Personal health prediction startup 100Plus attracts its first investor
Personalized health prediction startup 100Plus announced today that it secured initial funding from Founders Fund and Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook.
100Plus plans to use large clinical datasets and algorithms to build predictive models of users’ future health. The consumer application will also allow users to compare their data to others with like health characteristics and habits and will use gaming mechanics to encourage continual use of the app. “What we want to do is have the analytics at the core, underneath, but create a really fun and engaging user experience,” CEO of 100Plus Chris Hogg said. The idea is to log daily behavior in order to estimate how it will affect longevity and future quality of life.100Plus plans to launch a beta version of the program in mid 2012.
The data used to feed the formulas will come from public datasets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HealthData.gov and Practice Fusion Research Division’s proprietary clinical dataset of 24 million de-identified patient records. Practice Fusion is a free web-based electronic medical record provider, and this will be the first consumer health application built on its platform. CEO of Practice Fusion Ryan Howard is a co-founder of 100Plus.
With enough data from users, 100Plus aims to be able to tell the users how they compare to the rest of the population. About 75% of people will have high blood pressure at 70 years old, Hogg said. The application will tell people if their odds of developing high pressure are greater or less than that statistic, based on their current behavior. “We can really start to tease out what’s different about that 25% from that 75%. And over time, by accumulating more information, I think we can get better answers that are more personalized and more relevant to each individual user,” Hogg said.
The company is in the early stages of development. It has raised $500,000 and will use the newly raised funds to hire employees to focus on data analytics, engineering and user experience.
100Plus takes a similar approach to Genomera, a company that connects people with related health questions and concerns and uses crowdsourced information for health studies. The company has generated a lot of interest from Quantified-Self enthusiasts, or those who are interested in self-tracking their data to gain health insights. 100Plus differs in that it has access to much more data than Genomera. However, going forward, both companies will have to figure out how to attract attention from those outside of this relatively small interest group of avid self-trackers.
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