News & Updates

The rumors had been around for a while but the news still stings. The Official Google Blog announced the retirement of Google Health (2008-2011.) The blog reads: “While (it) didn’t scale as we had hoped, we believe (Google Health) did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult.” See write ups by CNET, Health 2.0 or Fed Trotter for details on what can be learned from it’s conclusion.

We checked on the progress of three Beta startups this week. All have variants on personalizing health information. Medify is building communities that can access content from professional journal articles and personalize it to individuals. HealthTap personalizes answers to queries and then allows communication with physicians about it. WellnessFx teams customers together to buy common and not so common diagostic tests and coach them through the necessary next steps.

Kyruus raised a $5.5M series A financing round from Highland Capital Partners. Venrock, and strategic investor Gerson Lehman Group. It’s building a “Big Data” platform with the goals of providing Processing, Profiling, and Predictive analytics about physicians. CEO is Graham Gardner, the ex-Highland Capital who led and sold DNA firm Generation Health to Medco. Another Boston based outfit MedNetworks, the company started by Connected author Nick Christakis is also working on linking physician data.

The Northern Virginia Regional Health Information Organization, Inc. has launched a pilot project that involves medication data exchange, allowing for the recovery of medication history for Emergency Department patients.

The National Prevention Strategy has received several Health IT suggestions from the Obama Administration, including the “expanded use of EHRs, social media tools, and mobile phone applications.”

American Medical Associations’ subsidiary, Amagine has launched a healthIT index that allows doctors to easily identify their top priorities for IT adoption in a way that will help them qualify for federal incentives (an otherwise time consuming process). AMA Board Secretary Steven J. Stack, MD explained, “The health IT index helps physicians visualize their health IT priorities in minutes and compare those priorities with other physicians to begin crafting a plan to meet their goals.”

The Informatics Applications Group, (TIAG) received a $5M contract from the Veteran Affairs to be the custodian of new work on the VISTA open source EHR. TIAG will also be tasked with managing the community working on it.