With big data playing an increasingly critical role in healthcare and with the pervasiveness of archaic infrastructure and lack of data portability in health systems and hospitals, data warehousing startup Health Catalyst sees a big opportunity to help fix this problem. And, at least for now, investors appear eager to buy in. In January, the startup raised a whopping $33 million in series B financing from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Sequoia Capital and Sorenson Capital.
Walk-in kiosks for retail settings are coming and promise to deliver healthcare on the spot via telemedicine. HealthSpot is part of a wave of upcoming small, walk-in telemedicine kiosk designed to deliver access to high-quality healthcare in retail stores and other non-traditional settings.
Las empresas iRobot e InTouch Health han obtenido la aprobación de la FDA norteamericana para su robot hospitalario RP-VITA. Se desplaza autónomamente por los pasillos de un hospital, y a través de él los especialistas, que pueden encontrarse en cualquier parte del mundo, interactúan con los pacientes mediante una aplicación especial de iPad. Además tiene puertos donde es posible conectar estetoscopios y otro instrumental.
iRobot es conocida por popularizar la aspiradora autónoma Roomba, mientras que InTouch Health es especialista en TICs aplicadas al sector de la salud. Un buen ejemplo de colaboración en el que empresas de sectores muy diferentes han aportado sus conocimientos y experiencias para desarrollar este nuevo producto.
Back in September, Glooko announced the release of a new version of its iOS app, a digital logbook which helps people with diabetes track their blood glucose levels from their smartphone. The new app brought support for six additional glucose meters, meaning that Glooko is now compatible with more than 17 different devices — a sign of the headway the startup has made in its march toward meter agnosticism.
There might be a lot of griping about how tight the venture capital world is when it comes to funding medical devices, but reality seems to be spinning a different yarn altogether.
A new funding report from CB Insights, a venture capital database, describes the medical device industry as the “sector darling” of VCs who invested in healthcare in the fourth quarter of 2012. In fact medical device deals comprised 42 percent of the overall number of healthcare deals done in the fourth quarter of last year. By comparison biotech deals stood at 15 percent, drug development at 13 percent and pharmaceuticals at 10 percent.
Blueprint Health has helped launch 18 digital health startups, and today it’s adding 11 more to its portfolio. Over 80 percent of its first two batches have gone on to raise additional capital, at an average of $400K per startup. On January 1st, the accelerator also launched Blueprint Co-Work — a healthtech-specific co-working space — that is currently home to 25 health startups, which are now plugging away in its 12,000 square-foot loft in SoHo.
But without further ado, here’s a peek at the 11 companies that are part of the accelerator’s most recent batch:
Las tecnologías de la información y las comunicaciones (TIC) aplicadas a los sistemas
sanitarios pueden hacerlos más eficaces, mejorar la calidad de vida e impulsar la innovación en los mercados de la salud.
No obstante, se trata de una posibilidad apenas explotada, tal como ha afirmado Toomas
Hendrik Ilves, presidente de Estonia y del grupo de trabajo independiente de alto nivel sobre la salud electrónica: «Sabemos que llevamos un atraso de diez años como mínimo respecto a prácticamente cualquier otro ámbito de aplicación de soluciones de TI. Sabemos por una amplia gama de otros servicios que las aplicaciones de la tecnología de la información pueden revolucionar y mejorar radicalmente la manera de hacer las cosas»
Big data has been big news in 2012. This year has seen a plethora of new apps, platforms and sensors that help create and capture more data about many aspects of our lives - from fitness and diet to energy consumption and retail. Advances in computer science and digital tools are rapidly improving our ability to analyse a greater volume, variety and velocity of data. Culturally, the shift towards much greater openness has had a significant impact on the public sector with more and more agencies opening up their data sets. Research shows that businesses are increasingly using data analytics to guide their innovation strategies.
Healthtech is an ever-growing sector, but from the $1 billion pool VCs poured into startups over the last year, health companies only received about 3 percent of that total. Not many healthtech startups have been able to secure those big venture rounds; however, last week, I highlighted one healthtech company that seems to be doing it right: Zocdoc, which raised a $50 million round from DST earlier this month, and offered a few takeaways for startups looking to learn from Zocdoc’s experience. (Check out the post here.
