ZocDoc announced $50 million in funding last week for its appointment scheduling app, and at least one commentator, Avado CEO Dave Chase (formerly of Microsoft Health), believes that healthtech startups could learn a thing or two from ZocDoc's apparent success.
In a recent column for TechCrunch, Chase lays down three simple lessons gleaned from ZocDoc's strategy to date:
Lead with the doctors....
Google's shuttering of Google Health in June also affected those mobile app developers that included Google Health integration in their offerings or even as a back-end solution. One such company is CTIS, which offers a personal health record (PHR) application, called mPHR, that requires users to have a Google Health account to access its features. Now, the company is collaborating with Microsoft...
PHR provider Dossia unveiled the latest version of its Dossia Health Manager software this week. It will be available to existing customers in the third quarter of 2011. According to the non-profit consortium, the Health Manager now "integrates game and social dynamics, incentives and messaging to foster sustained user engagement and behavior change, thereby offering long-term value to employers...
There are few places with such a high concentration of conceited, arrogant know-it-alls than Washington, D.C., but Silicon Valley may best even the Beltway gang. I've seen a lot of bluster, a lot of unearned publicity, plenty of buzzwords and, in many cases, little actual success in winning over customers or addressing a real problem in healthcare.
Sure, there are exceptions. With the iPad,...
In an industry as new as mobile health there are plenty of opportunities to announce a “first”. “The first medical app to do ‘x’” could be a tagline for a great number of the thousands of apps in appstores today. The second quarter of 2011, however, did bring a number of important milestones related to mobile health. Many of them are likely true “firsts,” but what will be more interesting is not...
Evoz, an innovative baby monitoring iOS app, launched in beta this week. The app allows parents to listen to their baby from their iPhone or iPad, with another WiFi-connected iOS device also running the app as a reciever. (Evoz also offers a WiFi connected monitor as an alternate option.) An Android version of the app will be available sometime in the coming months.
Earlier this year Withings,...
Mobile health is the future of medicine, according to a recent National Journal article.
The author of the piece, Ceci Connoly, is a senior adviser to the McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform. Connoly said that while the future of medicine includes breakthroughs and innovations on a number of fronts, while research her paper on the future of medicine, "what [she] heard about the most was...
The eighth annual Healthcare Unbound conference revealed a tension in the m-health marketplace between cutting-edge technology and ease of use.
According to Yan Chow, director of innovation and advanced technology for Kaiser Permanente, there are more than 9,000 health-related smartphone apps on the market right now, most segmented by phone operating system. But, noted AT&T Mobility's...
In February when Humana announced its partial acquisition of South Africa-based Discovery Holdings to take the company's Vitality wellness platform to the US, it was no surprise that the health plan was making moves to up engagement with its members and move toward wellness services. The surprise was that Humana decided to bring a new platform to the US rather than work with one of the many...
If you ask Microsoft Health Group's Chief Architect and General Manager Sean Nolan what the shuttering of Google Health means for HealthVault, he'll tell you the "real and simple" answer to that question is "nothing." Apart from an expected influx of new HealthVault users -- those forced to abandon Google Health -- Nolan said one change will be getting "used to being out there more or less on our...
