News & Updates

July 14, 2022 - By Connie Chen

Contributors: Matthew Holt

There are mobile applications for almost every health condition but here’s a new one we hadn’t seen before. A Singaporean chiropractor has developed the first digital scoliometer for the iphone.

First Google, now Twitter: Johns Hopkins researchers studied 1.5 million health related Tweets from a sample of 2 billion. From cancer and allergies to insomnia and depression, the researchers have been able to glean information about location and nature of people’s sickness.

Gain Fitness, a personalized workout startup founded by former Googlers, released an iPhone app that allows fitness enthusiasts to access programs on the go. The new app create workouts based on free time, fitness level, body, goals and other factors. We also saw a similar program from Skimble this week, which will be in the RockHealth incubator this summer and includes coaching along with a variety of workouts.

Mayo Clinic launched its own patient focused social network. Patients at Mayo Clinic can create personal profiles, participate in health related discussion forums, and connect with other patients within a secure, private portal.

NovaSom, an Obstructive Sleep Apnea management company, announced $35 million in equity financing led by Safeguard Scientifics, TPG Biotechnology II Fund and Quaker BioVentures. NovaSom intends to use the funding for growth focusing on their expansion in payer and provider markets, development of of their NovaSom diagnostic medical device and cloud-based MediTrack Patient Management Portals. The Novasom device allows for home testing of sleep apnea, saving patients a visit to a clinical testing center. It’s clearly trying to be a more clinical rival to Zeo.

We also saw OneRecovery this week. Currently focusing on addiction, it has a very interesting model where a health care organization can connect with patients in a non-gated community (think: Kaiser creating treatment plans inside PatientsLikeMe.)

Finally, in early alpha is SuperBetter from Social Chocolate. The game improves personal health and achievement, developed by famed game designer Jane Mcgonigal when she was recovering from a traumatic head injury.

ClearPractice announced Eden Practice, the first practice management and EMR suite tailored for all 3 apple device. The cloud-based solution provides clinical, financial, and administrative functionalities for physicians and is Meaningful Used certified.

Also seen this week — UK-based Clinithink uses natural language processing to structure codes out of free text (such as transcribed clinical notes) and create ICD-10, problem lists and more. It has a neat interface and could plug well into mainstream EMRs, assuming enough providers realize it’s needed.

Active Health Management, a provider of clinical decision support, care management and health data reporting services, announced the appointment of Richard Noffsinger as president and CEO. He joins ActiveHealth from Anvita Health (formerly SafeMed).

MIT just launched MEDRC, its Medical Electronic Device Realization Center, focusing on the development of wearable or minimally invasive monitoring devices, medical imaging, laboratory instrumentation, and the data communication devices. The center will bring together MIT researchers, micro-electronics industry contacts, Boston area hospitals and the VC community.

Coming out from under wraps is Happtique which is providing a catalogued App Store for medical apps — helping to make sense of the 7000 in the main App store. It looks very interesting and is (believe it or not) from the Greater New York Hospital Association.

Women swept the first ever Google Science Fair Aware with three US girls winning the top prizes for their projects on ovarian cancer, grilled chicken and indoor air quality.