News & Updates

Health care shopping solutions company, Castlight Health raised $100M from investors including T. Rowe Price and Redmile Group. The company provides an online platform for health care employees to shop around for higher quality products, procedures, and tests at the lowest rate and for the benefit of both the provider and consumer.

American Well has updated to their Online Care product. The new Version 6.0 includes mobile expansion to incorporate physician-patient interaction including voice consultations and two-way video.

Sensiotec, a medical device developer specializing in non-contact patient monitoring, released a new product for beta testing in three hospitals. The device is called a Virtual Medical Assistant and monitors heart, respiration, and movement without any direct contact to the patient through use of a sensor array that can be placed in various locations around a patient’s room. Information can be transferred to mobile devices to alert nurses of any changes in vital signs.

Carezone is an online resource for individuals to store, organize, and manage information about people who they’re caring for. The company raised $13m in funding from New Enterprise Associates, Catamount Ventures, and the company’s own CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and plans to use the funding towards initially towards hiring engineers as well as product and partner development.

Kansas City, MO startup Cognovant raised $500K in a seed round to launch its first product, the PocketHealth personal health record. The basic version will be a free App Store download, with paid upgrades available for versions that handle more complex needs and allow use by multiple family members. Founders Joe Ketcherside MD and Stan Pestotnik RPh were executives at TheraDoc before it was acquired by Hospira.

Startup Misfit Wearables founded by the co-founders of diabetes management product developer AgaMatrix raised $7.6million. Specifics on the device that will be created with the funding is yet to be disclosed, but it sounds like they’ve got a lot of folks on their toes. Former Apple CEO, John Scully is a co-founder and investor.

Striiv is a fitness tracker that announced a new social engagement component to the mobile device, just to encourage a little friendly competition. The pedometer device tracks users’ steps, calories burned, and time and distance accomplished - all of which can now be shared among friends and family.

Merge Healthcare, provider of enterprise imaging and interoperability solutions, released Merge Honeycome Archive, a cloud-based image archiving mobile application. The product houses images securely in multiple locations.

Major EHR vendor Allscripts had a terrible quarter missing revenue and profit projections. Chairman Phil Pead and three other allies from the old Eclipsys side left the Board. While CEO Glen Tullman is safe for now, CFO Bill Davis is also leaving in the coming weeks. The stock was off more than 40% from recent highs. Epic and Cerner appear to continue to do well as hospitals continue their push into EMRs.

With the intention of creating 1,500 new jobs and to encourage the development of health IT innovation, a $4.2 million initiative called the New York Digital Health Accelerator was launched. Funding and efforts came together thanks to several public and private statewide organizations. Soon, health care and technology startups will compete for awards of up to $300,000 and other perks to help drive their company to the next level.

A new addition to Facebook will encourage users to update their organ-donor status on their personal profile. The goal is to help mitigate the shortage of organs and increase the number of donations. A link to the official donor registry will also be included. If nothing more, at lease this initiative has the potential to spread a tremendous amount of awareness on the issues related to organ shortages.