News & Updates

July 28, 2022 - By Connie Chen

Contributors: Matthew Holt

Social networks for patients are certainly not new but that hasn’t stopped new companies from throwing their hats in the ring. This week I Had Cancer, a new resource for cancer patients, survivors, and supporters, launched in private beta. I Had Cancer was founded by members of the Squeaky Wheel Media and Crowdbeacon teams. Their Angel Round raised $750,000.

Car companies continue to integrate health devices into next generation vehicle prototypes. This week Toyota unveiled an ECG detecting driving wheel while Ford presented a contactless ECG-sensing driving seat.

Sprint had a health acre day at its new M2M (machine to machine) center in California and hosted several of its partners including Ideal Life (scales, blood pressure cuffs & more), BodyMedia (a leading wellness monitoring group that is sponsoring an ongoing Developer Challenge), and more. It looks like the big wireless carriers are developing ecosystems of smaller companies providing applications on their networks.

EHR and practice management SaaS vendor athenahealth agreed to acquire Proxsys for $28 million in cash. Proxsys provides cloud-based care coordination services between physicians and hospitals. The acquisition will catalyze the development of athenahealth’s emerging care coordination service, athenacoordinator.

DrChrono, a provider of point-of-care and practice management software, has rolled out an new application integrating speech-recognition technology from M*Modal, bringing speech-to-text capability to its iPad EHR. The company will be making some exciting announcements in the next few weeks so stay tuned.

In response to emerging technologies that collect data on chronic disease outcomes, the Institute of Medicine released a blueprint for building a national system for monitoring nationwide chronic disease trends.

Groundswell Health announced its web based collective purchasing service. The company is now in beta but Groundswell is hoping to reduce healthcare costs by providing a whole-sale social-commerce platform that delivers discounts on the products that healthcare practices purchase every day regardless of size and purchasing volume.

PBM Express Scripts announces plans to buy rival Medco Health Solutions for aproximatly $29 billion. While this isn’t exactly a merger of two small innovators, Medco has been aggressive in using both web & mobile tools for its consumer/members and also purchased DNADirect in 2010 to help use genomics to better target drug therapies.

Soon VA employees will be able to use their iPhones and iPads to access email as well as a mobile version of the VISTA EHR.