The Parkinson’s Voice Initiative is the brainchild of TED speaker Max Little that asks individuals suffering from the disease to make a short phone call so researchers can capture and analyze the symptomatic trembling in their voices. (“This project aims to collect 10,000 sustained phonations (‘aaah’ vocal sounds) through telephone-quality digital audio lines,” its web site explains.) If the project succeeds in its mission to accurately diagnose Parkinson’s Disease via voice recordings, it could make early diagnosis relatively fast, easy and effective without a proactive trip to the doctor.

PatientsLikeMe takes a somewhat different approach, instead offering everyday people the chance to connect with others battling the same medical conditions. When users share their stories, medical history, prescriptions and other data, it serves as both a platform for emotional support and for supplementing the information users receive elsewhere with information that might be more applicable to them. PatientsLikeMe also aims to analyze user data to spot trends in disease or treatment regimens that could assist in further research — something it did in 2008 with regard to a new drug prescribed to patients with ALS.

SkinVision in action

But these are just two examples. Recently, I wrote about the need for more thorough and open access to genomic data from cancer patients. Earlier this year, we wrote about calls to generally donate everything about your health — from medical records to your exercise regimen to the food you eat — in order to build a massive data bank that could help draw new correlations between why illness happens.

Anyone with a mobile phone can contribute to general medical research via platforms such as Ginger.io (see disclosure) or help track — and better diagnose — skin cancer by snapping photos of questionable moles via SkinVision (formerly Skin Scan). The USC Center for Body Computing wants people using iPhone heart-monitoring devices to send their data so doctors can try to predict heart attacks well before they happen.

If communities like PatientsLikeMe are more your thing, there’s also Alliance Health Networks, which is analyzing data from its condition-specific communities against medical research from Medify. A Las Vegas-based startup called Lucine Biotechnology is trying to be PatientsLikeMe for women’s health. Or maybe we can all just take a few minutes to post reviews of our doctors and health care providers in order to increase transparency and enable some legitimate price-performance comparisons.

Health care organizations and medical researchers are embracing big data, but as promising as their work is, it’s still largely a case of them working within their own silos of data and within the constraints of HIPAA and other regulations. At some point, citizens might have to undertake a little effort and volunteer their data in some form if we they really want to jumpstart the next generation of disease management. The good news is there are plenty of avenues through which they can contribute.

Check out Parkinson’s Voice Initiative founder Max Little’s TED talk below:

Disclosure: Ginger.io 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, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user wongwean.

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The acquisition, which is HealthTap’s first and is set to be announced Thursday, will expand its online community of doctors to 30,000 and enable the startup to provide local services for patients. It will also give HealthTap a directory of hundreds of thousands of doctors and dentists across the country (information that the startup previously licensed), which it can add to its database of more than a million medical professionals.

Through HealthTap, patients can pose anonymous questions to the general network of doctors for free or send text-based targeted messages to specific doctors for a small fee. They can also search the growing archive of questions by topic and see the top doctors in different specialties (as determined by other patients and doctors).

But co-founder and CEO Ron Gutman said that users increasingly indicate that they want to be able to find the best doctor for a particular topic as well as someone close by. The Avvo Health acquisition not only adds more doctors to its network, it increases the number of data points it can use to rank doctors and help pair them with patients.

“We’re able to match the question not only with the right doctor for you but also a local doctor,” he said. “And the directory can help you find a physician even if you don’t have a specific question.”

While HealthTap’s initial pitch was that it can help patients find credible and trusted answers to medical questions online, as it grows the startup is expanding its reach into doctor rankings and reviews as well as other services that help patients select physicians. On that front, it is beginning to compete with other consumer-facing sites like HealthGrades, Vitals and even ZocDoc, which provides patient reviews of doctors in addition to appointment booking services. But the added level of engagement on HealthTap could make it a more powerful marketing vehicle for doctors in addition to being a more complete information portal for patients.

Since 2007, Seattle-based Avvo has given patients a way to ask doctors private questions online. The company, which was backed by Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Ignition Partners, also includes a site for asking questions of lawyers, called Avvo Legal. But Avvo only spun off the health side of the business and will keep its legal arm independent. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal other than to say it was an all-cash acquisition.

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“Think of our vision as becoming a PayPal for the out of pocket [health] market,” CEO and co-founder Tomer Shoval told me.

From the beginning, Simplee offered users the option to pay bills directly from the site, but, over the past few months, it’s rolled out new partnerships that are bringing the company closer to Shoval’s broader vision.

Last month, for example, Simplee announced an integration with Silicon Valley’s El Camino Hospital to match a patient’s hospital bill with their insurer’s explanation of benefits (EOB) to resolve charges, explain claims, scan for billing errors and pay bills online. Earlier this year, it partnered with ACS|The HSA Solution, one of the largest HSAs (health savings accounts) in the country.

And on Thursday, the company introduced support for Medicare, giving the millions of Americans who qualify for Medicare benefits (according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 48 million beneficiaries in 2010) the ability to use the site to manage and pay their medical bills.

Navigating the health landscape is even more complicated for Medicare patients because their claims may be routed through two separate insurance companies. That means an even greater chance that they’ll miss benefits or make late payments.

With Simplee, Shoval said, patients (as well as the loved ones that might be taking care of them) can track their claims and bills as they are processed by both insurance companies, then see if they need to pay and, if so, do it through the site.

“The value that Simplee brings to Medicare patients is even greater than the value it brings anyone else,” he said.

And, with its Medicare integration, the company is bringing its services to a population that is not only growing steadily – 10,000 people turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare each day – but likely has a higher volume of medical bills and claims to sift through.

More startups bringing transparency to healthcare

Simplee is one of several new startups trying to bring more transparency into medical billing and health insurance process. CakeHealth, a San Francisco startup that has also been dubbed a “Mint for health insurance” and is part of Startup Health Academy’s latest class, similarly provides an online platform for tracking and managing health expenses.

But Shoval’s goal is to make Simplee the trusted destination for patients to make all of their out-of-pocket health payments, from hospitalization to dentist visits to primary care appointments. Between 2006 and 2010, Shoval said, the yearly amount that an average family pays out of pocket climbed nearly 80 percent, from $2,000 to $3,600.  As the consumer-driven healthcare movement makes consumers even more responsible for their medical spending, he believes there is an opportunity for Simplee to be the central hub for all of their transactions.

For consumers, he said, the platform will always remain free – Shoval launched Simplee after his family experienced its own confounding moment with the healthcare system and said helping others better understand their health expenses was a major motivation for the site. It plans to make money through a software-as-a-service model targeting employers, HSA banks and other partners.

By providing a single checkout platform, hospitals and insurance companies can receive payments that might be delayed or go through a collection agency because of patient confusion. And Simplee offers the added benefit of saving them money on paper (which can cost 70 cents to $1 per bill, Shoval said).

Simplee does not share the number of people currently using the site, but has said that it currently manages about half a billion dollars in member medical visits and that 60 percent of the members use the site at least once every three months.

One concern I’ve raised before is that consumers might not feel totally comfortable sharing sensitive health information with a new third-party platform. Data breaches aren’t an atypical occurrence and the procedures and care people receive from healthcare providers are very personal.  But Simplee said that it is very careful and strict about privacy and doesn’t sell user information. And, as people start using the site and realizing its advantages, the privacy tradeoff is one they might increasingly be willing to make.

Image from Andy Dean Photography via Shutterstock.

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On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which enables patients to connect with an online network of 15,000 doctors, announced a new Top Doctors Competition to bring more transparency to the quality of care physicians provide. As part of the ongoing online contest, patients and doctors will be able to vote for the clinicians they think are the top ones in each field. On each doctor’s HealthTap profile, users will be able to see the number of votes received from patients and other doctors.

In a sense, it’s similar to the 5-star rating system on ZocDoc, which is informed by patient reviews, and the patient satisfaction score on HealthGrades. But HealthTap’s voting system includes two separate tracks so that both patients and doctors can participate. HealthTap’s thinking is that patients can comment on a physician’s “softer” skills – their bedside manner, personality and empathy – but other doctors are best equipped to assess their peers’ actual practice and outcomes.

To ensure that doctors don’t try to game the system and hurt the reputations of other doctors, the system only allows up voting. And to discourage friends from just voting for friends, HealthTap adds accountability by randomly showing the names of a few of the doctors who have voted for a profile.

HealthTap already provides a “DocScore,” which gives patients a way to understand each doctor’s expertise and is based on publicly-available information, such as their medical school, residency, number of years in practices, as well as the reviews of other doctors on the site. But while that ranking may reflect a doctor’s knowledge about a particular field, HealthTap CEO and co-founder Ron Gutman believes the new ranking will provide more insight into each doctor’s ability as a practitioner.

“When people buy a phone, or something at the grocery store or clothing, we can easily see what’s high quality, what’s low quality, what’s the price and then make a good decision,” he said. “The funny thing is people aren’t even upset that they don’t [have this transparency] in healthcare… We need to demand to know who are the best doctors, and these kinds of things that make the doctors [competitive] among themselves and give patients the power to voice their opinion will make the whole healthcare system better.”

Image by Christopher Edwin Nuzzaco via Shutterstock.

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Founded in 2008, QuantiaMD offers physicians a free online platform for collaborating and consuming content, while charging health plans, large hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies and other kinds of healthcare companies for access to the network.  Much like consumer brands can set up pages and use other tools for marketing to consumers on Facebook, health-related companies can create micro communities on QuantiaMD to market to doctors.

With the new funding, the company, which counts more than 160,000 registered physicians among its members, said it plans to build sales and marketing to boost its visibility in new markets.

Mike Coyne, president of QuantiaMD, said reaching physicians – and not others in their offices – is an ongoing problem, but added that his company has built a community that engages members for an average of 45 minutes each week.  In addition to communicating with other doctors on the site, physicians can read cases and other content submitted by other doctors and medical experts.

“The way we put content together is designed to be engaging for physicians – it’s short, interactive, delivered by peers and education-oriented or clinically-minded,” he said.

In its effort to provide doctors with an online social networking platform, however, QuantiaMD isn’t alone. In addition to Doximity and Sermo, Ozmosis also gives doctors a secure platform for communicating with peers.  Medikly, a company backed by startup accelerator Blueprint Health and the Startup Health Academy, targets pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare marketers with an online platform that helps them engage physicians. And while HealthTap is mostly focused on giving patients a platform for reaching doctors, it does enable doctors to communicate with each other.

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Since launching last year, HealthTap has helped people find reliable medical information through a network of more than 15,000 doctors who can provide written, real-time responses to patient questions online. On Monday, the Palo Alto-based startup is adding yet another resource for those hungry for health information: the full library of peer-reviewed articles from the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed.

“Caregivers and patients will really obsess about finding what is the latest [research] on what is happening. … They will dive deeper and deeper but they don’t have the knowledge, they don’t know how to translate,” said Ron Gutman co-founder and CEO of HealthTap. “This gives doctors the opportunity to translate [their work] and lets patients who read these [articles] ask doctors about it.”

Not only has HealthTap mapped the PubMed database against the site’s list of topics to make it easier for patients to search for relevant information, it has mapped the database against its list of doctors so that patients can spot the specialists in each areaa.

Each time HealthTap ingests an article written by a doctor in its network, it gives the doctor the option to write an overview that translates jargony docspeak into plain English for the site’s users. And, as patients read the articles, it lets them send notes to the authors asking for clarification. Patients also have the option to reference articles as they ask general questions of doctors on HealthTap.  On the site, all public questions are free, but users have the option to pay $9.99 for a real-time private message with a doctor.

The goal, said Gutman, is that patients will be able to access easy-to-understand cutting-edge research while simultaneously educating doctors – on HealthTap, as well as their own doctors offline.  The dissemination piece is particularly interesting given recent research, highlighted by HealthTap, indicating that it can take one to two decades for original research to reach routine clinical practice.

About one in seven doctors on the site cross-references to a PubMed article, HealthTap said, and those doctors respond to public questions within 24 hours. Through its platform, patients can also query authors not yet on HealthTap, but responses are not guaranteed.

Sites like Symcat, Meddik, PatientsLikeMe and HealthLine similarly want to provide better health information online but HealthTap is unique in its ability to connect patients with such a vast network of doctors in real-time. To date, the startup has raised nearly $14 million from Mayfield Fund and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and others.

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Part of the Global Accelerators Network, Blueprint Health’s three-month program focuses on health companies looking to find customers and capital, and connects founders with a wide network of mentors, including investors, doctors, health entrepreneurs and other healthcare experts. In addition to the strong community, the accelerator, which is led by founding partners Dr. Brad Weinberg and Mathew Farkash, gives startups $20,000 in cash, $50,000 in perks and office space in exchange for a six percent equity stake in the company.

This class of startups, which comprises just three percent of the applicant pool, includes a higher percentage of female founders than Blueprint’s last class of startups, as well a strong showing from people with healthcare experience.

“Most of our companies have at least one founder with healthcare experience as we continue to believe that it is important that entrepreneurs understand the healthcare industry and its workflows and payment models if they want to create a sustainable businesses,” said Farkash.

Several companies from Blueprint Health’s first class, which graduated earlier this year, have received funding from top venture firms and angels or other organizations. Meddik, for example, a startup we’ve written about earlier that gives people a more effective way of searching for health information, has raised funding from Founder Collective, Collaborative Fund and others. Aidin, which helps people find continuing care after they leave the hospital, has raised funding from General Catalyst, HLM, Red Swan and other angels. Symcat, another startup we’ve covered at GigaOM that takes a data-driven approach to helping patients figure out what their symptoms mean, won a $100,000 prize from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Several mentors are joining the accelerator this summer, including:

• Dunston Almeida – Global strategy, M&A and Health IT, Express Scripts
• Chris Carter –  VP/Provider products, Sharecare
• Doug Elwood, M.D. – Director, GMI Strategy and Innovation
• Lorna Friedman, M.D. – Partner, Mercer
• Bill Hanson, M.D. – Chief Medical Information Officer, University of Pennsylvania Health Systems
• Bob Higgins – Partner, Highland Capital Partners
• Richa Pande, M.D. – Senior Vice President, Life Sciences, Gerson Lehrman Group
• Adam Sharp – Founder, Sermo

Take a look at the full list of startups below (descriptions from Blueprint Health):

Led by Josh Stein, Grant Mitchell, and John Langhauser, AdhereTech helps clinical research organizations (CROs) and clinical trial researchers reduce the cost of study compliance assessment. CROs and clinical trial researchers spend millions every year to send people to trial participants’ homes to assess their compliance with study protocols. AdhereTech provides a patented, connected pill/liquid bottle that can accurately measure if a medication is dispensed, saving CROs and clinical trial researchers hundreds of thousands of dollars per trial.

Led by Clifford Jones and Daniel Cates, Allazo Health helps pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) more effectively allocate dollars to medication adherence programs. AllazoHealth’s Saas based data analytics service predicts the combination of intervention techniques that will provide the greatest outcomes and profitability at a patient level.

Led by Catherine Montgomery, Sarah Moray, Ben Liscio, and Jenny Liu, daisyBill is worker’s compensation billing made easy. Currently it is very difficult for doctors to get paid for services provided via a workers compensation insurer and none of the practice management solutions handle the complexities of worker compensation claims electronically. daisyBill provides a Saas based platform that let’s practices easily submit worker’s compensation claims electronically and is taking advantage of the fact that California is requiring that workers compensation insurers to accept electronic claims starting October 2012.

Led by Jonathan Rothman and Scott Richards, EMBI helps hospitals quickly spot areas where they can increase revenue and reduce costs, specifically down to a department and patient level. Hospitals are losing millions of dollars every year because they are not coding effectively, duplicating services and will increasingly will have payments that are subject to bundled arrangements and meeting quality metrics. Most ERs do not have the time and the technical resources to install a million dollar business intelligence tool like SAP Business Objects. EMBI provides a low cost, easy to implement Aaas platform specifically developed for ERs. The platform has already been deployed at 9 hospitals.

Led by Peter Verrillo, Michael Phipps, and David Kay, EnHatch has developed software that helps medical device and pharmaceutical companies more cost- effectively and comprehensively articulate their value proposition to their customers. Currently medical device companies need to use sales reps to train surgeons to use their products or hire very expensive custom animation studios to create surgery training videos. EnHatch makes it very easy for medical device makers to create 3D surgery animations and deploy them on mobile devices.

Led by Victor Wang and Shuo Deng, GeriJoy helps assisted living facilities and nursing homes monitor residents and improve customer satisfaction and quality-of-life. Gerijoy provides tablet enabled software that enables cost-effective video surveillance and provides patients with a way to communicate with family members and a virtual caregiver.

Led by Jarret Bauer, Rohan Udeshi, and Daniel Priece, Health Recovery Solutions helps hospitals reduce congestive heart failure re-admissions. A 250-bed hospital can lose $250K or more in Medicare payments if it is not able to maintain an acceptable CHF readmission rate in 2012. HRS provides a care management service that scores patients on their re-admission risk daily and intervenes when necessary. HRS provides a software platform on tablets that patients take home with them from the hospital and trained health coaches and nurses that intervene with patients when needed.

Led by Dr. Venkat Gullapalli and Nita Nehru, Medikly provides white-label engagement solutions for healthcare educators and marketers, which enables them to better reach, engage and understand physicians.  Integrating content management, social media and big data analytics into a single, flexible and intuitive ‘engagement ecosystem,’ Medikly empowers healthcare organizations to expand access and personalize engagement with physicians, increase operational efficiencies, and improve business performance.

Led by Piyush Kedia and Sharad Jain, Symbiosis Health helps employers increase enrollment and retention in their high-deductible health plan and helps employees save money. Employers can save over $1,000 per employee per year if they can get them to transition to a high-deductible health plan, but are finding it very difficult to convince patients to do this. Symbiosis Health provides a preferred provider network that they have contract arrangements with and a software platform that allows patients to pay a reduced contracted cash-based price for medical services and apply those payments to their deductibles.

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Starting at about 15:50 in the video below, Hammerbacher tells a room at the HISUM2012 conference about some of the work Cloudera has already done in the healthcare space. Among those efforts was a project along with the Food and Drug Administration to detect unsuspected adverse side effects from multi-drug combinations, and an application developed with Emory University to help pathologists more accurately analyze medical images.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user 18percentgrey.

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At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, he said that when the company was initially raising money, it was in the middle of the recent economic crisis. But by keeping their heads down and focusing, he said, they were able to build out their presence in New York, expand to other cities, and ultimately raise $95 million over the past few years. Over the past couple of years, the company has quickly grown, adding  100 staff in the past year alone.

Looking out at the landscape now, he noted that it’s an especially interesting time in healthcare and for health tech startups.  “Healthcare access is one of the greatest challenges of our generation,” Massoumi said.

In the next couple of years, Obama-driven changes to the healthcare system could result in 30 million new patients coming online, he said, entering a market that already has a shortage of physicians. But even though healthcare is a $2.7 trillion industry, he added, “it’s totally under-represented in terms of Internet startups.” That might be because people were burned by earlier investments, he said, but it’s also because healthcare is a massive and complex industry. Changing how customers and vendors interact in the largest sector in the U.S economy is “a daunting task for any startup,” Massoumi said.

He also said that entrepreneurs sometimes look at the opportunities in healthcare too much as a patient and miss opportunities that address the needs of doctors or other players in the market. Surrounded by a family of doctors, he said he “became a doctor through osmosis” and viscerally understood the industry.

This week, ZocDoc announced that it had extended its service to Denver, the 19th city to join the platform. Other metropolitan areas (besides New York), include Austin, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, DC.

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A recent survey from ZocDoc and Harris Interactive found that digitally-savvy Gen Y adults (those between the ages of 18 and 34) think health care is so frustrating that more than half said they delay medical care because the process is a “pain.” The study also found that 79 percent said it’s easier to evaluate a new gadget than a new doctor or dentist and 76 percent said it’s easier to find the right information to choose a hotel than it is to find an appropriate doctor or dentist.

The big takeaway from the survey was clearly that New York-based ZocDoc – which tries to make picking a doctor as easy as picking a restaurant on OpenTable or Yelp – is addressing a problem for Generation Y. (And, of course, that vendor-commissioned surveys are likely to produce results that the vendor will like.) But while ZocDoc is arguably the largest and best known health care startup helping Millenial patients, it’s starting to gain some company.

“I feel like we’re at this moment where there’s a lot of momentum,” said Unity Stoakes, co-founder and president of Startup Health, a health tech academy and incubator in New York. “There’s a palpable sense that a lot of young innovators have a strong desire to disrupt the [health care] sector.”

In the past four months, he said, Startup Health has received about 600 applications from entrepreneurs with ideas on how to use technology to transform how patients, physicians and other health-care professionals receive and provide care. About a third of the entrepreneurs are Gen Yers themselves, who were often motivated by frustrating experiences of their own.  Care Dojo, for example, is a mobile health company still in stealth mode that was founded by 18-year-old Harvard dropout Faheem Zaman after his father went through a troubling health situation.

Regardless of whether emerging health tech companies are founded by members of Generation Y, Stoakes said innovation in the sector is reflecting the technological trends that are growing with the demographic.

One major trend: mobile innovation. According to a February study from Nielsen, Generation Y consumers (who are so digitally connected that the research firm has taken to calling them Generation C) comprise 23 percent of the U.S. population, but represent 33 percent of Americans who own tablets and 39 percent of the population that owns a smartphone.

Playing to that trend, Force Therapeutics, a Startup Health-sponsored startup, helps patients and physical therapists easily schedule appointments via tablets and smartphones.

Using game mechanics to motivate people to make slight changes in their behavior is another common strategy among emerging health tech companies, Stokes said. DailyFeats, another Startup Health startup, rewards users with real-world prizes (such as eBay and Barnes & Noble gift cards) when they complete small actions from doing the laundry and cleaning to taking their calcium supplements and exercising.

Other startups, such as Meddik and Symcat, which are backed by New York health tech accelerator Blueprint Health, provide familiar-looking search engines that help diagnose conditions or provide relevant health care information.

The industry hasn’t seen a Facebook-sized disruptor, Stoakes observed, but ZocDoc is paving the way for entrepreneurs hoping to bring Web innovations to health care. Consumer applications, such as the Nike Fuel band fitness tracker and iPhone-based fitness apps, are also likely spurring interest in the sector and Facebook’s recent organ donor initiative will only bring more attention to the field.

Stoakes said he’s seeing strong interest from corporations, universities and health institutions eager to partner with (and potentially acquire) companies on the leading edge. But, despite the positive momentum and free-flowing capital, new startups still have hurdles to overcome.

“The real challenge is connecting the dots and helping these startups get customers,” Stoakes said. “We’re starting to see these corporate partners pay attention and get involved and dip their toes in the water. But what we’d really like to see is more of these corporate partners support entrepreneurs in pilot programs and investments and become customers of the startups.”

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