Service industries like consulting, hospitality, restaurants or the local car mechanic, are judged on experience. Healthcare folks would like to think that it's all about outcomes but no one would argue that experience is just as important. And most healthcare experiences suck from a patient's point of view. Docent Health caught my attention last year in July when they raised a healthy $15M...
Virta burst on to the digital health scene recently boasting a $37M funding round and a tech-heavyweight CEO Sami Inkinen who previously co-founded Trulia, the online real-estate platform. Virta is the latest digital health star to follow the trend of what I'm now beginning to identify as tech-enabled care management. Think of it as a healthcare service delivery model where traditional care...
In March 2009, Apple hosted an event to introduce the iPhone OS 3.0 software. What I really found interesting back then was a prototype showcased with Lifescan (a J&J company), where they demonstrated how a user could manage her diabetes using an iPhone-accessory glucometer. It was a much needed evolutionary conceptual leap for a widely-used consumer medical device category. Turns out that...
On the continuum of healthcare IT solutions, there are two distant ends. One extreme can be thought of as the complex, medical-grade enterprise EHR systems that cater to large institutions and mainly providers. The other would then be a consumer-grade solution that is designed for delivering health interventions to the masses. The latter is where Voxiva's offerings lie. Voxiva provides the...
Accounting for only 7.2% employment in healthcare, Home Healthcare is perhaps one of the lesser known and advertised sub-markets in the industry. It serves patients who prefer to stay at home but need ongoing care that cannot easily or effectively be provided solely by family or friends. These providers deliver a wide variety of health care and supportive services like professional nursing,...
The wireless remote health monitoring market is white hot these days. Seems like a lot of creative folks are looking at the increasing ability of connected devices, sensors and wondering why aren't these disrupting healthcare. Some luminary research centers rooted in academic institutions have found enough financial support to establish formal presence specifically in this space. West Wireless...
People with type 1 diabetes need to take insulin in a similar way their pancreas would produce if it were normal. Older therapy used to be multiple daily injections, which were poor approximation of the insulin need. In Continuous Subcutaneous Insulin Infusion (CSII) or Insulin Pump therapy, a small device delivers a constant stream of rapid-acting insulin through a tiny tube; according to a...
Patient Monitoring is one of the mature, established markets in healthcare industry. A promising trend in that is the emerging 'Remote Patient Monitoring' (RPM) paradigm. (If you don't know much about RPM, this 2009 report from Frost.com is one of most insightful ones out there. It requires paid subscription though). The underlying concept is nothing new in medical device industry, with it's...
Asthmapolis is brainchild of David Van Sickle a researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The basic idea is to equip inhalers with a GPS tag to determine when and where was it used by the patient. When such individual (de-identified, of course) medication data is aggregated, it can provide population care insight like environmental triggers and disease impact. Seems like there are three...
Toumaz technology is a spin-off from Imperial College of London , and they make what is probably the only ultra low-power silicon chip targeted for healthcare applications. In October 2009, they launched the Sensium Life Pebble wireless monitoring device in EU. The Life Pebble hardware includes a single lead ECG, skin thermometer, and an accelerometer. The data collected by the system is...