A medication adherence app for families, a social network for recovering alcoholics and a mobile health diagnostic that claims to diagnose concussions based on eye movements. In addition to contributing to the debate on mobile health apps and medical device regulation these are some of the 10 companies that will compete as part of an innovation challenge next month in New York.

Launched in January by the New York City Economic Development Corp. and Health 2.0, Innovate Health Tech NYC is a competition among early stage mobile health and medtech companies competing for $50,000 in prizes. Here’s a summary of the finalists.

Kinsa Health’s Smart Thermometer is the first of a series of smart tools to help people track their health. They were developed Kinsa Health, an early stage venture-backed medtech startup led by CEO Inder Singh, a former executive vice president for Clinton Health Access Initiative. The company wants people to use its thermometer not only to help them to track their own illnesses and share that data with physicians. From a big data perspective, it can also provide a “health map” so people can see in real time virus pockets in their region. The Kinsa Smart Thermometer doesn’t need batteries, LCD, or a processor, but does depend on a smartphone.

Our DailyRX, which may or may not be intended to sound like “our daily bread…” from the Lord’s Prayer, tries to take a new approach to adherence apps by turning its app into another family ritual. Using a single mobile app, each family member theoretically can have their own prescription schedule, refill reminders, issuing reminders for taking doses.

Sippa Health is all about security protocol for electronic health records. It uses sophisticated biometrics that involve “voice signatures” or fingerprints to activate access. The idea is these would protect electronic health information stored in mobile devices and eliminate the need to memorize passwords.

Adhere Tech From smart thermometers we get to smart pillbottles. AdhereTech keeps its tech in a bottle that knows if patients are taking their pills. It sends text messages or rings users to remind them to take their medicine.

addicaid demo from sam frons on Vimeo.

Addicaid A social network for recovering addicts and alcoholics, Addicaid sets out to: help users find and sustain a support network, set personal treatment goals, and discover helpful support groups and activities.

Balance by Elucidate is a mobile app designed to help families coordinate caregiving responsibilities for Alzheimer’s patients from the iPad or iPhone.

FORCE Injury Packs are a selection of rehabilitation videos and patient education modules designed by physical therapists and sports medicine professionals. They include injury specific rehab exercise videos, advice treatment information and help users set and track goals.

Oculogica’s mobile health diagnostic uses eye movements to assess and quantify the extent of a concussion and other conditions. It’s intended to be a low cost and efficient approach to diagnosing concussions.

Patient Connect by Health Recovery Solutions has an early warning system for heart failure patients that uses real-time data to help providers avoid unnecessary re-admissions for outpatients.

Fitronix The popular choice finalist uses Microsoft Kinnect technology  to assess body movements for fitness, sports and physical therapy.

Among the entry criteria companies had to meet  were: outline the healthcare needs their technology fills, the target users, what makes it urgent, explain the path to commercialization, demonstrate its value, and explain how it would be marketed and sold, including details like sales channels and pricing.

COMS Interactive, a startup that produces an SaaS products for the health care industry, has secured a new $21 million round of funding, the company announced today.

COMS’ main product is Daylight IQ, a software suite that manages health and disease profiles for elderly residents at senior living facilities. (I would have said nursing homes but that seemed insensitive and politically incorrect.) The software suite helps track changes in a person’s condition and alerts attendance and doctors accordingly, which basically helps patients from going to the doctor multiple times before finding what’s actually wrong.

The startup said it plans to use the fresh capital to expand the company, develop additional products in conjunction with Daylight IQ, and for redemption of COMS common stock holdings.

The new round of funding was led by Summit Partners. Under terms of the deal, Summit Partners managing director Mark deLaar will also join COMS board of directors.

Founded in 2010, the Cleveland, Ohio-based startup previously raised a $2.7 million round of funding and has a total of $23.7 million in funding to date from Summit Partners, Zapis Capital Group, Next Sparc LLC, and Portal Capital LLC.

Health care image via Shutterstock

This article originally appeared on VentureBeat

LONDON (Reuters) - Pharmaceutical companies need to boost the benefits of drug research by working with regulators and healthcare providers to overhaul the way medicines are approved and paid for, a thinktank backed by investors says.

After years of disappointing research and development (R&D) productivity, a new report backed by leading institutional investors sees "early indications of a recovery", with U.S. approvals of new drugs last year the highest since 1996.

The PharmaFutures thinktank said on Wednesday that getting the most out of an improving flow of novel - and costly - drugs in areas such as oncology will require a more flexible approach to developing, licensing, using and paying for medicines.

This would allow investors in drug companies to benefit from earlier cash flows, reduced regulatory risk and less uncertainties over whether drugs will be paid for.

The thinktank has the backing of investors such as Fidelity Worldwide Investment, JPMorgan Asset Management, Robeco and Universities Superannuation Scheme Investment Management, as well as drugmakers like GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson.

PharmaFutures director Sophia Tickell saw scope for change as governments seek to overhaul healthcare and get better value, sometimes prompted by austerity.

"Today's binary decision-making at the point of regulatory approval and price setting will need to be replaced by iterative, dynamic decision-making that adapts as evidence is accrued, and value determined over time," the new report said.

In particular, regulators should have more flexibility to take into account evidence about a drug's effectiveness as it is rolled out and used.

At the same time, the industry needs to move away from ideas of a fixed price point for medicines to a system where prices are adapted according to changing perceptions of the value of a medicine, based on how it works in clinical practice.

On both fronts, there are signs that industry and regulators are starting to change.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for example, recently launched a programme to accelerate life-saving therapies designated as a "breakthrough," opening to door to earlier approval based on quicker studies, where clinical data is compelling.

The European Medicines Agency also has a scheme to allow conditional approval based on good interim clinical trial results, while Britain currently plans to introduce a system of value-based pricing for new drugs in 2014, although details of this measure are still awaited.

(Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

Christine Porter is hooked on the My Fitness Pal app. In October, after deciding to lose 50 pounds, Porter started typing in everything she eats, drinks and any exercise she gets.

“This is like my main page here,” says Porter, who lost 42 pounds in nine months. “It’s telling me I have about 1,200 calories remaining for the day. When I want to record something I just click the ‘add to diary’ button. I’m on it all day either through my phone or through the computer.”

Health apps such as My Fitness Pal are turning smartphones and tablets into exercise aides, blood pressure monitors and devices that transmit an EKG. And the day is not far off when doctors may be suggesting apps along with prescribing drugs to help patients manage their health. But the explosion of apps is way ahead of tests to determine which ones work. 

Porter heard about the app from Ryan Sherman, her health coach at a clinic for employees of Massachusetts General Hospital. Sherman helps clients turn a doctor’s orders into a user friendly action plan for keeping high blood pressure or sugar levels in check.

Increasingly, says Sherman, patients with diabetes or heart problems are coming in, pulling out their phones, and saying hey, have you seen this app?

“There’s a new one every day, so it’s trying to keep up with that,” Sherman says.

Which is one reason why many doctors are suggesting, but not prescribing apps. Doctors aren’t sure which of the roughly 40,000 available apps do what they claim to do. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration divides health apps into two categories: those that help with healthy lifestyles and those that turn your phone into a medical device to, say, record blood pressure or an EKG, and then send those readings to a doctor.

The FDA is revising regulations for apps in the medical device category. It does not plan to regulate diet or exercise apps. A few private companies are stepping in to do that task. Ben Chodor started Happtique, a company that reviews apps and gives those are at least perform correctly, a seal of approval.

“It’s the Wild West and someone needs to come in and at least help the consumers and the clinicians and the payers sort through the 40,000-plus apps that are already out there,” says Chodor.

Happtique will not say which apps work better than others or guarantee their safety. Still, some doctors say apps that work are transforming medicine. Dr. Eric Topol, the chief academic officer at Scripps Health in San Diego, says apps that monitor blood pressure or glucose rates can be more valuable than prescriptions to keep these conditions in check.

“When we use a medication we don’t know if it’s going to work or not.  It’s much better when a person’s taking their blood pressure on a frequent basis,” says Topol. 

Some apps work with another device, such as when a person wears a blood pressure monitor tha transmits the data to the person’s phone. “The average person looks at their smart phone 150 times a day,” says Topol. “All of a sudden, they’re able to diagnose if their blood pressure’s adequately controlled and what are the circumstances when it’s not.”

Topol says apps that control blood pressure will help prevent strokes and heart attacks and may mean doctors should prescribe phones and tablets in addition to apps. But Dr. Laura Ferris at the University of Pittsburgh, urges patients to use apps cautiously.

“It does make sense that people who download these apps and use them really understand that they are doing so at their own risk,” says Ferris.

Ferris ran a study of apps that claim to detect cancer based on a picture of a mole. Only one of the apps sends the  picture of your suspicious mole to a dermatologist. It was right 98 percent of the time. 

Three others, says Ferris, could be dangerously wrong: “The best of them missed melanoma 30 percent of the time. The worst of them missed melanoma over 90 percent of the time.”

Despite the growing interest in medical apps, there are many unresolved questions about their use: Should all the information patients collect become part of their medical record and how? Who in the doctor’s office analyzes patients’ numbers? Will insurers cover the cost of apps?

Dr. Ben Crocker, at the Mass General clinic that is testing a few apps, says those are questions doctors will have to answer.

“This is what’s engaging patients,” says Crocker. “Patients are coming to their doc for the first time saying, ‘I’ve been collecting some information or I’ve been using this application.’  And that, I think we can’t ignore no matter where this is taking us, no matter how Wild West it feels.”

This story is part of a partnership that includes WBUR, NPR, and Kaiser Health News.

Cleveland-based Clinical Outcomes Management Systems (COMS) Interactive secured the investment from growth equity firm Summit Partners.

COMS Interactive markets a software-as-a-service product called Daylight IQ that’s designed to help long-term care facilities create detailed disease profiles of their elderly residents and manage those residents’ healthcare.

It’s built on a library of protocols and procedures for two dozen of the most common diseases and afflictions of residents in long-term care facilities. By allowing for close tracking of changes in residents’ conditions, and alerting staff when it detects patterns that might indicate a need for clinical intervention, the software aims to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions.

In an announcement, COMS said the funds will support expansion of its products into skilled nursing, assisted-living and home care markets across North America. It also plans to “advance its clinical quality assurance and performance improvement initiatives.” A company representative was not available to provide details Tuesday afternoon.

COMS, which was formed in 2009, says it has more than 800 customers in 38 states. It’s also partnered with state healthcare organizations in Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and nine other states. The company says its nursing home and assisted living facility customers have reported a 50 percent reduction in return-to-hospital rates.

In the latest demonstration of how this trend is resonating with investors, Vitals has raised $22 million in a Series C round from Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking, Cardinal Partners, Health Enterprise Partners, Milestone Ventures Partners and Greycroft.

The scheduling and doctor rating website attracts 13 million users per month, according to the company.

In a phone interview with MedCity News, Vitals CEO Mitch Rothschild said the company, which employs 110, would use the funding to build services and grow its staff by 25 percent to 30 percent — across data and product support and engineering — rather than growing through acquisitions.

Among the services it plans to add are decision-support tools to help users make more informed health insurance decisions. “If you have ever tried to read a health insurance plan and didn’t get a headache, that would put you in a distinct minority,” said Rothschild. The services will help users understand the details of what these plans offer and what they don’t — sort of like a navigator.

Additional services will also supplement cost transparency. It will also add more personalized responses according to user search preferences. This summer it plans to add data for about 9,000 urgent care centers to the site, according to Rothschild.

The coming of health insurance exchanges will mean more opportunities for groups like Vitals to inform patients. But it will be interesting to see how helpful the information from Vitals and other companies will be to consumers and whether the quality of that information will be influenced by the partnerships they currently have with insurers.

Offering a “big data” solution is apparently irresistible to every company on the planet. Mega-corporation General Electric has just announced a new big data and analytics platform it calls “Predictivity” so it too can join the number-crunching party.

Unlike many other big data solutions, GE’s new Hadoop-based software is targeted at the “industrial Internet.” Companies in industries like aviation, health care, energy, transportation, and manufacturing all can benefit from real-time insight and analytics, and GE thinks it is the right company to deliver that since it already has such deep ties with those industries.

GE’s VP of the Global Software Center Bill Ruh called the new offerings a major step toward “a new era of computing.”

“GE’s industrial strength platform is the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity, but the next era of computing,” Ruh said in a statement. “The ability to bring machines to life with powerful software and sensors is a big advancement — but it is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand, and put machine-based data to work in real-time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data.”

To help GE add to the announcement, it also firmed up partnerships with Pivotal, Amazon, and Accenture that will help them fulfill some of the promise of this software.

The EMC-backed Pivotal partnership might be the biggest of the three. Pivotal is the recent high-profile spin-off of EMC and VMWare that got $105 million funding from GE in late April. The two companies are intertwining in a meaningful way, and so they will work together on these big data solutions. Specifically, Pivotal will use its Cloud Foundry platform and Hadoop-based tech to support GE.

“Pivotal and GE share a vision for a common platform that is cloud-agnostic and based on modern, scale-out technologies; and does it all at speeds faster than what was previously possible,” Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz said in a statement.

Amazon Web Services and Accenture will also give GE support. Amazon will be the first cloud provider on which GE will deploy its “industrial Internet platform.” Accenture and GE say they will jointly develop new tech and analytics apps that leverage big data.

Screenshot via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

This article originally appeared on VentureBeat

“CMS is sitting on so much data; it’s a goldmine,” said Giovanni Colella, CEO and co-founder of Castlight Health, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance on Tuesday. “Making that data accessible will help everyone better understand quality of care and cost of care.”

But data alone won’t drive down healthcare costs. Colella joined TIME contributing editor Steven Brill and two other healthcare transparency leaders in testifying before the committee on high prices and low transparency in healthcare.

“Transparency can only go so far” in solving the real cost problems, Brill said. Even if patients know what their providers will charge for certain drugs or procedures, and even if they know how much those drugs and procedures actually cost the providers, what can they do about the fact that that price is still too expensive? “While transparency starts the conversation about prices [...] it’s only a start,” Brill said.

So while measures like CMS releasing chargemaster data have gotten the ball rolling, it will take more than just pushing out data to effect change in the system.

Dr. Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, proposed that most of the policy efforts put forth so far have focused on transparency for transparency’s sake. Because of the current structure of most insurance plans, the average consumer is indifferent to the cost of the provider he visits, he said, since he will likely pay a set co-pay and will never see the true cost of that provider. Ultimately, lower healthcare prices will come through changes in benefit design, Ginsburg said, even if that means data is less transparent to consumers.

Rather than making price data publicly available to consumers, Ginsburg suggested that purchasers and health plans should analyze the complex data on costs and quality and design benefits that incentivize consumers to choose higher quality and lower cost providers.

“This information has to be customized to consumers, it has to reflect the details of their particular health plan, and I think insurers and employers are best positioned to do that,” Ginsburg said.

This is the kind of approach has taken shape in the tiered network designs being used by several insurers in Massachusetts. Under this system, some insurers assign providers to tiers based on quality and cost measures. They incentivize members to go to a higher quality, lower cost provider.

Another approach referenced by Dr. Suzanne Delbanco, executive director of Catalyst for Payment Reform, was reference-based pricing. Under this design, payers set the price of a particular service, and if a patient receives that service at a higher cost, he must pay the additional costs. This approach is being used in hip and knee surgeries by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

Delbanco underscored the importance of both quality and cost data in guiding such plan design. “One of today’s biggest shortcomings is the separation of price and quality information,” she said.

She proposed that quality measures by which providers are evaluated should be the ones where there is the greatest disparity among providers, not just the ones that are easiest to report or are least offensive to providers.  “I think we have probably too many (quality metrics) now and not enough that focus on exactly those points where there’s the greatest opportunity for reducing harm and where there’s the greatest variation in performance,” she said. “We tend to measure things that are easy to collect data on and that show very little difference between providers.”

The full hearing is available online here.

(Reuters) - Two long-awaited independent reviews of a controversial Medtronic Inc bone growth product show it works as well as traditional bone grafts taken from patients, but it may not be as safe.

The analyses, published on Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, suggest that Medtronic's Infuse product was associated with a small, increased risk of cancer, and that early published data on the trials underreported side effects and emphasized favorable results.

Writing in an editorial in the same journal, doctors said the Medtronic product should be reserved for certain, select patients, and that the costs and risks of the product should be clearly spelled out.

The reviews were prompted by questions raised by spine experts and U.S. lawmakers about the safety of the Infuse product, which contains a genetically-engineered protein used to promote bone growth known as recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein 2.

Infuse was once hailed as a major advance in spine surgery by offering a way to ease the pain of spinal fusion surgeries, in which bones in the neck or spine are fused together. Traditionally, a portion of bone known as a graft is harvested from other parts of the body to encourage bone healing. Infuse was developed to promote bone healing without the need for painful bone harvesting.

But in 2011, Infuse became the subject of investigations by the U.S. Senate and the Department of Justice over omissions of safety problems from its clinical trial data and over off-label use.

The product also drew intense public scrutiny after the influential Spine Journal ran an entire issue criticizing the product in June 2011, charging that surgeons, who were paid tens of millions of dollars by Medtronic, failed to report serious complications, such as male sterility, increased risk of cancer, infections, bone dissolution and worsened back and leg pain.

To address these questions, Medtronic in 2011 agreed to two independent reviews of its trial data. As part of the Yale University Open Data Access project - spearheaded by Dr. Harlan Krumholz - teams of researchers at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland and Britain's University of York, were selected to conduct the reviews.

The Oregon team found that in spinal fusion, the Medtronic product worked no better than bone harvested from a patient's own body.

In trials, Infuse was compared to iliac crest bone graft, which involves taking bone from the rim of the pelvic bone, which can lead to complications such as pain or infection.

The Oregon review also found that Infuse was associated with an increased risk of cancer after two years, although the overall risk was low and did not involve a particular type of malignancy. They also found that published trial data emphasized the positive, while underreporting side effects.

The University of York researchers found that after two years, Infuse offered no clinically important pain reduction and was associated with a possible increased risk of cancer, although again, the overall risk was low.

The findings suggest that Infuse should be used primarily as an alternative for patients who otherwise would require more than one incision to harvest their own bone for grafting at the surgery site, according to an editorial by Dr Daniel Resnick of the University of Wisconsin and Dr Kevin Bozic of the University of California, San Francisco.

They said patients should be counseled on the relative benefits and harms, as well as the costs of each graft option.

Medtronic had a somewhat more positive take on the conclusions of the reviews.

"The findings reinforced what we know about the product in the sense that the studies concluded equivalence, and in some cases superiority, to iliac crest bone harvesting," said Chris O'Connell, president of Medtronic's Restorative Therapies Group. "It's really up to the physician to interpret the data."

He said Medtronic views its cooperation with the Infuse reviews as part of a bigger industry trend toward open access to medical trial data.

The company said it has funded an analysis of real-world usage of Infuse to gauge its association with cancer risk and expects those results to be presented at a medical meeting in the fall.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Infuse in 2002 to stimulate spinal bone growth in patients with a degenerative disease affecting the lower spine.

In March 2012, Medtronic agreed to pay $85 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit accusing it of failing to reveal that as much as 85.2 percent of Infuse sales depended on so-called "off-label" uses, where doctors prescribe the product for applications not approved by the FDA.

The product had sales of $528 million in fiscal 2013, far below the $800 million the company reported in fiscal 2011.

(Reporting By Deena Beasley; Editing by Julie Steenhuysen, Bernard Orr)

LONDON (Reuters) - Turning around drugmaker AstraZeneca will be a long haul, with a strategy of revamping research and boosting acquisitions set to take up to four years to pay off, its chief executive said on Tuesday.

Speaking as the group unveiled the location for a new global headquarters and research center in Cambridge, England, Pascal Soriot said he was not expecting any short-term fixes for the group, which is struggling from falling sales as patents expire.

"You've got to look at this over a horizon of three to four years, it is not a six-month horizon," he said in a telephone interview from Cambridge. "And it is not going to be a smooth journey. We will have ups and downs."

The company's new $500 million site on the southern outskirts of the university town, which will be purpose-built, is only set for completion in 2016.

However, AstraZeneca plans to transfer some staff from its existing Alderley Park facility in northwest England before then, possibly as early as the end of 2013, using rented laboratories and offices.

"We will have people based here potentially at the end of the year and we will start benefiting from the location," Soriot said.

Cambridge is a major centre for life science research, which Soriot said could rival San Francisco and Boston, and he hopes to tap into that knowledge base by having his scientists working close to top academics and clinicians.

Targeted acquisitions in three key areas - cardiovascular and metabolic medicine, oncology, and respiratory and inflammatory drugs - are another important plank of Soriot's turnaround plan.

Despite urgings from some analysts, he has eschewed large-scale deals, preferring to focus instead on bolt-on acquisitions, often of private companies, such as last week's purchase of Pearl for up to $1.15 billion.

Britain's second-biggest drugmaker has suffered from a series of failures of experimental medicines that have weakened its pipeline, forcing it to go shopping for promising new drugs invented by smaller biotech companies.

"We will keep looking at potential deals to keep building our pipeline," Soriot said.

"You will see by the end of the year or early next year that our late-stage pipeline will look very different as a result of some of those acquisitions, but also with the acceleration of some of our Phase II projects that are moving into Phase III right now."

Among existing products, investors are focused on prospects for diabetes drug Onglyza, co-owned with Bristol-Myers Squibb, which may show a cardiovascular benefit in a clinical trial - an outcome that would give it a marketing edge.

Soriot said headline results of the so-called SAVOR study were due "in the next few days", but he declined to comment further on the findings.

(Editing by Greg Mahlich)

The agency said the patients died three to four days after receiving an appropriate dose of the medicine, and had very high levels of the injectable drug in their bloodstreams.

The medicine's package insert label carries a prominent "black box" warning of post-injection delirium sedation syndrome (PDSS), a serious condition in which the drug enters the blood too fast following an injection, causing greatly elevated levels of the drug in the bloodstream.

The FDA, in a bulletin on its website, said high doses of the drug can cause delirium, cardiopulmonary arrest, heart rhythm problems, sedation and coma.

The medicine, approved by the FDA in late 2009, comes with warnings that patients must stay at the doctor's office for at least three hours after it is given so they can be monitored.

(Reporting by Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Alden Bentley)

Lift Technology from Lift Labs on Vimeo.

Everyone knows the frustration of trying to thread a needle, or to hold a cellphone steady while shooting a video. Now imagine experiencing that frustration doing everyday tasks like eating and writing.

The team of engineers behind Lift Labs has set out to make smart devices that would help people with neurological disorders like essential tremor and Parkinson’s disease complete those daily tasks more comfortably.

While working toward his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, Anupam Pathak was looking for ways to use technology to steady the basic human tremor. But in the back of his mind, he knew he wanted to find a way to apply this technology to help people living with those disorders. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he secured an SBIR grant from the National Institutes of Health, and the company Lynx Design was born. For the past two years, Pathak and two fellow mechanical engineers, John Redmond and Michael Allen, have been using phase 1 and 2 SBIR grants to create a tremor-canceling device.

The idea isn’t new; active stabilization technology has been used in cameras, guns and surgical tools. The trick for Lift Labs (part of Lynx Designs) was adapting it to cancel out larger tremors.

Its device is a hand-held, battery-operated base that’s embedded with sensors, a microcontroller and tiny motors. The sensors detect the motion of a tremor, both horizontally and vertically, and the microcontroller uses that data to direct the motors in to move it in the direction opposite the tremor.

For its initial rollout this summer, the device will be sold in the form of a spoon. But Pathak said the head is detachable from the base, which contains the tremor-cancellation technology, and the plan is to eventually offer different attachments. The spoon should be available on Lift Labs’ website by late summer, he said.

When the team tested the device in a clinical trial at the University of Michigan (which was later featured at American Academy of Neurology’s annual conference), they found more than 70 percent reduction in tremor with use of the device. That means it doesn’t entirely cancel the tremor but provides significant stabilization. It’s by no means meant to replace medical options for treating tremor,  but could potentially be a tool for daily living with Parkinson’s or essential tremor.

Under the company name Lynx Design, the team has also developed a couple of apps aimed at the same audience; one measures and tracks tremor, and the other plays a beat over a Bluetooth headset to help people with impaired motor control keep a steady pace while walking.

Lift Labs is part of Rock Health’s fifth accelerator class this summer.

We all know the importance of eating well, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep, but good habits can be hard to maintain.

Today buzzed-about startup Lift opened up its platform to all web and mobile users, making it easier for anyone to achieve their goals. Lift has built a social goal-tracking application where people create lists of habits they want to maintain, track their own progress, and connect with friends for motivation, accountability, and support. The most popular habits in the app are exercise, drink more water, read, and flossing. Each goal has a community of people who can leave encouraging messages, and Lift will compile personal reports to tell you how you are doing.

It was the first product to launch out of Obvious Corporation, the incubator and seed fund run by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Lift founder Tony Stubblebine was part of the original team of Odeo, a podcasting service that eventually pivoted to become Twitter. At the time he was Jack Dorsey’s boss, and worked alongside Ev, Biz, and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom who worked as an intern. He observed how a key part of success was the ability to focus on accomplishing the “right things. Stubblebine decided to build software that could help people be more successful, whether that entails building a major tech company or trying to lose a couple pounds.

“We live in a world where you can get a lot of advice and track your behaviors, but there isn’t always support to achieve your goals,” Stubblebine said in an interview. “Lift actually helps you shape and change your behaviors so you become hardwired to think and do better. Its persuasive technology, and it gets deeper than quantified self apps.”

Lift started out as a simple iPhone application. There are not a lot of bells and whistles or eye-catching design. The focus is strictly on giving people the data, tools, and environment they need to be a better version of themselves.The system creates a feedback loop that reinforces positive choices and cuts down on feelings of “conscious effort” or “decision-making fatigue.” Once you acclimate to waking up early to go running or eating salads for lunch, it doesn’t seem quite so difficult to do those things.

“Willpower can be measured physically,” Stubblebine said. “You can only make so many decisions in a day and people are constantly bombarded with distractions so they don’t have decision-making willpower to pursue their goals. Habit is powerful, and when you turn things that feel like making a decision into a habit, when it becomes automatic, it won’t wear you down. We aren’t prescriptive at Lift. We are not trying to fix you. You can be who you want to be, but people have unmet ambition and one of the top reasons is they just don’t have the support.”

Now after almost a year of early beta testing, Lift is available on the web and all smartphones. The app is free for users and Stubblebine said he is not concerned with monetization yet. The priority is building a platform that helps people in a meaningful way. Lift is also soft launching a group feature where people can train with experts, like Tim Ferriss and the Leo Babauta of the popular Zenhabits blog.

In November 2012, Lift announced that it raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Spark Capital with participation from SV Angel. It is based in San Francisco.

This article originally appeared on VentureBeat

LONDON (Reuters) - GlaxoSmithKline is discussing the sale of its thrombosis drug brands Arixtra and Fraxiparine, along with a related French factory, to Aspen Pharmacare in a deal that could be worth some $1 billion.

Britain's biggest drugmaker said on Tuesday that Aspen had offered to buy the medicines, sales of which are in decline, and it was now in exclusive talks with the South African company about a deal, which is subject to consultation with employees.

Arixtra and Fraxiparine had worldwide sales of approximately 420 million pounds ($660 million) in 2012, down from 510 million in 2011, and revenues are expected to slide further in 2013.

Neither company put a value on the proposed deal but assuming Aspen pays twice this year's anticipated sales, it could be worth around 700 million pounds - after stripping out sales in China, India and Pakistan, which GSK will retain.

About 1,000 GSK employees would transfer to Aspen, if the deal goes through, the majority of whom work at the Notre Dame de Bondeville production site in France.

GSK said the proposed disposal fitted with its strategy of focusing on products with the most growth potential and delivering its new-drug pipeline.

For Aspen, which is already Africa's biggest maker of generics drugs, the acquisition will fuel its expansion in overseas markets.

Investors in Aspen - 19 percent owned by GSK - warmed to news of the likely deal and its shares rose 4 percent by 1230 GMT, while GSK was little changed.

Declining products such as Arixtra and Fraxiparine are seen as a drag on GSK's growth at a time when new drugs are set to reach the market, and the company said in April it was bundling many of its older medicines into a new established products unit.

That decision prompted speculation that more old drugs might be sold off to generate windfall gains, which could be returned to shareholders.

GSK is also divesting its energy and fruit drinks Lucozade and Ribena in an auction that is expected to get under way later this summer.

Aspen and GSK have a long history of doing deals together. Last year, the British group sold 25 older brands marketed in Australia to Aspen for 172 million pounds in another clear-out of non-core drugs.

(Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)

Early this year, officials at Littler Mendelson, the largest U.S.-based law firm representing management in employee benefits and labor law, surveyed the landscape as the Obama administration began implementing the Affordable Care Act. They knew big money was to be made.

Businesses large and small were grappling with how – or even whether – to comply with the new federal mandates for providing health insurance to full-time workers. Many feared the costs would be staggering and could put them at a competitive disadvantage or drive them out of business.

Littler Mendelson responded by forming a separate health care consulting group with over 20 top attorneys to advise clients on how to minimize their costs and taxes.  The giant firm – with more than 900 lawyers operating from 55 offices nationwide – also created an online service to help companies determine liabilities and costs under Obamacare.  New business started pouring in.

“We’re advising hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of businesses,” Steven Friedman, co-chair of the firm’s employee benefits practice group, told The Fiscal Times. “We’re working with employers to determine if there are strategies they can employ to somehow mitigate the effects of the law . . . and we’re coming up with some innovative solutions.”

This strategic expansion is part of a cottage industry thanks to the new health-care reform law. President Barack Obama signed the law in March 2010, but it won’t fully take effect until January. With a new slew of complicated laws and regulations on the books, someone has to interpret them for average Americans and the business community.

Leading law firms like Littler Mendelson, Proskauer and others continue to eye the possibilities. H&R Block and other tax preparation firms are expected to hire additional accountants to help individuals file their tax returns, which will provide vital information to comply with Obamacare.  And certified public accounts and data management firms are poised to assist businesses with record keeping and other assistance.

Without question, tax professionals and tax form preparers are among the most important cogs in the Obamacare machine. That is because the IRS, rocked by political scandals in recent months, is central to implementing the health care reform system. 
  
The Supreme Court held last year that Congress could regulate health care under its ability to tax. That gave the IRS a leading role in implementing the new law, along with the Department of Health and Human Services. There are 47 tax provisions – including the small business health care credit and the medical devices tax – that will take effect. The agency will have to administer those provisions and collect taxes where due.

• The IRS determines whether people qualify for a health insurance premium tax credit as part of the minimum coverage requirement. 
• Americans will report their insurance status when they file their tax forms.
• The IRS will collect a $95 penalty on those without insurance. 
• Businesses with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health care insurance to their employees or face a $2,000 per-head penalty. 
• The agency will collect the penalties when businesses do not comply.

Tax preparers play such an important role in Obamacare that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reportedly solicited a $500,000 donation from H&R Block to fund a marketing campaign to sell Americans on health reform. Gene King, a company spokesman, said yesterday that while Sebelius contacted H&R Block, the firm had yet to commit to any donation. 
 
H&R Block CEO Bill Cobb said last week in a conference call with investors that the company has “begun to invest in resources and technology that we expect will enable us to roll out initiatives this year that will benefit our clients.”

The potential for revenue growth by H&R Block and other tax-prep firms is tremendous. The tax preparation industry generated $9 billion in revenues in 2012 while employing 302,931 people at 109,758 firms, according to IBIS World. Hundreds of millions of dollars or more could easily be generated by those companies’ outreach on Obamacare.

Those Who Stand To Gain

Some accounting firms that don’t directly advise on the new health insurance law still stand to make a lot of money because of it.

Peisner Johnson & Co., a Dallas-area certified public accounting firm, specializes in handling companies’ state and local sales tax obligations. Because many firms are trying to keep their workforces below 50 employees, they are outsourcing some work – including handling sales tax records and payments.

Many Texas companies are outsourcing that work to Peisner Johnson, says Michael Fleming, the firm’s director of partner relations.

“Our out-sourced [state and local] tax returns business is growing by leaps and bounds,” Fleming told The Fiscal Times. “I’m not looking at exact figures here, but I would say year over year we’re probably up 20 percent this year.” 

Combined primary care degree: Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School is setting up a dual degree in primary care and population health. “The goal is to educate a new type of physician with a primary care background,” its proposal said.

Accelerated degrees: University of California — Davis School of Medicine is creating a three-year accelerated primary care program in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente called the Accelerated Competency-based Education in Primary Care program.

Technology focus: New York University’s Medical School is offering an accelerated three-year program with a focus on technology-led curriculum to improve care coordination and quality improvement, according to a description of the program. A virtual patient panel using de-identified patient data from NYU Langone Medical Center physician network practices will help create a real-world clinical setting for students.

Outcomes-based care: University of Michigan’s Medical School is creating a program in which students develop leadership and change management skills alongside a study concentration. They will participate in a clinical and educational community called the “M Home,” — which will provide relationships with core faculty and connections to clinical settings that will link improved learning with improved patient outcomes.

Patient safety: Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University has proposed a comprehensive core curriculum in patient safety for all medical students. It will include simulation, problem-based learning, clinical skills training and targeted clinical experiences. It takes an interdisciplinary approach with other health-related courses to develop interprofessional skills and prep students to successfully lead healthcare teams for systems-based healthcare transformation. There will also be an emphasis on rural and underserved populations. Faculty will be trained to provide the new curriculum.

 [Photo Credit: chanpipat]

About half of Americans say they don't know how the Affordable Care Act will affect them. Four in 10 think it has been repealed or overturned, or they are unsure where it stands. So chances are good that when the major provisions kick in next year, including online health insurance marketplaces and new standards for health plan costs and coverage, people are going to have questions. Lots of questions. When they do, the biggest one of all may be where to turn for answers.

There may not be a simple solution. Depending on where people live and the type of coverage they have, the assistance that's available and where to find it may vary considerably.

Health policy experts and consumer advocates "are concerned about consumers falling through the cracks and not having clear information about where to go for what," says Sabrina Corlette, a research professor who directs Georgetown University's Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The health-care overhaul envisioned a nationwide network of state-run Consumer Assistance Programs, or CAPs, supported by federal funds. Building on existing state insurance department programs and community-based services, the CAPs would provide one-stop health insurance assistance for people with private coverage and would advocate on their behalf with insurers.

In the politically charged atmosphere surrounding the passage of the health-care law, however, 15 states with Republican governors refused to apply for CAP grants, and two more returned their funding after Republican governors were elected, according to a Health Affairs study published in February.

Program funding has been inadequate, experts say. Following an initial $30 million appropriation for CAP in 2010, the Department of Health and Human Resources awarded nearly $20 million two years later, in August 2012. In contrast, the annual budget for the Medicare program's help line is $250 million, the Health Affairs study noted.

Some states have been creative about patching together CAP funding, says Karen Pollitz, a research fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation. But funding uncertainty continues.

Consumer Assistance Programs are operating in 21 states, including Maryland, and in the District. The quality of the assistance provided through these and other assistance programs varies widely, says Mark Schlesinger, a professor of health policy at Yale who co-authored the Health Affairs study. Some of the programs are aggressive advocates for consumers, he says. In other states, however, "they're explaining the law rather than advocating for people."

Angela Gavin of Troy, N.Y., turned to the program for guidance sorting through an insurance dispute and found the program helpful. When Gavin, 58, had a colonoscopy in February to screen for colorectal cancer, her insurer said she owed $1,150 of the $4,745 bill. The insurer said that because the doctor had found and removed a polyp, the procedure was no longer a routine screening and she would have to pay a portion of the cost.

But under the ACA, preventive cancer screenings such as colonoscopies are covered without patient cost-sharing even if a polyp is found.

Gavin noticed an 800 number at the bottom of her insurance form for Community Health Advocates, which runs New York's CAP. An advocate at the program worked with Gavin to file an appeal. She's awaiting the result.

"Thank God for that 1-800 number at the bottom of the form, because otherwise I would probably just have paid the bill," Gavin says. "I wouldn't have known what to do."

Consumers can check the federal government's healthcare.gov Web site for links to CAPs and other insurance assistance programs in their state. State insurance departments can help consumers with questions. But they often see their role as mediating between insurers and consumers rather than advocating for individuals, experts say. In some states, community-based organizations
also offer insurance help.

Individuals and small businesses that are considering seeking coverage from state-based health insurance marketplaces can contact those exchanges directly with questions about plans or eligibility for subsidies. The ACA requires all exchanges to have community-based "Navigator" programs to help people learn about plans offered through the exchanges and about eligibility for subsidies. Grants for these programs will be announced later this summer.

In addition, each exchange is required to operate a toll-free call center. Some exchanges, like the one planned for the District, aim to provide comprehensive health insurance assistance.

"We are building our call center to handle all sorts of questions," says Mila Kofman, executive director of the District's Health Benefit Exchange Authority. "Whether it's about enrollment through the exchanges, tax credits, Medicaid or a problem with their health plan, we'll be a one-stop shop where consumers can come."

The assistance available at other exchanges may be more bare-bones, experts say.

Pollitz suggests that people shopping for insurance on an exchange start investigating plans and applying for coverage in October, the first month people can sign up for exchange coverage that will begin Jan. 1. "You don't want to wait until the last minute."

LONDON, June 18 (Reuters) - AstraZeneca has chosen a science park on the southern outskirts of Cambridge, England, next to the world-renowned Addenbrooke's Hospital, for its new $500 million global headquarters and research centre.

Property industry sources told Reuters last month that the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC) was the most likely site for the new facility, which will house some 2,000 employees - a decision confirmed by the drugmaker on Tuesday.

Transplanting the heart of the company to the university city is the centrepiece of a $2.3 billion restructuring plan unveiled by new Chief Executive Pascal Soriot in March, which also includes a 10 percent cut in overall staff numbers by 2016.

Soriot is trying to turn around the group's fortunes after a series of drug development disappointments by investing more in research and bolt-on acquisitions, while reining in costs.

AstraZeneca said at the time that it planned to establish a new global research and development centre and corporate headquarters in the city by 2016, at cost of around 330 million pounds ($500 million), but did not disclose the exact location.

The group currently has its corporate headquarters in London, while its main research centre is in Alderley Park, northwest England, where research will be shut down.

A smooth move to the new purpose-built Cambridge centre is a key test for Soriot as he tries to change the culture at Britain's second-largest pharmaceuticals group to put science at the centre of its activities.

"Moving to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus means our people will be able to rub shoulders with some of the world's best scientists and clinicians carrying out some of the world's leading research - that's a really exciting prospect," Soriot said.

LONG-TERM BET

In addition to Addenbrooke's Hospital, the CBC is also home to the Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the Wellcome Trust-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.

AstraZeneca will occupy approximately 11 acres of the 70 acre campus, which is situated two miles from central Cambridge and its university colleges.

The decision to select CBC is a blow for Granta Park, the other main location option, which is outside Cambridge and already houses AstraZeneca's biotech unit MedImmune.

Science Minister David Willetts said AstraZeneca's move was excellent news and a vote of confidence in British science and the position of Cambridge as a centre of academic excellence. It also underscores the growing economic importance of Cambridge, which is home to more than 1,500 high-tech firms.

Still, AstraZeneca management will have to work hard to ensure it retains its best scientists during the transition. Menelas Pangalos, the group's head of innovative medicines, said last month the drugmaker would offer enticing packages to make sure key staff relocated.

Whether the Cambridge's scientific "stardust" will rub off on AstraZeneca remains to be seen. The relocation process will take three years and the fruits of any new research will be even further down the road, making the shift a long-term bet.

SpaceCurve, a startup that lives to suss out massive amounts of location, social, sensor, and timeline data, has just raised $10 million.

This round, led by Triage Ventures, is the company’s second institutional round of funding. Since it was founded, the startup has taken a total of $17.3 million, including a $3.5 million Series A last summer.

In the company’s own words, “SpaceCurve’s geospatial-temporal database and graph analysis tools effortlessly handle the scale and complexity of geospatial, temporal, sensor network, social graph and other large data to create real-time models and immediately actionable intelligence.”

Translated, that means this startup is trying to organize and make useful just about every kind of data imaginable. Customers who use the SpaceCurve platform are, in the words of a Triage Ventures partner, “pushing the current limits of big data technologies” by analyzing not only large volumes of data, but data that appears at high velocities — stuff like checkins and sensor data that are constantly being updated by nodes all around the globe.

For example, SpaceCurve announced in February that it had set a record for real-time big data performance by crunching location-aware tweet records, averaging 2,500 bytes in size, at a rate equal to millions of records per second, hundreds of billions of records per day, and petabytes of data per day.

Customers and potential customers, the startup says, are in industries such as mobile, social media, financial trading, energy, communications, transportation, government, and similarly big-scale markets.

The Seattle-based company was founded in 2009 by J. Andrew Rogers, who has previous experience in dealing with big data from time spent on Google Maps and the UK’s Meteorological Office. The team includes former employees of IBM and Microsoft.

This article originally appeared on VentureBeat

Medivo has raised $15 million in a Series B round led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund. It also got venture capital financing from Safeguard Scientifics and Mentor Tech Ventures. It’s using the investment not only to expand the number of chronic condition its platform covers, but it’s also developing more services for users.

In a phone interview with MedCity News, Medivo CEO and co-founder Sundeep Bhan said it wants to deepen its analytics services by hiring 20-30 people including analytics specialists who can help it look at additional health care gaps and conditions. It also wants to add technology staff like programmers and developers to provide enhanced products and services and increase the functionality of its mobile apps.It currently employs about 60.

In a nod to the consumerization of health care, it is building a direct channel on its platform for consumers to access lab tests that will go live in the second half of the year but could not elaborate on details.

A couple of years ago three divisions of the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that would allow direct consumer access to their clinical lab results. In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid said a final rule was expected later this year. “Acquiring a mobile health platform [WellApps] gave us a running start to establishing additional connectivity to patients. We have launched additional services on WellApps since we acquired it,” said Bhan.

He added: “We are becoming more widely known as lab data company and as people learn more about what we do, we’re getting more companies contacting us and partnering with us.”

The company is in the process of expanding its network of laboratories and health monitoring modules, across obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis B, HIV, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, myelofibrosis, multiple myeloma, growth hormone deficiency, osteoporosis, hypothyroidism, and multiple sclerosis.

As of June, Bhan estimated that its users span 15,000 providers and more than 2 million patients. He said it wants to enhance its connectivity with 500 labs. Its growth in the past year has been helped by increased engagements with life sciences companies and a formalized partnership with the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists to deliver Medivo services to its AACE members.

Medivo has doubled its growth year-over-year, according to a company statement. Today marks the close of its second major financing round. In 2011 it raised $7 million.

[Photo credit: People Connect Across Gap from BigStock Photos]

Savara Pharmaceuticals needed several million dollars to take its inhalable drug for troublesome infections in cystic fibrosis patients through Phase 2 clinical trials. So CEO Rob Neville, naturally, began talking with venture capitalists. But in the end, he didn’t end up needing any of their money.

Over the course of about a year, Savara raised a $16 million Series B round – in two tranches – led by a quartet of angel groups from central Texas to southern California.

It’s a case study on the burgeoning influence of angel investing networks, which are moving across state lines and outside of their own networks to piece together bigger deals. They’re also enabling angel investors to move upstream and fill funding gaps opened by more risk-averse and tapped out life science venture funds.

“(Our) story had resonated well with first groups that we raised money with, and we found that we had traction and momentum in the angel groups,” Neville said. “It wasn’t a decision from the outset to go one way or the other; that was just the path where we had the most success.”

To get the investor perspective on the trend, click here.

Hard to understand, slow to exit and more than enough risk to go around.

Not many investors are brave and smart enough to fund startups working to get new pharmaceuticals, medical devices and therapeutics on the market. To highlight this breed of investors, and to give healthcare entrepreneurs a way to find them, we have compiled a list of venture capital firms with a track record of healthcare investing.

You can scan the entire list to find a potential investor in your city, or you can search by investment focus.

This is our first data-driven project. We are already working on version 2.0 that will revise and expand this list. Angel funds and corporate venture capital funds are not included in this version. We will add those in the next update.

This is an alpha launch. Did we miss a company or a fund? Let us know and we will add it.
Is there other information we should include? Tell us.

Check it out and send us your comments.

This is the second of a two-part series on the evolution of angel investing. To read part one, click here.

As groups of high-net-worth individuals continue to band together in the form of angel investment networks and funds, they’re creating new opportunities for funding for mid-stage startups. But to some entrepreneurs, they’re also starting to look an awful lot like VCs.

There are about 350 angel investing groups in the U.S. today, according to Marianne Hudson, executive director of the Angel Capital Association. Although most of the U.S.’s more than 300,000 angel investors still work as individuals, the influence of their networking is growing. The median angel round size in 2012 was somewhere around $600,000, according to the 2012 Halo Report, up from $500,000 in 2010.

Investors say being part of a group solves a lot of problems: They have access to more deals, don’t have to write huge checks to raise a lot of money for a company and can syndicate bigger rounds with other angel networks.

Clay Rankin, who manages Ohio’s North Coast Angel Fund, said his group tries collaborating in almost every deal it does – particularly when it comes to life science deals, where companies need $1.5 million or more.

“You still want to know and engage with the management team and help them in the growing process, but if you develop relationships with other networks that you know provide good governance and do good due diligence, you don’t have to be geographically near (to companies),” he said.

That means angels have access to a more broad expertise on the investing side, so due diligence is typically more thorough.

On the other side of the coin, that means more rigorous vetting than startups would typically undergo with individual investors. The process depends on the size of the investment group, and whether it’s structured as an angel fund where investors can also make sidecar investments, or as a network where investors contribute as individuals. Typically, if a company’s application makes it past an initial screening, the entrepreneur will have to present several times to various groups within the network.

A few entrepreneurs who talked with MedCity News for this story had been turned off from angel groups because of these VC-like processes that resulted in rigid deal terms, often times without the expectation of a follow-on investment. For some, a three-month application and vetting process ending in a take-it-or-leave-it deal that could be $200,000 or $1.5 million or anything in between, just wasn’t worth the time and effort.

And although angel networks might have a structured due diligence process, that doesn’t mean it’s a good one. One entrepreneur who had turned down an investment from a network in Ohio said that due diligence had been tasked to a person who was a designated “expert” in the healthcare industry, although he may not have known anything about the particular space the company was working in.

Looking for a VC to fund your healthcare startup? Check out our Money Map.

Shirley Gee, a member of the Keiretsu Forum, began to see this problem several years ago. She started a consulting firm called AngelPlus that works with entrepreneurs, including Rob Neville’s team from Savara Pharmaceuticals, who are looking to be more proactive about their due diligence. If startups have a report in-hand when talking to investors, she said, they may be able to at least partially avoid having that task fall into the hands of someone not well-suited for it. “We’re trying to encourage companies to add this due diligence as part of their business plan in the same way they would hire an IP attorney,” she said.

Although angel networks are increasingly formalizing the process of angel investing, Hudson of the Angel Capital Association reiterated that the vast majority of angel investments are still made independently of a group. It will be a while before it’s clear whether the formality imposed by the groups pays off in the form of more successful startups and bigger returns, or whether it will in turn create a new gap in funding for early-stage companies who look to angels for small rounds of seed capital.

Neurostimulation devices that send mild electrical pulses to target nerves are arguably the fastest-growing segment of the medical devices sector. They’re primarily being commercialized in neurology and urology but are apparently showing promise in cardiology too.

A startup called NeuroTronik spun out of medical device incubator Synecor last year says it’s raised a $13.1 million series A led by Hatteras Venture Partners. NeuroTronik CEO Fred McCoy told VentureWire that Lord Baltimore Capital, Mountain Group Capital and Synergy Life Science Partners also participated in the round.

The funding will be used to develop a device to treat patients who go to the hospital for worsening symptoms of acute heart failure syndrome, which occurs when the heart’s ability to pump blood is hindered by coronary artery disease, high blood pressure or a variety of other conditions.

NeuroTronik is creating a device that cardiologists would use to stimulate a patient’s heart so that it could pump blood more effectively. This kind of treatment has the potential to shorten hospital stays and reduce the need for patients to return to the hospital, McCoy told the News & Observer.

The Chapel Hill, North Carolina, company, which also has operations in Ireland, hopes to have its device approved outside of the U.S. within four years and in the U.S. in six years.

Minnesota firm BioControl Medical is already testing a nerve stimulation system for heart failure, but its intended use appears to be in chronic heart failure patients.

NeuroTronik’s McCoy spent the first part of his career working his way up the ladder at Eli Lilly and Company and its subsidiaries. He was president of Guidant’s cardiac rhythm management division when the Lilly spinoff was sold to Boston Scientific in 2006. He’s also currently vice chairman of Synecor.

Aetna sees cost savings in helping people track their health and fitness.

A smartphone app that launches this week gives the health insurance company Aetna access to detailed user health-tracking data. As costs spiral upward, health-care companies could turn to such apps as a way to monitor customers and encourage healthy behavior.

At MIT Technology Review’s Mobile Summit in San Francisco last week, Martha Wofford, consumer platform vice president at Aetna, said the company would launch an app called CarePass to serve as a portal for an individual’s health-related activity and, if he allows it, his medical records, too.

Through CarePass, a person could enter a health goal—say, fitting into his jeans next month—and get personalized suggestions for how to go about achieving it. CarePass can integrate data from wearable tracking devices like Fitbit or Jawbone’s UP, as well as apps like MapMyRun; it can take into account doctor visits, prescriptions, and blood pressure or cholesterol records. It will also point users to trustworthy symptom and diagnosis information through iTriage, software that Aetna acquired last year.

A few other health-care providers, such as Kaiser Permanente, are getting into this area, but Aetna appears to be pushing forward more quickly than most. CarePass, for example, will include APIs so that patients can give access to their data to third parties, including doctors or other software developers, Wofford says.

Nearly 50,000 health-related mobile apps are already out there, letting people collect data about their well-being and interact with doctors and pharmacies from their mobile devices.

With the entire U.S. health-care system under pressure to reduce costs, insurance companies could start creating financial incentives for people to voluntarily share this data and improve their health and fitness.

President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Wofford says, allows insurers to increase so-called “wellness incentives” to up to 30 percent of a premium, up from 20 percent before. This would allow employer health plans to create bigger “carrots” for their employees to go to the gym or use a Fitbit. Under U.S. law, incentives have to be based on behaviors—say, joining a gym—rather than outcomes, such as losing 10 pounds versus two pounds, Wofford says. The same rules do not apply in Europe.

CarePass will be offered to individuals at first, but Aetna plans to launch a portal for employers, too. There they will receive anonymous and aggregated data about the overall health trends of their employees, Wofford says.

As health-care costs increase for employers as well, they are likely to become more aggressive in looking for ways to reduce costs.

“I think it will be led by employers,” says Wofford. “We see some more aggressive employers like Safeway, where they are driving outcomes by swabbing the cheeks of employees to see whether they are smoking or not.” U.S. law says that smokers can be charged higher premiums.

More data is not enough to improve health outcomes, however. And the data can be difficult to make use of. Zeo, a company that made a sleep-tracking device, and which was a pioneer in this area, recently went out business because people found its data too complicated to understand, Wofford says. “If we make it convenient enough, the question is whether we can actually drive behavior change,” she says.