysis, the report says.  Although it emphasized security to prevent the misuse of data, the report says better demographic information could help identify disparities and lead to services that more appropriately consider linguistic or other cultural needs.

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Launched by the former head of Nokia’s App Studios after a frustrating personal run-in with the health care system, the startup provides easy access to a searchable database of about 600,000 doctors nationwide.  It launched on the web and with a mobile optimized last fall but on Thursday released its first mobile app for the iPhone.

“What we focus on is the discovery problem – it’s not always about needing to find a doctor today,” said founder and CEO Ari Tulla, referencing ZocDoc. And, he added, that when it comes to mobile, “If I learned anything [at Nokia], it’s that mobile has to be very simple – there has to be one thing that it does well.”

For BetterDoctor, he hopes that one thing is helping people find a good doctor in as little time as possible.

To streamline the process, the service only helps people search for a general practitioners, dentists, pediatricians, OB/GYNs and optometrists (as opposed to the endless array of specialists available on ZocDoc and other sites).  And it only lets people search by location and insurance company. The service is free to consumers but earns revenue through lead generation.

Similar to ZodDoc, the app then returns a list of relevant doctors, with biographical and contact information, specialties, affiliations and reviews (supplied by Yelp). But Tulla said the company pays special attention to evaluating doctor quality. While other doctor discovery marketplaces may give prime real estate to those willing to pay for it regardless of how good they are, he said BetterDoctor uses big data and machine learning algorithms to attempt to validate each doctor.

In addition to the basics – a doctor’s education, board certification and experience – the startup looks at patient reviews, malpractice history and referral data that can indicate whom other doctors hold in high esteem.  Doctors that meet all of its criteria surface most visibly in searches and get a special designation as a validated physician; doctors that have don’t pass malpractice screenings or have other issues end up closer to the bottom of the list.

BetterDoctor is definitely not without competition – besides ZocDoc, companies like HealthTap, PokitDok, HealthInReach and others fall somewhere on the spectrum in the doctor discovery space. But I like their data-driven approach to validating doctors (HealthTap also attempts to rank doctors by quality although it uses slightly different variables), and I appreciate their stance on reviews. Tulla said patient reviews are only a part of how doctors are ranked because “consumer reviews are tricky in healthcare.”  Studies have shown that on most doctor review sites, there aren’t enough reviews for them to be reliable and that they tend to skew positive.

Unlike many doctor discovery sites, BetterDoctor doesn’t let patients leave reviews and comments of their own because Tulla said they don’t yet have a way to verify that a patient actually met with the doctor.  But he indicated that it’s something they could roll out in the future.

Tulla declined to share too many details on user activity or revenue, but said the company, which has raised about $525,000 in seed funding so far, has been used by hundreds of thousands of people.

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At the EdGrowth Summit this week in New York, Andrew Kassoy, co-founder of B Lab (an organization that certifies socially responsible business) put it well when he said:

“This industry, in particular, is one — and there are some others like healthcare and clean tech — which is cloaked in nobility. We’re providing a public good at some level or another and so what we do must be good. And I think it’s a pretty good idea to ask whether that’s always true. I’m not in the education field, but I know plenty of folks who are education investors or who are entrepreneurs running education businesses who, I wouldn’t say they don’t care, but that’s not why they’re there — they see a market opportunity. And I think it’s useful to be honest about where that’s the case and where there are other entrepreneurs or other investors who really are truly driven by the mission and profit is not that important. And then where people are on the spectrum, because usually people aren’t one or the other, they’re somewhere in between. That kind of clarity, and the transparency around measuring impact and communicating who you are, can drive who your investors are and what you’re able to achieve.”

Kassoy was speaking on a panel about how entrepreneurs, executives and investors build companies that are simultaneously market- and mission-driven and, to me, his comment was one of the more refreshing ones offered by the speakers.

Will Ethridge, COO of Pearson North American Education, also took part in the panel but emphasized “false dichotomies.” “I don’t think there is a trade-off between being mission-driven and being profit-driven,” he said.

Thankfully, Kassoy called him on the comment, arguing that if you’re a public company, your obligation is to maximize shareholder value. So if you decide, for example, to bring your products to poorer people without the resources to pay for those products, that affects your bottom line. And, he added, if you’re a startup with “hot money” interested in a fast exit, you won’t have the chance to control your mission for very long.

I don’t think mission and market motives are incompatible. But I agree that it’s important to look at companies in the context of what’s really driving them and consider the compromises they may make in the pursuit of their goals, as well as who benefits most from the value they create and to what degree. There are always trade-offs — if companies want to be trusted, they need to give windows into how they’ll draw their lines and be honest about where they stand.

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The previous HIPAA rules applied to healthcare providers, doctors and insurance companies. But under the new rules, their “business associates” – contractors or service providers – also have direct specific compliance obligations, said Kirk Nahra, a partner at Washington, D.C.-based Wiley Rein LLP who specializes in health care. That could include electronic health record companies, telehealth companies and others that contract with hospitals or insurance companies.

Even though the ruling has been expected for some time, companies in the industry are all over the map when it comes to being prepared. Some have the security infrastructure, policies and documentation in place, he said, but others have a ways to go before being in compliance. Although the act goes into effect in March, companies don’t need to be compliant until September.

To meet the new standards of the law, Nahra said, companies may need to evaluate the extent to which they encrypt data, train all employees on privacy and security, develop appropriate procedures for the disposal of information, designate a security official and implement appropriate contracts with subcontractors, among other tasks.

The report itself is not for the feint of heart – it clocks in at 563 pages. But anyone in the business of health care information will want to be aware of the changes they contain.

“They need to consider whom they are doing business with, how they will obtain information from those in the circle, whether they can sell their product to enough people without getting into the circle and how to build sufficient confidence with these other entities (and consumers),” Nahra added.

As digital technology changes how patient information is collected and stored, and how quickly it can be moved and compromised, the new rules attempt to strengthen safeguards and expand the pool of parties held to the highest security and privacy requirements.

For example, they raise the maximum penalty for negligence, strengthen data breach notification requirements under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and provide new requirements on how patient information can be used for fundraising and marketing.

“It’s a big deal,” said Nahra. “The government hasn’t been incredibly aggressive about enforcing it, but they’re getting more aggressive.”

Image by Chad McDermott via Shutterstock.

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If you’ve ever done an online search for an unfamiliar ache, you can probably relate: That weird pain in your side could mean appendicitis, food poisoning or pregnancy.  That nasty rash on your arm could be poison ivy, a spider bite or cancer.

But despite “Dr. Google’s” shortcomings and concerns about so-called cyberchondria, the Web – and search engines in particular – remains a top destination for people seeking out  health information.  The Pew Internet & American Life Project this week reported that about a third of U.S. adults have gone online to look for health information. And, eight in 10 Internet users say their last health-related search began with a search engine – a figure that has not changed since Pew last asked that question in 2000, despite the rise of social media, health-specific content sites and startups. The report also found that those health searchers are reaching diagnoses that their doctors disagree with about one-fifth of the time.

Some physicians are making an effort to adapt to the new reality, but given the frequency with which people seem to page the doctor in the search box, more clinicians need to do the same. “Our relationships with patients was once entirely defined by our unique access to information,” said Bryan Vartabedian, a Texas physician who is active on Twitter. As patients access new information, their relationship with physicians is changing, he said. “The biggest challenge facing the health consumer in 2013 is online health literacy – understanding what’s reliable and what isn’t,” he added.

A few studies have attempted to evaluate the reliability of search engines but with mixed conclusions.  A 2001 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that using search engines to find medical information wasn’t efficient.  A study in 2006 found that when two medically trained doctors typed symptoms into a search box, Google was able to provide an accurate diagnosis 58 percent of the time. Other studies of varying quality have added other dimensions to the debate over time.

On one hand, the Web can help direct people to valuable information and studies that even their doctors may not be aware of. But search engines alone don’t give people enough ways of gauging a source’s reliability or providing the context they may need to make the most of sources that are actually good.

Dr. Vartabedian said he sees patients and first makes a diagnosis or discusses a condition, he warns them about the irrelevant information they’ll likely encounter online to stave off future concern and unnecessary questions.

Wendy Sue Swanson, a Seattle pediatrician, uses her hospital’s blog and Twitter to help her patients and others navigate online health information. She said that if Google can help patients feel more in control or nudge them into the doctor’s office, that’ s not a bad thing. “When you’re in a moment of fear, you don’t think about a specific site… they’re compulsive,” she said. “The benefit of being a clinician is that I know more about the sites and how realiable they are – but that’s where we’re not doing a great job.”

Tools that connect doctors with patients in HIPAA-compliant digital environments are growing – HealthTap, for example, helps patients directly ask doctors questions online, and Ringadoc lets people consult physicians via video conference. But they’re just beginning to appeal to doctors who are wiling to define their roles and organize their time differently.

Twitter is another way doctors are able to influence online health behavior en masse, but a recent study found that just 7 percent of doctors tweet (even though half use physician-only communities to learn and contribute information). If more patients could easily reach their doctors via email or other electronic messages, they might also be less inclined to search aimlessly for answers on the Web.

Meanwhile, insurance reimbursement and payment processes mostly don’t include electronic communication, and more systems and policies are needed to ensure patient privacy and assuage liability concerns.

As mobile adoption grows and digital natives age, a doctor willing to email you and curate online information isn’t just going to be a nice to have — for many, it will be a need to have.

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This week, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released its annual report on the top health industry issues. The document touches on everything from state debates over establishing Affordable Care Act-mandated health insurance exchanges to employers’ new role in providing health care to the growing influence of the consumer. Chris Wasden, PwC’s Global Healthcare Innovation Leader, chatted with me about how technology specifically fits into the bigger picture and the ways in which it will impact the industry in the next few months and years.

2013 is a critical year in healthcare for several reasons, he said – this year, health insurance exchanges are supposed to be ready to come online, doctors are incentivized to meet new electronic health record guidelines and more hospitals will feel the pinch from new penalty fines for high readmission rates. But even aside from the changing policy landscape, a big driver of technology in health care is simply its ubiquity in the lives of consumers.

“Consumers [think that] with my mobile device, I can control the light fixtures in my home remotely, I can buy and sell goods, I can get directions. I’m able to do all these things and yet, when I walk into [the doctor’s] office, I can’t use my mobile device to do anything,” said Wasden.

Technology is poised to shape the health care industry in several ways – here are seven of those trends to watch in 2013.

Consumers get more tools for being cost-savvy

If you needed to buy a plane ticket across the country, you’d likely have a sense of how much it would cost and, if not, you’d at least know where to go to find out. But what if you needed to pay for an MRI? Or a colonoscopy? Or a mammogram? Comparison shopping is the modus operandi for most big-ticket items we purchase, but not so for healthcare – until now.

We’re clearly not going to become a nation of cost-savvy health care consumers overnight. But as states implement the recently-passed Affordable Care Act (ACA) and establish health care exchanges, they’ll be under more pressure to provide tools that assist people in choosing their own coverage. The push for more transparency is also coming from employers’ shifts to higher-deductible health plans and, says PwC, the rise of retail health clinics that provide health services in nontraditional environments, like pharmacies, big box stores and other non-medical locations. Sites like Castlight Health, ClearCostHealth and GoHealth are leading the way in comparison shopping, while startups like Simplee and CakeHealth help consumers manage and understand their health care finances.

Employer as health coach

When it comes to health care, employers have played the role of banker for decades, but, going forward, many may start playing the part of coach. Given new incentives in the ACA and in light of rising health care costs, employers will increasingly rethink their roles, says PwC. And, as they do, many could embrace prevention-focused, data-driven employee wellness programs that quantifiably monitor employees’ behavior and provide tangible rewards. With new fitness trackers like FitBits, WiFi-enabled scales and biometric devices that measure blood glucose levels, blood pressure and other vital signs, programs from companies like Healthrageous remotely track patient progress and outcomes; companies like Keas use social media and gamification to keep employees engaged; and PUSH, for example, actually pays employees for achieving their goals.

Consumer ratings make a difference

Consumer reviews are run-of-the mill for everything from restaurants and reviews to gadgets and books sold on Amazon. And they’re slowly making their way into health. Through consumer services, like ZocDoc, HealthTap and Healthgrades, patients are reading and contributing comments about their doctors. And, PwC’s report highlights that government payment to hospitals is increasingly being connected to consumer experience and satisfaction. Historically, health care providers have been resistant to reviews, believing that patient ratings would skew negative. But a study last year, found that patient reviews were largely positive. A more recent study indicated that too few patients had submitted reviews for rankings on sites like Healthgrades, Vitals and RateMD to be reliable. Still, though there are limitations to the ratings, patients support them and their value is expected to grow.

Nonphysicians put on the doctor’s coat

You’ve likely heard the phrase “doctor shortage” bandied about considerably in recent months. But according to a new study in Health Affairs, most estimates don’t consider how new technology, paired with nonphysicians, can make it possible to treat more patients with fewer physicians.  The health care industry may be more resistant to this kind of change than any other, says Wasden. But electronic communication, big data and other kinds of information technology will result in nurses, pharmacists and other nonphysicians stepping up to offset at least some of the increase in demand for doctor services.

Health comes home

Considering that we spend far more of our time at our houses and apartments than we do at the doctor’s office, health has always started with the home, Wasden notes. But the rise of telehealth services, from startups like Ringadoc to a national telehealth program from insurer WellPoint, as well as the growth of connected and wearable devices that enable doctors to monitor patients remotely, will make health even more bound to the home. Additionally, PwC reports that concierge medicine and “population health” approaches to care, which reward physicians based on outcomes, not treatment, are on the rise. And to keep patients healthy and out of their offices, physicians will increasingly rely on digital communication.

Consumerization of health IT

Mobile technology, as we and others have reported, is sweeping health care.  But that isn’t because IT departments across the industry have pushed it into the doctor’s office, it’s because doctors and consumers have. Doctors rarely warm quickly to IT initiatives, Wasden said, but because of their attachment to their mobile devices, they’re starting to bring them to work. The downside of the “bring your own device” trend is that hospitals must contend with security issues. But the upside is that it’s bringing consumer technology into health at a faster pace, which bodes well for patient engagement and more communication between patients and health care providers.

Big pharma goes ‘beyond the pill’

For years, drug companies have been looking for ways to provide value “beyond the pill,” says Wasden, and as they do, more are turning to apps, devices and sensor-based technology. Those options help keep them relevant to consumers on an ongoing basis and they help them address increasing pressure to show outcomes.  For example, earlier this year, Pfizer launched a Lipitor app just as generic versions of its drug hit the market. Drug firm Novartis is an investor in Proteus Digital Health, which this summer received FDA approval for its chip-embedded pill.

Image by Brian A Jackson via Shutterstock.

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A Chicago-based startup called MiGym, however, wants to weave a tighter-knit relationship between the gym and its customers, benefiting active exercisers and the less motivated alike. It’s developed a smartphone app platform used by health clubs across the country. The app doesn’t just create a smartphone presence for a gym, it seeks to engage its members more actively. It uses social networking to connect members with similar sporting interests and exercise regimes, and it allows them to view, book and manage classes.

George Monical, who heads up the MiGym division of Chicago app development shop Solstice Mobile, said he has even bigger ambitions for the app. Soon MiGym’s dozens of national and regional health club chains will be able to start tracking workout data. MiGym is tapping into APIs offered by gym equipment makers like Life Fitness and exploring ways of quantifying the health benefits of more traditional workouts from aerobics classes to free weights — tying them all into a single unified workout tracking tool.

It’s a neat idea, but not one that’s very useful if all of that info is trapped inside your gym app — it would become just one more disparate repository of health information. But Monical said MiGym believes strongly in the concept of the quantified self (subscription required), and it aims to incorporate its apps into the overall fitness data ecosystem, Monical said. In addition to working with Life Fitness, its tapping into the APIs of Fitbit (see disclosure) and Runkeeper as well as any source of open health data it can get its hands on.

The idea is that MiGym will accept information for its own app and share it with other apps, Monical said. So if you take a three-mile run in the park tracked by an external app or device, those steps run and calories will be included in MiGym’s meters. Conversely, any data taken from the gym, whether it’s scooped directly out of an elliptical trainer or approximated from a kickboxing class, could be funneled into any outside fitness portal, Monical said.

Eventually, MiGym wants to explore direct partnerships with the healthcare industry, transmitting information to your doctor or — with permission — to your insurer. If State Farm and Allstate can track use machine-to-machine technology to track your real driving behavior and consequently reward safe drivers with lower premiums, Monical asked, why can’t health insurers do the same thing, granting lower rates to people who keep in shape?

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Kzenon

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