Health Startup Digest - 4/10/16

Startup Highlight: EpharmixImproving patient adherence and outcomes via text messages is a well-resea   April 10 - Issue #8 Health Startup Digest Curated by R. Scott Munro, the latest news and information about startups and innovations in healthcare. Startup Highlight: EpharmixImproving patient adherence and outcomes via text messages is a well-researched tactic. Epharmix is looking to take advantage of this beyond pill adherence to 15 different interventions for specific patient use cases that help improve adherence and post-visit follow up. It seems to me to be similar to Health Loop, but with specific intervention focus areas. Depending on how they differentiate vs. Health Loop (and others), could be a cool company to watch.As always, if you come across news, announcements, videos, or podcasts that you think the other 4,600+ subscribers would benefit from, e-mail me at scott.munro@startupdigestmail.com or tweet @R_Scott_Munro and subscribe to the digest, here. I have also started putting up updates and article overviews throughout the week, you can find those at: www.healthtechdigest.com/ Articles: StartUp Health Insights Digital Health Funding Rankings Q1 2016 www.slideshare.net It’s April which means StartUp Health and Rock Health released their Q1 digital health funding updates (see Rock Health’s below). These funding updates are always interesting to look through, but should be quoted with big grains of salt, it’s hard to truly understand how either accelerator views the market, and each one has drastically different numbers it throws out there for funding within digital health.Some key takeaways for me from the StartUp Health report:1) The most active investors included many institutional and health system based investors, which goes along with a budding thesis of mine that these investors are better equipped to handle investing in health tech2) New York has surpassed San Francisco in total dollar amount of funding (again, caveat here is the $400M that Oscar got)3) No matter how you cut it, there was more digital health funding this quarter, than any other Q1 in the last 6 years.4) Big Data is taking the lead in terms of funding, obviously a huge area ripe for technology assistance in health care (even if the elephant in the room, Watson, will be hard to beat out) Rock Health Q1 2016 Funding Update rockhealth.com There are subtle differences in how Rock Health and StartUp Health look at the “digital health” market. Rock Health saw wearables/biosensing and big data as a virtual tie in funding (quantified-self was number 4 in StartUp Health’s report). Rock Health looks at M&A activity, which is absent from StartUp Health’s report, they tracked 187 acquisitions in 2015, and highlighted 3 for Q1 of this year (although they don’t give an exact number for Q1). I would tend to agree that the most favorable exit for digital health startups seems to be acquisitions given how rough the public markets have been (and the lack of IPOs as of late).  Sorry the first two articles this week are more of “in case you missed it” pieces… but I would feel wrong not including them in the digest. Academia And Industry Do Not Need To Be At Odds With Each Other www.forbes.com I’ve had a couple David Shaywitz articles recently, this one was a must include for me as it’s a topic near and dear to my heart. I very passionately believe that collaborations between private/public institutions are a necessity to push forward medical innovation. We can argue about whether or not medical innovation increases costs or not, and in fact we are likely going over board when it comes to medical care in the United States. But even if we are over caring for our patients, there are clearly innovations that can and will take cost out of the system, and many of these innovations will come from collaborations between industry and academia.  He sold his first startup to Medtronic. Now he's developing an even better technology to help monitor metabolic functions www.massdevice.com Great interview with Darrel Drinan, one of the founders of Corventis. I appreciate Darrel’s views on wearables and some of the issues with consumer facing wearable companies, and it’s interesting to hear about how Corventis spun out from DARPA funded research. As you might imagine, I particularly agree with his sentiment that, “the technology guys really understand healthcare, so they stuck with things that they do understand and fitness is one of them.” STDs no LOL matter: Digital tools aid hookups, public health suffers www.post-gazette.com This isn’t necessarily a digital health article, per se. But I thought it was an interesting look at an unintended consequence of our digital culture (specifically as it pertains to relationships). Seems as though some public health officials are pointing at Tinder and other digital “hook up aids” as a potential reason for a recent spike in STDs. Quote of the Week: “[The view that collaborations between pharma and acadamia are bad], however, not only fails to capture the urgent need for effective, new therapies, it overlooks entirely the vital role played by companies in translating fragile but promising scientific ideas into robust medicines for patients.- David Shaywitz, Forbes This Digest is curated by: R. Scott Munro - Utility Infielder @ DocMatter www.startupdigest.com I am a classical languages nerd turned digital health geek. I spend my days researching medical device, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies + helping clinicians efficiently collaborate.I have a passion for the intersection of health and technology, and wholeheartedly believe we are at the beginning of the most exciting eras of healthcare. Do you enjoy receiving this? Please share it:     Tweet     Share   Carefully curated by Health Startup Digest with Revue If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here.