The round, which included Siemer Ventures, Telegraph Hill Group and Dr. Lyle Dennis, a neurologist and founder of HealthKeep, brings the startup’s total amount raised to $1.9 million. Previous investors include FF Angel, Practice Fusion CEO and founder Ryan Howard and former president of One Medical Group Sharon Knight.

The startup launched in 2010 as a service for providing on-demand telephone and video chat access to physicians. For $40, consumers could use Ringadoc to connect with doctors anytime, day or night. But earlier this year, in a bid to bring more doctors on to its network, it pivoted to its current product, which targets physicians with an after-hours messaging and phone service.

Typical after-hours messaging services require patients with after-hours questions to leave messages with a non-medically trained operator, who then looks up an on-call doctor and passes the message along. When the doctor calls back, the patient needs to recount her symptoms all over again.

With Ringadoc, patients leave a secure message with a cloud-based answering service that automatically finds the appropriate physician – patients only need to explain their issues once and the cost, Ringadoc says, is cheaper than most existing systems. To date, the company said it has handled more than 100,000 phone calls for physicians.

With the new funding, CEO and founder Jordan Michaels said the company plans to beef up sales and marketing, as well as enhance the product so that it could integrate with other tools used by doctors’ offices, including practice management and electronic health records systems. Since Ringadoc is capturing valuable patient engagement data through its telephone calls, Michaels said, they want to enable doctors to make the most of that functionality.

“We’re tracking a lot of two-way conversations and that’s an important piece of the health care conversation,” Michaels said. “Our vision is to be on the frontline of virtual care for patients.”

For now, the company is focusing on its physician-focused product. But, later this year, he said, it could start expanding to patients and restore the startup’s initial mission of providing on-demand physician access to patients.

Recognizing the need to address the shortage of doctors in the U.S., other companies are also working to streamline physician-patient communication and promote virtual health care. For example, PingMD targets physicians with a mobile app for more efficiently communicating with patients and peers, HealthTap offers consumers a mobile- and web-based service for messaging and querying doctors and Sherpaa works with employers to help patients and doctors connect via video chats and phone calls.

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The Series B round, which was led by Khosla Ventures and included current investors Mayfield Fund and Mohr Davidow Venture Partners, brings the company’s total amount raised to $37.9 million. In addition to the new funding, the startup added a new board member: former Square COO and Khosla Ventures’ newest partner Keith Rabois.

Since launching in 2011, the site has created a network of more than 38,000 physicians who answer anonymous patient questions on a wide range of health issues. As the health system readies for a “demand shock” of new patients in 2014, HealthTap CEO and co-founder Ron Gutman said his site can help alleviate some of the pressure.

“We’re putting in a technology multiplier that can enhance the number of patients every physician can serve,” said Gutman. “We’re using technology to clone the physician to make him available to more patients.”

Instead of rushing to the doctor each time they have a question, HealthTap enables patients to quickly reach a doctor online. If they just have a non-urgent, general question, they can ask a free question of the entire network (or search the site’s deep repository of questions and answers). And if they want more personalized, specific feedback, they can message individual doctors for $9.99.

Companies including American Well and Sherpaa also use technology to more efficiently connect patients and doctors (although those companies support video chats and phone calls, not just text messaging), but they work through employers while HealthTap goes straight to consumers.

To date, HealthTap has focused on building out its service with new products – from features that let users access peer-reviewed medical research to those for discovering and rating doctors. But Gutman said the new funding will enable the team to significantly expand the team with business development, marketing and data science staff.

A key goal for the business team will be new partnerships with other apps and health companies, Gutman said, adding that about 1,000 developers and companies are already on a waiting list to access their API. And he added that another focus will be hiring more data wonks to parse the site’s data and package it in more valuable ways.

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Thursday’s news that iRobot’s medical robot, which would let doctors talk to and monitor patients remotely, stoked interest across the web. But ‘robodocs’ are  just one way telemedicine could keep healthcare costs down, improve care and increase access to patients in remote communities.

The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) estimates that 10 million Americans directly benefited from some sort of telemedicine service in the past year, with clinical applications, like those for radiology and emergency room services leading the pack. A report this month projected that telehealth would grow 53 percent in 2013 and six-fold by 2017.

Aside from the rise of sensors, expanded broadband access and the ubiquity of connected and mobile devices among patients and doctors, several health-specific trends are making remote care more of a reality. More patients are coming online, meaning that fewer doctors will be needed to serve more patients; payment models are shifting from fee-for-service to managed care approaches that emphasize patient outcomes; and hospitals are under more pressure to keep re-admission rates down. Remote monitoring and communication technology could play a critical role in addressing each of those issues.

Some telehealth innovations, like the iRobot that lets doctors visit  a patient’s bedside via an electronic avatar and 15-inch screen, seem like the stuff of science fiction. San Francisco-based Scanadu is developing handheld tools that have been likened to the StarTrek “Tricorder.”  A recent product lets you check your temperature, blood oxygen levels, pulse and other vitals by holding the device close to your body. Then it sends the information to your smartphone, where it can be sent on to your doctor. To encourage more innovation in sensor-based mobile technology, the X Prize Foundation even developed the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize competition (in which Scanadu is a participant). A “Magic Carpet” developed by researchers at GE and Intel, uses sensors in home carpets to monitor seniors’ activity and then predict and detect falls.

Other telemedicine services aren’t as sexy but could still go a long way in getting improved care to people who need it. Corporate giants like GE, Intel and Cisco have, for years, provided videoconferencing and remote communication platforms to hospitals to enable, people in rural communities, seniors and the chronically ill to interact with doctors from home. But new applications and companies are bringing telehealth into more specialized areas and the everyday.

Startups like Direct Dermatology and Iagnosis help patients seek skincare help from doctors via technology. iCouch and Breakthrough provide online counseling services, and Ringadoc targets consumers with a network of doctors available 24/7 to give advice and even write prescriptions from phone consultations. This week, the iExaminer App from Welch Allyn received FDA clearance to make iPhone-enabled remote eye exams more feasible. And a company called CampusMD this month announced a nationwide telehealth program to provide students with round-the-clock, remote access to doctors.

Still, despite increasing innovation, legacy barriers still stand in telemedicine’s way – for example, licensing issues related to interstate telemedicine and Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements that are limited. And then there’s the expense and time commitment needed to implement new platforms and train providers, as well as the skeptics who raise confidentiality and ethical questions (and not without good reason).

But more insurers, like Aetna and Cigna, and big employers, including GE and Delta, are backing the trend – earlier this month, WellPoint, one of the country’s biggest insurance companies, said it would support telehealth services for all employer and individual plans. And the ATA reports that other groups, including state legislator, patient groups and medical societies, are making new inroads in at least pushing for more favorable policies.

Four or five years ago, there were virtually no telehealth services targeting consumers. But Jonathan Linkous, ATA’s CEO said 400,000 consumers used an online service in the past year to receive remote health care.

“When a consumer realizes how much more benefit they’re going to be able to get [from a telehealth service], they’re going to wonder why [their doctor] doesn’t support it and go to another doctor,” he said. “We’re right at the tip of that now.”

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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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But an emerging group of startups is trying to make healthcare more convenient by connecting patients and doctors for phone calls, Web video chats or written replies. The virtual doctor concept isn’t new. Companies like Teledoc and American Well have been giving patients 24/7 access to doctors via phone and video chats since the early- and mid-2000s. But while those companies offer services through employers or healthcare organizations, newer startups are going straight to the consumer or appealing to them with lighter-weight, simpler options.

Virtual physicians certainly can’t replace an in-person counterpart in many circumstances (they can’t take your blood pressure, run lab tests or other simpler tests, for example).  And they may not have a patients’ medical history or the personal context that comes with a doctor-patient relationship developed over time.

But these companies say that for basic questions and ailments – say allergies, skin conditions or sexual health questions – virtual doctors can be enough. Advocates of the concept say tele-health programs save consumers time and potentially money, while easing the burden on a healthcare system that increasingly doesn’t have enough doctors to meet the needs of patients. Skeptics worry that it will compromise the level of care and diminish the value of the doctor-patient relationship. But the trend seems to be picking up. According to a recent Kaiser Health News/USA Today article, tele-health is gaining traction among insurance companies, including Aetna and Cigna.

Many of the startups are local for now, as some state medical boards block the practice of tele-medicine, especially across state lines. But many say they plan to expand nationwide soon. Here are five startups tackling tele-health in different ways:

1. Ringadoc
Just as Netflix, iTunes and Spotify provide instant gratification in entertainment, Ringadoc founder and CEO Jordan Michaels thinks we ought to receive on-demand services in healthcare too. Launched in 2010, the San Francisco-based service charges patients a $40 flat free (slightly more than the average co-pay, Michaels said) to speak with a doctor (who can provide advice, diagnoses and prescriptions) over the phone anytime day or night. This month, it announced that the Founders Fund had invested $750,000 in seed money. The service currently has about 2,000 registered users, who make a couple of hundred calls a month, Michaels said, but he added the company has done very little marketing. Right now, Ringadoc’s network of about 100 licensed doctors is only available to patients in California, but the company plans to expand into more locations over the next six months. Michaels also said that in the coming weeks and months the company will roll out a video chat service, as well as a direct-to-doctor product to give physicians a virtual way to keep in touch with existing patients.

2. Direct Dermatology
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup doesn’t provide instant care, but founder David Wong said it cuts down the time patients wait to get a dermatologist consultation from more than one month to two days. For $85 per consultation, users sign on to the site and provide information about their specific question (including their medical history, written description of their skin condition and photographs). Direct Dermatology ensures a response from a board certified dermatologist within two business days, including a prescription if necessary. The service, which has raised $335,000, launched in July 2010, but Wong said it only accepted referrals from primary care physicians until this month. Earlier this year, Direct Dermatology was chosen to be a part of New York health tech incubator Startup Health’s first class of startups.

3. HealthTap
Launched in 2011, HealthTap connects patients with more than 10,000 licensed physicians nationwide, who provide immediate written answers to medical questions for free via desktop and mobile applications. The Palo Alto-based startup aims to give patients a quick way to access reliable health information and physicians a new avenue for reaching new customers and establishing their reputations. Participating doctors must be approved by the service, and once admitted, they can provide answers, as well as weigh-in on the responses of other doctors. To date, the company has raised nearly $14 million and attracted doctors from top institutions such as Mount Sinai hospital in New York and the Cleveland Clinic.

4.  BreakThrough
BreakThrough, a tele-psychiatry service, launched in 2009 at the TechCrunch50 as a direct to consumer service. In the past few years, it’s shifted to provide services through health-care partners but said it plans to support self-pay by September. The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup lets patients search for certified mental-health professionals and schedule appoints conducted via chat, email, phone or a custom HIPAA-compliant video system. At the moment, it only serves California patients, but said it’s on track to be a covered service for three million members by the end of the year.

5. Sherpaa
A newcomer to the field, Sherpaa launched earlier this year to connect people with doctors in New York City. Employers pay the company a flat fee per employee per month and patients receive 24/7 phone and email access to the company’s physicians and specialists (which it calls “guides”) for free. For the past four months, Sherpaa has been working with tumblr with impressive engagement – so far, the company says, 80 percent of tumblr’s employees have used the service. Jay Parkinson, the company’s founder, said it’s still figuring out its expansion plans. Given the local nature of healthcare, he seems to want to take a deliberate approach, but he said once it figures out operations in New York it would make sense to open in other cities.

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The MedMinder connected pill dispenser, powered by MedApps

Trying to give the still nascent mHealth sector a motivational kick in the pants, the Federal Communications Commission has begun working directly with startups and universities to help bring new wireless telemedicine and health care technologies to market faster.

On Wednesday the FCC convened an mHealth summit in Washington, D.C., bringing together not only some of the big gorillas of telemedicine — Philips, Medtronic and Qualcomm — but also several mHealth startups focusing on specific health applications: TheCarrot, MedApps, Telcare and WellDoc. The FCC put those companies in a room with the big regulatory agencies in health care: the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the departments of Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs.

The FCC then tasked the whole bunch to provide actionable recommendations to overcome the technological obstacles and red tape preventing mobile data from revolutionizing the health care field.

“We know there are barriers to harnessing this technology for the greater good — interoperability, reliability, connectivity, privacy, and security, just to name a few,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in his prepared remarks before the summit. “Today, we’d like to hear from you on these and other barriers to rapid deployment and find ways to collaborate to help accelerate innovation in this sector.”

New spectrum for mHealth innovators

Genachowski also revealed that this summer the FCC plans to release new experimental licenses to universities, research institutions and other nonprofits, giving them instant access to the usually high-regulated airwaves. Those institutions could use those airwaves to more quickly develop, test and commercialize new machine-to-machine (M2M) medical technologies.

The licenses will span the spectrum bands already designated for medical use, and the FCC will also create “innovation zones,” areas where device manufacturers and app developers can test their technologies over closed mHealth frequencies without a license.

Last month the FCC created a new band for medical body area networks (MBANs), which will allow vendors to untether monitoring equipment from cables and wires and create hospital and home sensor nets that keep in constant contact with patients. Last November the FCC also designated airwaves for medical micropower networks, which would connect devices embedded within the body that replace damaged nerves. The goal of the project is to use new medical research breakthroughs and wireless communications to restore sensation and even movement to damaged limbs and muscles.

Special attention placed on startups

The inclusion of startups in the summit was particularly interesting, since they run the gamut of mHealth services and in many cases focus on consumer-facing applications rather than ones targeted at the health care industry.

TheCarrot’s health portal

For instance, TheCarrot has created Web and mobile portals designed to let consumers take their health into their own hands. The service allows customers to create their own dieting, exercise and even smoking-cessation regimes. It aggregates data from medical and fitness sensors and gives a big-picture view of the user’s overall health. Customers can then share that information with their doctors, personal trainers, families and individual friends.

MedApps provides a service called HealthAir, which aggregates data from different medical sensors and devices and presents it in usable format by patients and doctors. Telcare is devoted entirely to creating cellular-enabled blood glucose meters. Meanwhile, WellDoc has developed a series of applications that help patients manage chronic diseases such as diabetes.

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At the mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Qualcomm announced the creation of a new division called Qualcomm Life — replacing its Wireless Health business – overseeing its new 2net mobile and cloud telemedicine platform. The heart of the system is the 2net Hub, a wireless gateway that can link to any wireless sensor or device through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy and ANT+, encrypt that data and send it securely to the 2net cloud.

Qualcomm's 2net Hub

The hub isn’t the only way to transmit that medical data, though. Medical devices with their own cellular radios can upload biometrics directly to the 2net cloud as can smartphones loaded with health monitoring apps. Qualcomm has designed APIs that hospitals, doctors and insurance companies can use to integrate 2net into their healthcare systems, allowing them to retrieve patient information as well as upload any medical data they have compiled. Qualcomm also announced that it is starting a $100 million fund, managed by Qualcomm’s venture capital arm, that will seek out and invest in other mobile health startups.

Verizon is also developing its own cloud-based platform to connect medical devices to a common diagnostic database working with Entra Health Systems. But Verizon’s big contribution to mobile health may lie in its ability to transmit massive amounts of information between doctors and their patients over a far-flung network. New tablet video chat and conferencing abilities paired with diagnostic sensors could be used to approximate the office check up, used for follow-ups after a procedure or a new prescriptions and even as a means of instant communications during minor emergencies.

While it’s easy to think of telemedicine being primarily a solution for the old and the infirm, it has the potential to target a much wider swath of the public. New wirelessly connected pill caps can remind patients to take their medication and even notify a doctor if a patient goes to long without popping a prescribed pill. New exercise and diet monitoring devices can deliver real-time information useful for preventative medicine and monitoring overall fitness (your doctor will know if you’ve been lying about that daily 3-mile jog). Plus, new wireless technologies could expand healthcare to areas where hospitals and clinics are few and far between. Verizon plans to expand its LTE network to rural areas through spectrum-leasing partnerships with small regional operators. A 4G connection might be just what the doctor ordered when it comes to delivering remote healthcare to traditionally underserved areas.

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AT&T isn’t a newcomer to the energy smart grid or telemedicine, by any means. But what’s new here may be the way AT&T is approaching these vertical markets. Digital Life Services could be the vehicle AT&T will use to become a retailer of applications that it currently addresses through the wholesale market.

AT&T’s machine-to-machine (M2M) strategy basically has two facets: it sells new emerging devices such as tablets and netbooks directly to its customers and it powers the connections between devices — whether it’s an e-book download to a Kindle or a network link to a smart meter — leaving the sale and customer relationship to its partners. Pure M2M connectivity isn’t a bad business model and the return on bits shipped is high, but it’s pennies on the dollar compared to what AT&T could make. Earlier this year, Stacey wrote about how the maker of connected pill bottle caps Vitality charges $15 a month for sending roughly 20 kilobytes of data a day over AT&T’s network. While that amounts to $25 per MB (compared to the $25 it charges for a 2-GB smartphone plan), AT&T probably sees only the tiniest fraction of that revenue. If it sold the service as well as access to the pipe, AT&T could make serious bank. Plus AT&T has a bunch of whiz kids at Emerging Devices and its new Foundries working round the clock to design and test these new applications. I’m sure AT&T would rather see a much higher return on that investment than mere carriage fees.

Why a new business division? Well, AT&T’s back office is set up do one thing very well: Sell specific telecom services at set monthly rates through contracts. These new M2M business models don’t gel easily with that concept. AT&T’s wireline division may be better equipped to handle such services, selling home health monitoring or energy management applications on top of broadband, TV and home phone subscriptions. But AT&T’s wireless customer base and mobile network is a heck of lot bigger than its residential footprint. It doesn’t want to run a DSL or passive fiber line to every customer that wants a $5 a month smart thermostat  – or write off every customer outside of its Bell operating territory — when it could much more easily and much more cheaply embed a GSM module into that thermostat.

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Sources at the FCC say the program will pay for both building out better connections as well the monthly costs paid to a broadband provider. A more limited program that’s been in place for years hasn’t had many takers in part because once the connections were in place, it was still expensive to pay for the access from a rural area to the main Internet backbone. For more on this issue see our coverage of special access fees and reform.

The FCC’s proposal would change the parameters of an existing program to pay up to half of the monthly costs of buying Internet access for rural healthcare, as opposed to paying only 25 percent. It would also pay for dedicated connections as opposed to more residential or small business offerings.

The program would also pay for up to 85 percent of the costs associated with building out access lines and would allow more players in the healthcare market to take advantage of such funds. In addition to offsetting the costs for doctors and hospitals, the program would offset the costs to provide connections at acute care facilities, dialysis centers, as well as off-site administrative offices and data centers that support healthcare in the area.

If the proposal is adopted then the FCC would begin issuing funds as soon as June of next year. Given the overall push for online medical records and the current FCC’s effort to expand broadband to more avenues of everyday life, this program could prove both beneficial to people who live in rural areas, and also companies in the IT sector that want to see telemedicine expand.

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