Bay Area Startups: Bringing Digital Health to Your Fingertips
By Karen Ring, Ph.D.
Did you know that approximately 1 in 2 Americans live with at least one chronic illness? With our growing elderly population and skyrocketing healthcare costs, the US is eager to find ways to minimize spending and increase the efficiency and quality of patient care.
One of the opportunities currently being pursued is digital health. Digital health integrates patient health and wellness with digital technology in order to establish a more organized and communicative healthcare network. The industry is blowing up with 55 digital health exits either through IPO or acquisitions in the past year and more than $956 million raised from venture capital firms reported in 2011. The market is projected to hit $31.3 billion by 2017 and $60 billion in 2025.
To be honest, I was relatively unfamiliar with the concept of digital health technology, until I attended Bay Area LifeTech’s (BALT) digital health meetup featuring talks by three digital health startup companies: Practice Fusion, Better Doctor, and Mevoked. The event was organized by BALT founder Luke Lightning, Ph.D., and sponsored by DLA Piper and Robert W. Baird & Co.
Stephen Abreu, an associate at DLA Piper and the host of the event, commented, “It was a pleasure for DLA Piper to host the digital health networking event. We recognize that the area of digital health is a growing field and holds much promise, with the potential to address some of the most challenging issues in healthcare. We welcome the opportunity to support entrepreneurs in the space, and hope to leverage our deep expertise in areas such as corporate law, intellectual property transactions, and regulatory analysis to continue to do so.”
The talks were eye-opening and spoke to how technology can revolutionize healthcare in the next few decades. Below are descriptions of each of the presentations.
Sachin Kelkar has been at Practice Fusion (practicefusion.com) for six months in the role of corporate finance strategy. The company has tackled population health management by providing physicians and medical doctors with free electronic medical records that are contained within a single, cloud-based platform. This platform is useful for doctors as well as patients not only for digitizing patient medical history, but also for identifying new patients, emailing test results or diagnoses, booking appointments, filling prescriptions, and even identifying potential medical problems such as allergies or drug-drug interactions. Patients can also find new doctors who subscribe to Practice Fusion through a service called “Patient Fusion”. Practice Fusion generates revenue through advertisements and is the fastest growing online health platform in the US. Currently, 1 in 4 doctors choose their services. Sachin explains their client base, “Practice Fusion targets the ambulatory, or non-hospital based, physician community where north of 50% of doctors are still charting on paper. 80% of physicians practice outside of the hospital, but Practice Fusion’s reach is naturally moving upstream to larger practices, IPAs and community based hospitals.” It seems that the sky’s the limit for Practice Fusion with more than 100,000 doctors using their platform and their recent $70 Million Series D fundraising, which values the company at approximately $700 million..
Paul Whitaker has worked with BetterDoctor (betterdoctor.com) for nine months as the vice president of business development. BetterDoctor makes it easier for patients to find high quality doctors by doing the work for them. By using either their online website or downloading their mobile app, patients can look up local doctors that have been rated and meet the criteria of a “better doctor”. Signing up is simple. BetterDoctor asks you to supply background information such as where you live, your insurance provider, and what type of doctor you need, in order to match you with a doctor in a timely manner. Doctors who participate in this program in turn are rated based off a number of criteria including consumer rating services, state licensing board information, outcome data, education, and training data. While BetterDoctor has focused its efforts initially on the Bay Area, it is also expanding across the US. Paul explains, “Most of the doctors in the US are already on our service. People from Paris Texas to New York and San Francisco can find local doctors using BetterDoctor. The rollout of markets is really more related to doctor participation. We want doctors to be engaged to ensure that they are well represented on BetterDoctor. This creates much higher value for patients and for doctors.” So don’t worry if you find yourself sick while you are out of town: finding a physician could be as simple as downloading BetterDoctor!
Arun Ravi is the CEO and founder of Mevoked (mevoked.com), a behavioral analysis platform that correlates online and mobile behavior to mental health wellness. Mental health is one of the biggest untreated problems plaguing US healthcare. The average time from diagnosis to actual treatment is 20 years. As Arun puts it, “Mental health needs technology and it hasn’t come to that yet.” Mevoked presents an opportunity to help with mental health wellness. Arun and his colleagues have teamed up with an advisory board of psychiatrists and psychologists to look at behavioral indicators of mental illness in young adults. Mevoked was designed to determine an individual’s state of mind based on how he or she uses technology such as a computer, smartphone, or iPad. Mevoked also provides a monitoring system for parents who can receive reports about their child’s activities online and more important identify any warning signs of potential worrisome online behavior. While Mevoked is currently focused on tracking mental illness, Arun’s plan is to eventually use this platform to track the onset of other debilitating and devastating diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders, eating disorders, and post traumatic stress disorder in war veterans. Mevoked will launch its consumer product at the end of September. Keep your eyes open because the first 100 users who sign up will receive a discount!
The next BALT networking event featuring local start-ups will focus on Medical Devices and will be held on Thursday, October 3rd at the Netherlands Consulate General. Also, we have an exciting announcement: The BALT group recently surpassed a major milestone and welcomed its 1,000th member! Congratulations to Luke for putting together such a successful networking group!
Karen Ring is a postdoctoral scholar at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. To contact Karen email at Ring.Karen@gmail.com.
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