I must admit that it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with all of the Healthcare IT Accelerators, Healthcare IT Incubators, Healthcare IT that are going up all over the place. The interest in investment and incubation of healthcare IT companies is huge right now. It’s an exciting time for those of us in the Healthcare IT space and an even more exciting time to be a healthcare entrepreneur.

Two recent announcements that caught my eye were the following.

NYeC Launches the New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA) – You can read the full release, but it’s a $4.2 Million program to accelerate the creation of digital health technology companies in New York City. It’s an interesting collaboration of the New York City Investment Fund (NYCIF) joined the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and the NYS Department of Health (DOH).

I think the thing that sets apart the NYDHA (that’s a long name even abbreviated) is the $300,000 each company gets along with the 18 healthcare providers that have agreed to participate in the program. We’ll see how well NYDHA can execute on this relationship since I believe it’s key. A healthcare IT accelerator program could provide nothing more valuable than actual customers for these healthcare IT products.

I also just saw that on May 10th the New York Digital Health Accelerator program is putting on an information and networking event. It says they’ll be streaming the event live. Looks like a great group of speakers and shows the depth of their connections.

Healthbox Launches Boston Healthcare Startup Accelerator – Healthbox launched its first program in Chicago. I think it’s a smart move for them to go to Boston (or Cambridge if you prefer) since it is a hotbed for healthcare IT. They’re offering $50,000 in seed capital for the 3 month program that will go from August to November.

There’s a real change happening right now in the venture capital healthcare investment world. In a recent article on NPR they highlight one piece of the change that’s happening with VC investment in healthcare:

The share of venture dollars flowing to seed and early-stage investments in biotechnology and medical devices has plummeted since 2007, when investors pumped $3.6 billion into 332 deals in which a price was disclosed, according to data compiled for Kaiser Health News by FactSet Research Systems. Overall venture investing declined by nearly one-third as the economic recession set in.

Many might look at this and say that this is a bad thing for healthcare. I think this this is a good thing for healthcare. One reason why is described in the same article:

“If you come in with [a device] that’s 10 percent better and twice as expensive, it’s hard to get anyone to care,” said Bryan Roberts, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist at Venrock, a Silicon Valley company that invests in firms working on health services, medical devices and drugs.

I think it’s healthy that we’re no longer investing twice as much money in something that delivers only partially better care. Sure, we still need companies innovating and looking at how that 10 percent better care can have an extra 0 on the end and be 100% better care.

Plus, I think we’re seeing a shift in healthcare investment into a large number of smaller companies who can innovate as opposed to larger sums of money into medical device and biotech companies. In some ways we’re seeing the costs associated with a startup company in healthcare starting to come down the way they did in the IT side of things.

The news recently came out that Hello Health has raised $10 million in funding. For those that aren’t familiar with Hello Health, here’s a pretty good description of what they do from the press release:

For years, physicians have experienced revenue reductions and, more recently, declining patient visits and must now look to ‘market their practices’ beyond quality of care to include: secure online communications that improve information and care team access, and provide greater convenience for patients. Hello Health is a Patient Management Platform that allows independent primary care physicians to transition from paper to electronic medical records and to provide a patient health portal through a subscription-based plan. Patients pay a small fee for the ability to schedule appointments, request lab results, renew prescriptions, share medical information and communicate (via HIPAA-compliant email, instant messaging and video consults) with their doctors and medical health professionals. The Hello Health Patient Management Platform was developed to provide an improved revenue stream for physicians while also enhancing patient engagement and providing better time and workflow management, all of which combine to strengthen the independence and sustainability of a practice.

I think it was a really interesting move for Hello Health to put a full blown EHR on top of their previous product offering. If you’re going to connect doctors with patients, then you really need to tap into the doctors EHR software. What better way to tap into that software than to just give the doctor the EHR software for free.

I also find it interesting that BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners is part of the funding round. While this is the venture arm of BlueCross BlueShield, it’s still interesting to see a health plan get so close to EHR software. There are plenty of health plans getting connected to HIEs, but not as many to EHR software.

I think the model of healthcare that Hello Health is working on is quite interesting and could represent a larger trend in healthcare: technology facilitating lower cost healthcare. I’ll be writing more on this in the future.

A few weeks ago Techcrunch announced the $3.5 million in funding that Glooko received to connect Glucose meters to iPhones for tracking diabetes. Here’s a description of Glooko:

Launched last year, Glooko is a digital logbook for people with diabetes who have to check their blood sugar every day. There are dozens of glucose logbooks in iTunes, but almost all of them require manual entry. What makes Glooko different is that the company designed a $40 cable (sold separately) that works with seven of the top glucose meters. You just plug it into both devices and it downloads your daily readings.

This is an interesting approach because it allows someone to use the Glucose meter that they’re use to using all of the time. Although, I don’t know many people that want to carry around a glucose meter with their phone and a cable to connect the two. I’m sure that Glooko would argue that the problem is that the glucose meters don’t support a wireless (bluetooth or NFC I suppose) technology for the exchange of that data. They’re right that it is a limitation of the traditional glucose meters.

The solution is to go down the path that AgaMatrix has gone down with their blood glucose meter that attaches to the iPhone. Basically it makes your blood glucose meter the size of a thumb drive. If you don’t want to carry your phone, you can just carry the small meter and some strips (yep, I don’t know if we’ll ever get away from the strips). Then, when you hook the meter back up to your iPhone it uploads all the data. Or, just leave it attached to your phone since it’s not that big.

I’ll be interested to see how well Glooko does with their $3.5 million in investment. There’s a lot of people focusing on the diabetes market.

A few days ago the news came out that Y Combinator startup company DrChrono has raised another $2.8 million in funding. Here’s the summary from Techcrunch:

Drchrono, a startup that simplifies the professional lives of doctors by bringing electronic health records and much more to the iPad, has raised $2.8 million in funding led by Yuri Milner, with Google’s Matt Cutts and other investors participating. The startup had previously raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Milner, General Catalyst, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, Gmail creator and FriendFeed cofounder Paul Buchheit, Cutts, and the Start Fund.

It’s an interesting mix of people that are funding DrChrono. Matt Cutts interests me a bunch since he works on the search engine team at Google in charge of Spam. Obviously, this is a quite different space.

The most interesting information in the Techcrunch article is the number of providers and patients that DrChrono has in its system.

The company also announced it now has more than 15,000 registered providers, and more than 400,000 patients using the drchrono platform.

Of course, we know how EMR companies are with these numbers. It’s one thing to have a registered provider and it’s quite another to have them actually using the EHR software. Also, I can’t help but wonder if the 400,000 patients includes imports of a physicians past patients. I’d love to hear some real numbers. For example, how many daily active users (doctors) do they have using their iPad EHR?

I also find it interesting that DrChrono has only taken $4.1 million in funding versus funding like CareCloud’s $27.3 million and Practice Fusion’s $38 million. Seems like DrChrono has chosen the much more conservative EHR software route as opposed to the more ambitious healthcare platform route that the others are working on.

The news came out that Merck was investing up to $17 million in Physicians Interactive Holdings (better known as Skyscape.com). Here’s a section from the press release.

Physicians Interactive Holdings, Inc. the leading provider of mobile and web-based clinical resources and solutions for healthcare professionals, today announced it entered into an agreement with Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, LLC (“GHIF”) to invest up to $17 million in the Company. The financing includes an initial investment of $8.5 million and potential future investments of up to $8.5 million contingent upon achieving certain pre-specified milestones. The proceeds will be used to fund the growth initiatives of four key products and other initiatives as identified by the Board. Physicians Interactive Holdings was identified by GHIF as being on the forefront of healthcare innovation, and the investment is part of the fund’s strategy to help nurture leading global healthcare solutions.

Uh huh, nurture leading global healthcare solutions. I think this line describes what’s really in the works after they describe PIH’s clinical medical reference tools, electronic drug sampling and interactive education they say, “The solutions are blended into the clinician’s daily workflow via web, mobile and electronic health records channels…” Exactly. Is there any wonder why Merck would be interested in this type of company?

There are a lot of companies that would love to be blended into the clinician’s daily workflow. Why do you think drug companies want to find some way to access the clinician through their EHR software? It’s because the EHR software is blended into the clinician’s daily workflow. There’s no better place to advertise, market and inform someone.

Omada Health comes out of the first batch of Rock Health startups. Back in December it raised $800k from Esther Dyson, NEA, Aberdare, Kapor Capital, and TriplePoint Ventures. I’m quite interested in Omada Health since a Diabetes Prevention Program was on my Health IT 2012 Wish List.

The unfortunate part about Omada Health is that their website has no real information about what they’re doing. It has their vision for doing disease prevention and it tells about their team, but their product isn’t out yet. I do like their idea of “Using the power of human relationships to drive behavior change.”

I think they call this peer pressure, but it sounds like they’re trying to leverage it for good in this case. It’s definitely a powerful idea if they can execute on it. I’ve often thought that the most valuable mHealth startup companies are going to be those that are able to create something that will get people to change. Change is hard and if you create something that facilitates change, then that’s powerful!

Since Diabetes Prevention is on my Wish list, I hope that Omada Health is wildly successful.

This happened last month, but I wanted to make sure we made note of it as part of listing all the Healthcare IT investments that are happening.

Waltham, MA-based health IT company PatientKeeper announced today that it has added $6 million in growth financing, from Flybridge Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Whitney & Company.

PatientKeeper had previously raised a $13 million round in 2009. I find a company like PatientKeeper really interesting since they aren’t an EHR company, but they have a lot of services that many healthcare organizations get from their EHR company. I’ll be interested to see how well they can do with this sort of best of breed approach to healthcare information systems.

On their site they claim to have 40,000 physician users and counting. That’s a lot of physicians using their software. I wonder what their road map is for the future. I’ll have to find them at HIMSS and learn more.

News travels fast on Twitter and I couldn’t help but notice this tweet about Practice Fusion raising another $2 million.

More money again for #PracticeFusion. Raises additional $2 million from Facebook’s Jeff Stremel and the Partovis for a total $38 million

— Zina Moukheiber (@ZinaMoukheiber) January 13, 2012

You can see the full press release from Practice Fusion about the new funding here. Here’s the most important section of the release:

Stremel, who led Facebook’s mobile efforts, joins existing investors Ali Partovi, angel investor and co-founder of LinkExchange, and Hadi Partovi, angel investor and co-founder of Tellme, in the current investment. Including the $23 million Series B round of financing led by Founders Fund in 2011, Practice Fusion has raised over $38 million in total funding with investments from Band of Angels, Felicis Ventures and others.

Considering this is only a $2 million investment, this seems more like a strategic investor as opposed to Practice Fusion needing some extra cash. Considering the mobile experience of these investors you can easily see this being Practice Fusion moving aggressively into the mobile space. It could be a smart move since past efforts by Practice Fusion to go mobile have basically been a flop.

These next couple of posts are going to be a little dated, but I want to make sure I’m getting all of the various large funding happenings in healthcare IT and I only have so many hours in a day to post these things. Plus, hopefully I’ll add a little insight into what’s happening.

As reported by Lauren Goode on AllThings D, Jawbone received $40 million in funding from Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Yuri Milner and investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Those are some really big name investors that are dipping into the healthcare space. A really great sign for those considering whether health IT is a place worth investing in right now.

What’s interesting is that Jawbone was still able to close this round of funding even after the huge issues they’ve had with their UP fitness wristband. My favorite write up of the Jawbone UP issues was from Michael Arrington. Basically, the company issued a full refund to anyone and they stopped selling the Jawbone UP. Even with all of that they still get $40 million in funding.

The other oddity I’m not sure about is the CEO Hosain Rahman talking about more healthcare products coming out and also some in the audio market. $40 million can do a lot of interesting things. Whether they become profitable and a wise investment is another story. Regardless of their profitability, I’ll be interested to see what other healthcare products they come out with and what they learned from the issues they experienced with the Jawbone UP.