Vida, a mobile health startup, has launched a 24/7 service that uses live interactions with physicians through text and video to steer people to make better health and fitness decisions. The move comes after eight months of Beta testing its service, which is geared to helping people with chronic conditions, such as diabetes or hypertension, and those at risk for developing them.
Vida recently raised a $5 million Series A round from Aspect Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Signia Venture Partners, The Valley Fund, Kevin Scott, Skip Battle, Lorrie Norrington, Jerry Yang at AME Cloud Ventures, and Maynard Webb, the chairman of Yahoo!, through the Webb Investment Network, his early-stage venture capital firm.
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In a phone interview with Stephanie Tilenius, the founder and CEO of Vida, she said Vida will be able to cut down on the number of times people see their primary care physician.
“We really believe that in the future healthcare will be much more virtual and everything will be in the cloud,” Tilenius said. “Doctors will be used for complex patients and for specialist expertise.”
Asked how the company is setting itself apart from other health coaches in the increasingly crowded digital health arena, Tilenius said the company is far more than a health coach.
“We are not an automated coach,” she said. “There are a lot of one-off vertical solutions but nobody is looking at co-morbidities. From a patient perspective there are multiple access points.”
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A sample of case studies includes developing diet and exercise plans for people who want to lose weight and lower cholesterol. But they also include a plan for a woman battling breast cancer such as developing a cardiovascular exercise program following a double mastectomy and tips for coping with the side effects of chemotherapy. It claims that while the service was in Beta, 50 percent of customers with a chronic condition lost more than one pound of weight per week and showed improvement in A1C, cholesterol and blood pressure levels.
Vida isn’t the first company Tilenius started. She was co-founder of PlanetRx.com, an online pharmacy and disease management company which went public in 1999. She has also worked as an executive at Google, eBay and PayPal.
Tilenius emphasized that the company wants to create a personalized relationships between patients and their health coaches. It supplements text and video interactions with doctors and nurses with supplementary information such as video modules to increase patients’ insight on their condition and treatment. Asked how it gathers data beyond talking to patients, Tilenius said it can connect to devices. For example, it connects to Apple Health Kit.
Although it is currently a direct to consumer monthly subscription service, Vida wants to work with hospitals too. The company has pilots with Duke University Hospital and MD Anderson Cancer Center geared for patients recovering from leukemia, multiple myeloma and heart attacks.
Its app is available for Android and iOS networks.
I am bit skeptical of companies that say they will reduce primary care doctor visits. A lot of people like their doctors and tend to trust what they say over one that sends the messages on a phone. But if the intent is to work alongside physicians, it raises interesting questions, like when these overworked primary care physicians will find time to communicate with Vida. If it can work out a way to share patients’ information with their physicians that makes sense with the doctors’ workflow, then maybe it could make a significant difference.
