Aidin, a startup that helps people find better continuing care after they leave the hospital, is announcing today that it has raised $600K from General Catalyst, HLM, Red Swan and a band of angels and physicians from the healthcare space. The startup, a member of the NYC healthtech accelerator Blueprint Health, will use the funding to accelerate its growth and keep rampin’ up that team. Everyone needs more developers these days.

But what does this healthtech company do? Well, you shouldn’t want to go there anyway, but hospitals need patients to find better care providers after they leave the hospital. Because they keep coming back. In the U.S., one in four Medicare patients are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, and readmissions have a $17.4 billion price tag for hospitals.

This is especially true for “post-acute care,” or the care you receive after leaving the hospital to recover from an acute illness, injury or from surgery. Traditionally, “post-acute care” has meant care for elderly patients after they leave the hospital, but that’s changing. There are 25K post-acute care providers in the U.S. that deal with all ages, according to Aidin co-founder Russ Garney, which include nursing homes, health agencies, and rehab centers. And there’s a huge variability in care at all of them.

To get better outcomes and avoid going back to the hospital, patients need better information, but hospitals can’t tell their patients which care facilities to choose — no objective ratings or reviews of the providers to help them find a good one.

So, Aidin helps patients (or their families) make the right choice post-hospital by providing them with up-to-date ratings and reviews of the available providers in their area, as well as giving them data around the outcomes of each providers’ patients. 50 percent have gone right back to the hospital? Well, probably want to avoid that one.

The information they provide, Garney tells us, is customized to their specific conditions and needs, so that, say, a patient needing follow-up wound care will see ratings for providers that have really nailed wound care — not postnatal care. This includes ratings and reviews from patients who’ve received that specific treatment from that specific provider. In a sense, they’re trying to create the Yelp for continuing care — but which makes hospital staffs’ lives easier, too.

Through Aidin, hospital staff can easily create referrals, share provider ratings with their patients, enter the patient’s choice in the system, as well as take advantage of eMessaging and emailing. The idea is by integrating this into hospitals’ existing infrastructure they can help them save hospitals money on readmissions, documentation, etc. And for patients, it’s a much more effective way to be matched with the right care provider.

As to where the startup plans to make money? They haven’t decided concretely on a business model yet, but potential revenue streams could come from hospital subscriptions, lead-gen/transaction fees for providers, etc. Though it’s somewhat of a niche market, there is some competition from electronic referral systems like ECIN and Curaspan, but with a fresh Web 2.0 interface and some ease of use, Aidin thinks it can do it better.

Aidin here, product demo here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Though the health industry has, in many respects, been slow to adopt new web and mobile technologies, it seems we may finally have reached a tipping point. This is perhaps best demonstrated by Manhattan Research’s report, which found that 72 percent of physicians owned a smartphone in 2011, with adoption potentially reaching 85 percent by the end of this year. With doctors increasingly carrying smartphones and tablets at the point of care, Borna Safabakhsh says that he is confident that the timing is right for medicine to finally take advantage of the breakthroughs in web and mobile technologies.

Safabakhsh is the co-founder and CEO of Agile Diagnosis, a Y Combinator and Rock Health-incubated startup, which is today launching a beta web and mobile platform that aims to help doctors better diagnose their patients. While this may initially sound like a next-gen WebMD, Agile Diagnosis isn’t intended to help consumers self-diagnose, although the team may get there initially, it’s just for doctors, nurses, and medical students.

To that end, Agile Diagnosis gives clinicians a central place in which they can gain realtime access to evidence and consensus-based best practices (or clinical guidelines), so that they can help diagnose their patients not just based on scientific literature, but with the help of other doctors who have correctly diagnosed the same or related symptoms, for example. This is then obviously made available through cross-platform web and mobile apps that enable doctors quick access to those guidelines at the point of care.

The startup’s CEO said that, while there are quite a few medical reference apps on the market already, most of those are “more or less an eTextbook.” So, what sets Agile Diagnosis apart is that it includes access to a full repository of quality and credible medical information not only from medical literature but doctors themselves, surfaced by its own clinical algorithms, as well as a user-friendly mobile interface and design.

That means that, visually, Agile Diagnosis’ tree format was designed to make clinical guidelines and medical information easier to digest and thus more actionable, as compared to the apps and web services that come densely-packed with text — the same format that has plagued medicine for decades.

“For the patient, this means faster and more accurate decisions,” says Dr. Scott Stern, who is both an Agile Diagnosis co-founder as well as the Assistant Dean of technology and innovation at The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. “For your doctor, it means clear guidance for taking medical history and physical exams, ordering tests and labs only when necessary, and identifying pertinent results and clinical clues.”

The co-founders tell us that an estimated 50 percent of patient visits fall below the standard of care, and that one in seven patients are misdiagnosed. That’s alongside the tens of billions wasted on unnecessary testing and inappropriate treatments — in the U.S. alone. While doctors have long had access to enormous online repositories of medical journals, texts, and research, medical data has not historically been organized into a digestible format for physicians. It’s either check out WebMD or read a detailed, 70-page article — the options have been limited.

What’s more, on average, doctors only have 7 to 10 minutes per patient. That’s not a lot of time to make the right decision, and certainly not enough time to comb through medical journals. So, Agile Diagnosis’ web and mobile platforms offer doctors contextual information (along with lists of references that provide hyperlinks to primary and secondary literature) for each diagnostic and care-related decision they make, which allow them to explore alternatives to find the right solution.

Because a doctor’s process begins with the differential, Agile Diagnosis has developed a dynamic differential which updates in realtime to make them aware of the particular diagnoses that are driving decisions in the medical community. This enables physicians to hone in on the differential using evidence-based tips, including sensitivities, specificities, likelihood rations, and post-test probabilities.

All in all, Agile Diagnosis is looking to give doctors the ability to give better, more accurate care in less time, while in turn enabling patients to gain improved health and a higher quality of care, leading to fewer unnecessary tests, treatments and bad outcomes. The startup is a graduate of Y Combinator’s 2011 summer class — was thus a recipient of SV Angel and Start Fund’s joint offer of $150K in convertible debt to each member of the class — and is currently a member of Rock Health’s second batch of healthtech startups.

Agile Diagnosis’ first mobile offering is an HTML5 web app that is built for tablets (specifically for the iPad). An iPhone app is in the works and should be available later this year. The current beta is free, but the co-founders said that they plan to convert to a paid subscription model in the future.

For those doctors, nurses, and medical students interested in checking out Agile Diagnosis’ interactive visual guidelines, check them out here, and apply for access with the code “TECHCRUNCHDOC”.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As Dave Chase wrote earlier this year, the healthtech space is heating up, and a lot of serial entrepreneurs with consumer web experience are turning their focus to fixing some of the big problems inherent in the legacy health systems we have today in the U.S. and abroad. Yet, in spite of the $1 billion pool VCs have poured into startups last year, for example, healthtech startups, specifically, aren’t seeing a lot of that capital. There are a lot of challenges inherent to launching a healthtech startup that companies in the consumer web just don’t have to deal with, HIPAA-compliance, among others.

While it’s difficult for all startups, establishing B2B relationships and intricate partnerships is no simple task. That’s where health-focused accelerators like Rock Health come into the picture. (And we need more.) Rock Health has a great list of mentors (more here), and list of financial and health-related partners is growing fast as well.

Today, the company is officially pulling back the curtain on their second batch of startups. There are 15 companies in this batch, which will begin the 5-month Rock Health program beginning in January 2012. (You can read more on the accelerator’s inaugural batch here.)

Without further ado, here they are:

Agile Diagnosis is creating a web and mobile platform that provides clinicians with evidence and expert-consensus based, best practices in the form of highly actionable clinical algorithms. The startup wants to make it easier and quicker for clinicians to give their patients the best possible care.

Avva is the first, online patient-focused breast cancer management tool that allows patients to comprehensively organize, manage, and communicate important information throughout the breast cancer experience.

Cardiio empowers ordinary people with simple yet powerful tools to experiment, gain insight and take charge of their health and wellbeing.

Care at Hand is a mobile-based electronic health records and workflow automation software for home health care agencies. It also allows for new participation by family members via an online portal. With increased efficiency, agencies will be able to retain and attract new customers at a higher rate.

ChickRx is a healthy living community and marketplace for young women. Young women are preoccupied with health and wellness (diet, weight, birth control, STDs, mental health, skin, etc.), but existing health sites are clinical, target everyone or target moms.

Cognitive Health Innovations provides an online environment to help people address mental health issues and achieve personal growth goals using scientifically validated psychotherapeutic techniques and structured social interactions.

Docphin is the Bloomberg for Doctors. Docphin is a platform that personalizes medical news and research. In an environment that includes over a thousand medical journals with content that is increasingly complex and fragmented, physicians have grown tired of searching for relevant news. Docphin was created to address the “find” problem which has challenged physicians for decades. Docphin’s platform enables users to easily personalize the news and research that matters most to them and their patients.

Epi.MD is creating a dynamic, social population management tool that’s designed to help medical providers manage their patient population, disseminate information about new health care trends, and take immediate action to improve the health of their patients.

GetMyCare is a home health care marketplace that helps families find high quality caregivers at the lowest cost. Caregivers on our network range from non medical home care aides to physical therapist to licenced registered nurses.

HealthRally is a crowdfunding platform that lets friends and family motivate one another to achieve health goals with money and rewards. Think KickStarter for personal health motivation. (Read our coverage of HealthRally’s seed raise from Esther Dyson and more here.)

Helpful Systems is building an analytics system to predict and identify patients who are most at-risk for developing a hospital-acquired infection based on patient demographics and behavior patterns, hospital staff behavior patterns, and hospital logistics.

Nephosity shares medical images on the iPad. Doctors have access to a patient’s medical images anywhere, anytime, and can collaborate with their colleagues.

Sano is developing a powerful mobile health monitoring product that will reveal new insights about stage zero care.

Senstore is a spin-out from Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program 2011. We are developing open innovation tools and a community of developers and entrepreneurs to catalyze innovation around sensor devices and applications. Our long term vision is to crowdsource the development of a medical tricorder which will enable low cost medical diagnosis to be performed by anyone, from anywhere.

Sessions aims to unlock social exercise by allowing people to share and discover exercise sessions around them. Think Meetup meets Foursquare for exercise.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Just as consumers are adopting smartphones (to the tune of 84 million in the U.S.) and tablets at a breakneck pace, an increasing number of clinicians, healthcare administrators and staff are using mobile devices to manage patient care, communicate within the workplace, and carry out their day to day work. Nearly 80 percent of physicians will adopt smartphones by 2012.

Consumers interact with and use app stores on a daily basis, and there are a growing number of consumer-facing healthtech services that offer a variety of health services, as people become more interested in using web and mobil services that help them stay in shape and get fit. So, as the centers of healthcare, and arguably with serious demand, why can’t hospitals take advantage?

Across the board, hospitals want to offer applications for their doctors and employees to use, but not all of the apps they want to offer are consumer, or even patient, focused. Hospitals and most other care facilities are enterprises, their use case doesn’t fall under healthcare categories of traditional app stores, there is a lot of sensitive and private data within their walls, so they want secure and custom deployment of their apps. This is no easy task.

This is where Happtique comes in. Happtique is a mobile app store developed by healthcare professionals for hospitals and other healthcare professionals. The startup offers enterprises like hospitals, continuing care facilities, and physician practices, the ability to create individually branded and secure app stores that support apps for both patients and employees.

Happtique has previously partnered with HealthSaaS, the maker of cloud-based healthtech solutions, to create a custom catalog of mobile health apps, designed to connect patients to their healthcare organizations and physicians through their mobile phones — all via a secure network.

The health app catalog basically offers a suite of mobile apps for patients and providers that will eventually (this is still in the works, but you can see the intended use case) allow patients to remotely monitor their health and continue treatment off-site. The solution will enable patients to upload medical documents requested by physicians into a secure portal (which healthcare organizations and hospitals can customize, i.e. it’s white label), as well as the option to integrate this into their electronic health records.

The solution will be platform agnostic, which means that patients will be able to access this via the majority of their mobile devices, as well as giving both healthcare providers the ability to be more proactive in managing care and further bring patients into the center of the treatment process, rather than having treatment and care be a one-and-done process that only happens on-site. HealthSaaS provides the custom apps, while Happtique provides the ability for healthcare providers to manage and control deployment of certain apps to their patients.

As part of its beta trial, Happtique has offered a number of East Coast medical institutions their own branded, private mobile app stores, including Mount Sinai Hospital, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center.

Across the board, the medical institutions Happtique is working with have either developed their own mobile apps or are in the process of developing their own apps, which is reflection of where hospitals are today, said Cory Ackerman, President of Happtique. Happtique can help with development of apps, or for those hospitals and facilities that have already been creating their own, Healthcare they can then use these new, custom app stores provided by Happtique to offer apps to their patients and employees. While the intent is to be platform agnostic, initial focus has been on Android and iOS, with expansion to other mobile platforms coming in the near future.

In the broad picture, there are over 23,000 mobile health apps available for iOS and Android, but for doctors and hospital administrators, there really hasn’t been an easy way to recommend and effectively categorize apps. Happtique’s team of healthcare pros curates their app store, rating and categorizing apps in a way that’s akin to a medical library, rather than the traditional consumer-focused store. So the solution was created to both organize the mobile healthcare app library, and to make that a customizable platform so that hospitals, doctors offices, etc can each have a unified solution across their devices.

While doctors may want to use some of the awesome consumer-facing health apps publicly available today, each hospital has its own legacy system and infrastructure it uses internally to push and circulate records, patient data, treatment information, and so on. They want to have all this information on their devices, as they move around the hospital, but they want that info to be private and secure within a hospital’s already existing data silos. Again, this is tough to do, especially for a platform trying to be a one-sized-fits-all solution with white label customization, but that’s where Happtique is going.

And boy are we glad they are going there. These represent some big, big problems facing the healthcare industry, and as Happtique rolls out the ability for doctors and hospitals to prescribe apps to patients, let post-transplant patients, say, interact with an app that walks them through post-treatment rehab on their iPad — well, you can see the value.

Happtique is currently in the process of raising a round of venture investment. For more, check them out at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch