Sleep monitoring related offerings started surfacing in the consumer market couple of years ago. More recently EASYWAKEme, another European startup, has thrown it's hat in the ring. While reviewing Zeo and aXbo last year, I found myself wondering what was the need for having a bedside clock hardware, since most of that computing could be done in a smartphone. Seems like the crop of solutions ...
Scientific and medical research has seen explosive growth in the past few decades. Since 1996, the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) has maintained PubMed, a free portal providing access to references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. PubMed now has over 21 million citations going back to 1966, and continues to add a staggering amount (about 500,000 new...
There have been plenty of success stories of online networks that help aggregate individuals with a common interest in a health condition. PatientsLikeMe, MedHelp, DailyStrength, Sermo to name some. So it was only a matter of time before we saw a network of networks. Something that went beyond a online community with singular focus. Alliance Health offers services to create health-related social...
Docmein is an online appointment scheduling service focused on private practices. The value proposition is that providers and patients can both use this online service to request and confirm appointments without any software to install. Side benefits are timely email reminders and custom pages for patients and practices. It's a bit surprising that healthcare continues to get the onslaught of...
The long tail of rare medical conditions has mostly been an unexplored market. Office of Rare Disease Research at NIH defines a disease or disorder as rare when it affects fewer than 200,000 people in America. Another non-profit organization, the National Organization for Rare Disorders's database lists more than 6,000 rare disorders that cumulatively affect approximately 25 million Americans....
Doximity is a mobile-based social network for physicians. It brings back memories of Sermo, which was my first review, written more than two years ago. Doximity was started by Jeff Tangney who was also one of the co-founders of Epocrates- an extremely popular physician information tools vendor that recently filed for an IPO in July 2010. The free app is currently only available for iPhone...
Jitterbug Wireless is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) founded in 2006. They offer simplified mobile hardware and service targeted towards baby boomers, with the value proposition being the opposite of a feature-rich phone. Few big, buttons and great customer service are it's selling points for seniors who are looking for hassle-free wireless connectivity. Verizon Wireless is their main...
As I've written before, medication adherence is an undeniably critical problem for the healthcare system. Most startups in this area have taken the approach of finding novel ways to remind or monitor the patient about medication, with the assumption that the problem is forgetfulness. Instead, PictureRx offers something that tries to solve a much more fundamental cause of poor adherence- lack of...
Drug safety surveillance (more formally, pharmacovigilence) is a serious and complex issue. Once a drug is FDA-approved and on the market, it needs to be constantly monitored for long/short-term side effects. That process is currently rigid: once observed conclusively, these effects are reported by providers to relevant authorities and disseminated back to all medical community (after some lag...
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...