Author: Ki Mae Heussner

With an estimated 40,000 mobile apps for iOS and Android that want to help you lose weight, track your fitness, manage chronic disease and address other health issues, separating the truly useful from the trash can be a tough challenge.

Sure, user reviews can be helpful. But the average user could very easily give a high rating to an app that’s not scientifically sound or that doesn’t follow medical guidelines. And as studies and reports continue to show, there’s a good likelihood of that happening, considering the number of apps that claim to treat medical problems but lack clinical evidence.

To give people a little more clarity on the apps that could best address their health needs, HealthTap on Thursday is launching an app directory featuring doctor recommendations and written reviews. Called AppRx, the company said the directory enables patients to filter health and wellness apps with more granularity than what they’d find in app stores managed by Apple and Google. And, more importantly, it gives users a window into the apps that physicians actually find valuable.

“This whole notion of apps being integrated into the process of care is something we’re going to see more and more as these apps mature,” said HealthTap co-founder and CEO Ron Gutman. “One of the things we saw as a huge opportunity is the discoverability of apps, which came from our own frustration of going to the app store and drowning in a sea of apps.”

While any of the 40,000 physicians on HealthTap can recommend and review an app, Gutman said they’re asked to consider three key guidelines: the medical soundness of the app, the app’s utility (in supporting health or healthy living goals) and the app’s usability. Given the site’s wide network of physicians and consumer-focused orientation, AppRx is a smart way to get physicians more deeply involved with the site and patients more interested in spending time with the service. At launch, the company said its directory will include 21,900 apps in 30 different categories, but it declined to share how many apps will include reviews or recommendations.

While the Food & Drug Administration is expected to hand down final guidance on the regulation of mobile health apps, the agency has said its oversight will only apply to a small subset of “mobile medical apps.” Services like HealthTap’s AppRx could help give more insight into apps not covered by the FDA.

For the past few years, Happtique, a company founded by the Greater New York Hospital Association’s for-profit arm GNYHA Ventures, has been focused on building a kind of mobile health app store of its own. And it’s spent a good deal of time finalizing standards for content, technical performance, privacy and security, as well as creating a certification process for health app developers. But its primary focus is on hospitals and enterprise app distribution, not consumers. The independent website iMedicalApps offers app reviews written by doctors and medical school students, but its target audience is also mostly the medical community.

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In the year or so since its launch, online learning startup Coursera has touted partnerships with some of the world’s most elite institutions. And, under most of those arrangements, the schools create online courses for tens of thousands of students anywhere to watch.  But with its latest cohort of partners, which the company is set to announce Thursday, Coursera is trying a different strategy on for size.

Working with 10 state schools, including the State University of New York, the University of Colorado System and the University of New Mexico, Coursera said it plans to explore various uses for massive open online courses (MOOCs). Instead of just creating open courses for anyone, the institutions plan to use MOOCs for blended learning experiences (that combine online and offline instruction), as well as to improve completion rates, quality and access at their schools.

“Up until now we’ve been doing a very good job giving a free education to people around the world,” said co-founder Andrew Ng. “But one thing a lot of people still need is a college degree. This is a big step toward helping make that better.”

Noting that about 75 percent of people in the U.S. attend schools in state university systems, Ng said Coursera’s partners plan to experiment with Coursera in a variety of ways.

For some partners, Coursera could enable various campuses within a system to pool resources, which could be particularly helpful as state schools face tighter budgets. For example, one campus could create an effective Introduction to Biology class, another could create an Introduction to Psychology and the courses could be shared by students across the system.

For other partners, the platform could enable faculty to adapt existing MOOC content to fit their courses or offer courses to non-matriculated students that could potentially be used for credit.  Ng said that very few partners currently award credit for Coursera courses offered by their institution but five courses have been won approval from the American Council on Education (ACE) for credit equivalency.

At the University of Kentucky, for example, the plan is to use Coursera to help prepare admitted students for college-level courses. As with several colleges, many students enter the University of Kentucky unprepared for science and math courses, Vince Kellen, the university’s CIO and senior vice provost, told me. While anyone online will be able to take the Introduction to Chemistry course the school plans to place on Coursera, he said it will primarily be intended for incoming freshmen and sophomores at his school.

“Rather than trying to build a course for the elite learning, this lets us reach a large percentage of students preparing for college,” Kellen said.

In the past few months, MOOCs have come under attack at a few universities, with faculty arguing that the massive online classes could weaken non-elite schools and promote a two-tier university system. Ng said he believes that Coursera’s partnerships could help strengthen state schools through blended learning and other approaches that enable professors to bring more resources into the classroom. And he said that he doesn’t buy the notion that MOOCs will lead to a two-class college system.

Even though Coursera may offer a great Intro to Calculus class offered by the University of Pennsylvania, that doesn’t mean students at every school should take it, he said, adding, “There are students at different levels, adding content makes sure you have content at different levels… [For some students], having their local professor create a different course would serve them better.”

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PayPal co-founder and all-around Silicon Valley star Max Levchin isn’t really the kind of person you’d expect to hear discussing the intricacies of women’s health and fertility. But there he was Wednesday, on stage at the D11 conference, getting all technical about menstrual cycles and cervical mucus (a phrase he apparently said no less than five times).

That’s because his newest startup, called Glow, wants to help couples conceive by using big data analytics to pinpoint a woman’s most fertile days.  As women input information, like the length of their menstrual cycles, basal body temperature, emotions and health-related habits, the app crunches the data within the context of other user data and known medical correlations to predict when she’s most likely to conceive. Down the road, he said, the app could integrate with various sensors to make inputing data even easier. (As he told Om earlier this year, one of his current areas of interest is how sensor data could influence our daily lives.)

With his track record and expertise, the startup clearly has a lot going for it – his name alone could bring needed attention and innovation to women’s health. But he’s entering a very crowded space. Apple’s app store is chock full of apps claiming to help women track their cycles and get pregnant. And, even when it comes to bringing big data to fertility, Glow isn’t the first.

Ovuline, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup, debuted its fertility app in September, and it similarly uses algorithms and millions of data points to help women identify the best times of the month to conceive. Its most recent version integrates with Fitbits and other health-tracking devices, and it offers women a premium version that lets them connect with fertility experts for personal advice. And it has a pretty healthy head start – so far, it’s been used by 55,000 women, many of which have paid $49.99 for the premium version.

But what I found interesting about Glow is its financial component, Glow First. In addition to the prediction service, the startup created what Levchin called a “mutual assistance program.” Each user can choose to put $50 into a pool and, if at the end of 10 months users are still not pregnant, they get a share of all the money entered into the pool during their first month of trying. Levchin himself said he’s kickstarting the risk pool with $1 million of his own money.

Sure, you could say it’s just a gimmick meant to assure potential customers the company is confident in its ability to get you pregnant in 10 months.  But I like that Levchin is putting his money where his mouth is, and that he’s encouraging a community fund among app users. To start, it may just double the amount of money each user contributed, he said. But the idea is to create an alternative “insurance” pool for couples that will ultimately need fertility treatments, which are largely not covered by insurance. Down the line, Levchin suggested that the company may go through the necessary regulatory hurdles to make the program even closer to a true insurance policy.

“The thing that’s been missing for people that cannot do it naturally is data and financial coverage,” he said. “Because it’s this elective procedure bucket that gets swept under the rug, I thought it needed some help.”

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Android users with aspirations of learning another language have a new app to check out. About six months after rolling out an iOS app, Duolingo on Wednesday launched its Android app.

Created by Recaptcha founder and Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn, Duolingo helps people learn languages while translating real-world content from the web.

Built from the bottom up for the new platform, von Ahn said, the Android app could help the company as much as double its user numbers. At the moment, the app has 3 million registered users, half of which are on mobile and 1 million of which are active. Already, it has broad appeal among non-U.S. users – about 70 percent are not from the U.S. – but considering the number of non-U.S. Android fans, von Ahn said that number could rise quickly.

Like the website, the Android app offers skill-based, game-like lessons, but they’re optimized for a smaller screen and shorter chunks of available time. They’re easier to complete while you’re waiting for the bus or in line at the store, and they require less typing.

In the last month and a half, the iOS app added the ability to download lessons for offline use (great for subway commutes) and a feature for recording yourself speaking the language (so the app can assess your pronunciation). The Android app doesn’t yet include those features, but von Ahn said they should be added later this summer.

First revenue-generating deal with publisher

Until now, the service has offered web and mobile users theme-based, mastery-level-appropriate lessons, as well as opportunities to translate real-world web content. But von Ahn said the company just signed its first partnership with a U.S. publisher, meaning that users will begin to translate actual news articles from English to Spanish.

He declined to share the name of the publisher, but said the deal marks the startup’s first revenue-generating partnership and points the way to how the company intends to make money. At any given time on the service, he said, about 80 percent of the users are completing lessons, while 20 percent are translating content. But even though a smaller percentage is translating, he added, users can translate a 500- to 600-word article in about an hour.

Now that the company is beginning to make money from the translations, von Ahn said it may experiment with new ways of incorporating translation opportunities into the lessons and other parts of the experience.

“We haven’t had a huge incentive to push the translations because they haven’t been generating revenue,” von Ahn said. But “we’ll never force you. What I hope is that users like them – and they actually do.”

In the past few months, interest in language-learning startups seems to have picked up. Last month, Rosetta Stone, a giant in the space, acquired language-learning community LiveMocha. And in April, Berlin-based language learning service Babbel acquired PlaySay, a small Silicon Valley language-learning app, and raised $10 million.

Despite increasing competition, Duolingo’s traction seems to be growing at a healthy clip. Since the startup raised a $15 million Series B round in September, its number of active users has quadrupled. A study earlier this year found that it takes a Duolingo user 34 hours to learn the equivalent of one semester of college-level Spanish, while it takes a Rosetta Stone user 60 hours to learn the same amount of content.

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When it comes to watching movies and playing games, New York City’s middle schoolers likely already know their way around laptops and smartphones. But if a group of educators, tech innovators and entrepreneurs have their way, technology will increasingly play a starring role in classrooms in helping them learn.

Earlier this year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Department of Education kicked off a first-of-its kind competition, called the Gap App Challenge, inviting developers around the country to submit ideas for apps that could help close achievement gaps in middle school math.  On Tuesday, Schools Chancellor Dennis Wolcott announced that, out of more than 200 applicants, the department — which overseas the largest school district in the country — had picked their winners.

The startups, which included adaptive learning company KnowRe (Best Instructional App), Google Apps management startup Hapara (Best Instructional/Engagement App), video-based math lesson website Mathalicious and behavior tracking software company LiveSchool, won a total of $100,000.

“Our students are really into technology – they know it like the back of their hands,” said New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Wolcott. “If we can find better ways to engage them [around learning] that’s to the benefit of the entire community.”

While the amount of money itself isn’t huge (the top winners won about $15,000 each), the competition – along with the city’s broader Innovation Zone (iZone) program – holds a lot of promise for more cross-pollination among educators and entrepreneurs.  Launched in 2010, the iZone includes about 250 of the city’s 1,700 public schools and is focused on finding ways to personalize learning through new tools, technology and ideas.

It remains to be seen how much traction these apps will actually get among teachers and students, but the hope is that iZone schools will partner with the winning developers to refine the apps and implement their use in classrooms.

While plenty of ed tech startups partner with individual school districts and schools to beta test their products, New York’s iZone is among the most ambitious attempts to blend the worlds of education and tech innovation. While the app challenge isn’t expected to become an annual event, the program is planning a series of hackathons, challenges and workshops.

Here’s a little more on the winning startups:

KnowRe: One of the growing companies in the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, KnowRe, which focuses on math, aims to personalize learning process by determining a student’s strengths and weaknesses. As students progress through a series of questions, it figures out where the student is struggling and its algorithms adapt to the student to help them master the necessary skills.

Hapara: As Google’s Apps for Education gain traction worldwide — at last count they were in use by 25 million schools — Hapara helps schools and teachers optimize the tools with easy-to-view intuitive dashboards.

Mathalicious: Instead of teaching kids math with boring old word problems with little bearing on reality, Mathalicious creates and licenses lessons for teachers that helps students learn math through real-life examples related to sports, music, technology and more.

LiveSchool:  In an effort to record information about students’ classroom behavior, some teachers might spend up to two or three extra hours a week filling out paperwork. To help them save time and more effectively communicate with peers and administrators, LiveSchool offers subscription-based software that enables teachers to track and share classroom behavior information in real-time.

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Adolescence is tough enough without the threat of cancer or the fear of being unable to have children. But for Surbhi Sarna, high school was an extra trying time thanks to a series of cysts that wouldn’t leave her ovaries alone.

Starting at age 13, she said, she experienced multiple episodes of abdominal pain caused by recurring complex ovarian cysts. Each time, Sarna would go to the doctor and undergo blood tests and ultrasounds to determine the severity of the problem, hoping to learn whether the cysts were cancerous. But each time, even though her blood tests came back normal, the doctors could never tell her with certainty that she was in the clear. It’s very difficult to determine whether a cyst is cancerous without invasive surgery and the surgery to remove a cyst can threaten fertility, she said.

“For a 13-year-old, that’s really a big deal,” Sarna, who is now 27, told me. “I realized then that there is a big unmeet need.”

Ultimately, the cysts dissolved on their own and, by the time she started her freshman year at UC Berkeley, Sarna said, they stopped developing entirely. But at that point she’d already decided that she would study bioengineering, with the goal of someday working to improve women’s health.

So many questions in women’s health

As Sarna learned, there are so many unknowns when it comes to ovarian cancer — the exact cause of the disease is a mystery, it’s symptoms are vague and it’s difficult to diagnose with certainty until it’s already in the later stages. Many other areas of women’s health, including fertility, are equally overflowing with questions.

Founded in 2010, nVision grew out of Sarna’s personal experience and work at Berkeley, as well as conversations with her father and husband, both of whom work in Silicon Valley.  The company is still just beginning to get off the ground — it just closed the second tranche of a $4.4 million Series A round last week after many talks with less sympathetic venture capitalists — but intends to develop a range of medical devices for women’s health diagnostics and treatment.

Its first products include devices for detecting fallopian tube blockage — a leading cause of infertility — and grabbing cells from a woman’s reproductive track to determine whether cancer has developed in the ovaries. Both devices will need to through the Food & Drug Administration’s approval process, and Sarna expects to make the first sale in a couple of years..

Introducing less expensive, simpler procedures

Now, the typical procedure for determining whether a woman’s fallopian tubes are clear is the hysterosalpingogram, a special X-ray test that causes discomfort for some and requires an extra expense and trip to the doctor. But Sarna said her catheter-based device that sends a tiny camera into the fallopian tube to gather images could be used by a typical OB/GYN (not a specialist) at a lower cost and with less inconvenience.

The other diagnostic device, which also uses a catheter, takes cells from a woman’s ovaries. It’s intended to give women a more accurate and less risky way to screen for ovarian cancer, and it’s also simple enough for use in an OB/GYN’s office. At the moment, current options are an inconclusive blood test or invasive and expensive surgery.

The devices challenge the traditional system of women’s health, in which women are referred to more expensive specialists and procedures for fertility and more serious issues. But Sarna said that by making the devices simple and the procedures less expensive, she hopes OB/GYNs will be able to offer the services to more women – and engage women at a deeper level.

At present, images from diagnostic procedures are saved by hospitals and doctors offices and can be a headache for patients to get their hands on. But Sarna said her longer-term goal is to introduce apps that complement each device so that women can immediately receive the data and images from their procedures.

“The unique challenge around women’s health, historically, is that women don’t talk about their conditions and they suffer silently,” said Sarna. “What I’d love to do is take data and empower the patient.”

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Learnist may have launched out of a company focused on test prep and more formal education, but the social learning site is quickly showing that its appeal is much broader.

Since its launch about a year ago, the service, which was created by startup Grockit to enable users to curate and follow “learn boards” of videos, text and other web content focused on specific topics, has attracted about 700,000 registered users (150,000 to 200,000 are active monthly users). Each month, the company said, it receives about two million page views and has grown its traffic 30 percent week over week since its latest update last month.

But while a significant portion of its traffic goes to content relevant to K-12 teachers and students, the site is also drawing a large crowd for content unrelated to the classroom.  Co-founder Farb Nivi said that about 25 to 30 percent of the content on the site is education-related and it receives about a quarter of the total Learnist traffic. But he added that while just 6 percent of the content on the site is lifestyle-related (focusing on food, cooking, home design and other similar topics), it receives about 35 percent of the site’s traffic.

It underscores that while the site does accommodate teachers and the education-only crowd, it’s moving further away from being a typical ed tech app.

“We want to be the Instagram of knowledge-sharing,” Nivi said, adding that as it grows it plans to make it even easier for users of all types to share content and receive the bits of content most relevant to their interests, “like a smart RSS.”

Unlike a true RSS reader, the site doesn’t allow people to subscribe to blogs and news sites to get the most timely stories. But it wants to be a service that enables people to easily keep up to date on the topics they care about – from technology to art to cooking to politics – by following people and topic-focused tags. While an RSS reader only enables people to view content from sources to which they subscribe, Learnist aims to suggest and surface all kinds of crowd-sourced content that could match a user’s profile.

Now, the site has about 25 million pieces of content but, in the next twelve months, he added, Learnist plans to increase that by as much as 100 times. Last month, it removed the sign-up process, which was a big barrier to entry. Going forward, Nivi said they’re considering removing the concept of the “learn board” to simplify content sharing, as well as adding more publisher partners (now they partner with only Discovery and the BBC).

That growth could raise the amount of lower-quality content on the site. But to keep the signal to noise ratio high, the company this week added a LinkedIn-like endorsement feature to help its algorithms identify the best contributors and content and it’s playing with applying natural language processing to publisher content to help it route the best content to users.

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Apparently, lots of people have dreams of being just like Spock. On Wednesday, health electronics startup Scanadu launched an Indieogo campaign for its Scout “tricorder” that, much like the medical hand-held device in Star Trek, can determine a person’s vital signs from a simple scan. And according to the crowdfunding site, Scanadu set a new record for the fastest funding velocity on the platform.

The campaign reached its goal of $100,000 in two hours (and doubled the goal within five hours), making it the fastest campaign to reach its goal on Indiegogo (of campaigns with a goal size greater than $20,000). Through Indiegogo, supporters could contribute at various levels for a range of perks, including early access to features and visits to NASA for a space medicine workshop. Early funders were able to pre-order a device for $149, while the amount went up to $199 for subsequent contributors. As of Friday, the campaign has raised more than $350,000 from funders in 65 countries.

While Indiegogo declined to share the average funding velocity of campaigns on its site or the last campaign to set a record of this type, back in August, The Oatmeal’s campaign for a Tesla museum grabbed headlines for raising $27,000 an hour.

Scanadu, which is participating in the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE competition, first revealed a prototype of its device six months ago. By holding the small hockey puck-shaped device to a person’s head, this slightly updated version can determine a user’s heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rate and oxygen levels in the blood. It can then send the information to an iOS or Android smartphone, via Bluetooth.

Scanadu founder and CEO Walter de Brouwer said he believes interest in the device stems from a desire know more about our own health and the health of the people we care about.

“It’s the sense of empowerment and the sense that we are data and some how we have to measure that data,” he told me. “And if we are data, we can change because we can set goals to improve that data.”

In addition to providing market validation for the Scanadu, Indiegogo supporters will be able to offer feedback on the devices through usability studies, which the company will use as part of its submission for FDA clearance.

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When you first hear disruptive economics guru Clayton Christensen’s prediction that by 2019 half of all K-12 classes will be taught online, it’s easy to wonder if brick-and-mortar schools as we know them are on their way out.

But a new study released Thursday from his think tank, the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, depicts a future of education, particularly at the elementary school level, that isn’t nearly as stark as that. The paper, which refines theories on blended learning Christensen and his colleagues have laid out in the book “Disrupting Class” and other studies, introduces the idea of hybrid innovation. While Christensen’s famous theory of innovation mostly focuses on disruptive and sustaining innovations, the new paper offers the concept of the hybrid.

Often, the researchers argue, sectors experiencing disruption go through an extended phase in which old and new technology exist side by side, providing “the best of both worlds.” In education, many approaches to blended learning, which combine online instruction with traditional classroom learning, fall into this hybrid category.

“What’s clear to us from this theory is that schools will be here for the long haul,” said Michael Horn, executive director of the Institute, a co-author of the paper, as well as a co-author of “Disrupting Class.” “The future of learning is blended learning for the majority of students.”

In particular, he said, elementary schools will increasingly adopt less disruptive styles of blended learning that rotate online learning activities into a student’s schedule but still maintain the basic structure of a traditional teacher-led classroom. For example, schools will continue to “flip” their classrooms with videos (from Khan Academy or other sources) students can watch online, but mostly rely on classroom teachers to shape the experience.

At the middle school and high school levels, where students tend to have more personalized, modular schedules, he said, the school setting will remain in place but the classroom structure will be upended. In those grades, educators will increasingly adopt more disruptive blended learning models.

For example, students looking for more advanced subjects or languages not offered at their school could supplement their in-school experience with online classes – even massive open online courses – that barely involve offline instruction.

Horn said that one of his hopes for this most recent paper is that it helps give educators some clarity around what they can and can’t do to drive innovation in their classrooms and schools.

While superintendents, principals with some autonomy and a healthy budget, as well as philanthropists may be able to introduce more disruptive online learning models into their classrooms, Horn said, the most individual teachers and those with more limited budgets could likely do is encourage hybrid approaches.

“For the first time, it gave us a much clearer idea of what people in education could or could not do to bring about this future,” he said.

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It’s easy to see how a motion-tracking, iPhone-compatible camera dock could appeal to any gadget hound or videography geek. But since the first Swivl launched in early 2012, its biggest fans haven’t been in the consumer or even corporate markets: they’ve been in education.

To build on that base, the company on Wednesday said it had raised $500,000 from Grishin Robotics, an investment company focused on supporting personal robotics. Previously, Swivl raised about $175,000 from Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns and less than $1 million in angel funding.

Since the device’s debut, Swivl co-founder and CEO Brian Lamb said the company has shipped about 10,000 units, with uses ranging from pet monitoring to corporate videoconferencing.  But he added that 75 to 80 percent of its customers are coming from education.

“There’s a very powerful ongoing discussion about using video for [several] use cases [in education] that this plugged right into,” said Lamb. “It’s a tool to open the doors of the classroom and get people participating online.”

For teachers aiming to “flip” their classrooms with videos students can watch online or get feedback on their teaching styles from peers, the Swivl provides an easy way to self-record lectures and classes. The $199 device, which the company likens to a robotic “personal cameraman,” includes a sensor that tracks the subject’s movements, panning and turning the camera as necessary. (For more details on how it works, you can check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s review of the first-generation Swivl.)

Already, it’s being used in 1,000 K-12 schools and 250 universities, Lamb said. With the new funding, the company plans to accelerate the production and distribution of the company’s second version of the Swivl, which includes more classroom-friendly features like iPad compatibility and a feature for attaching additional microphones to capture audio from students.

Even though it may have been unintended, Swivl’s rise in education makes sense given the surging interest in using technology to enhance and extend the classroom. In addition to the “flipped classroom” trend and growing calls for better teacher feedback systems, teachers are increasingly turning to video technology to support distance education programs and capture lectures for students to review or watch later on.

For example, companies like Torsh and Edthena provide tools for teacher observation and evaluation, while McGraw-Hill’s Tegrity and Echo360 are among those offering schools lecture-capture services.  But given its focus on developing hardware and eventually offering connected cloud services (although Lamb wouldn’t elaborate too much on that), Swivl is more of a complementary rather than competitive startup.

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San Francisco-based PracticeFusion may bill itself as an electronic medical records company, but that’s definitely not all it is.

Since launching in 2005, the company has attracted 150,000 physicians with its free, cloud-based software for managing patient health information, scheduling, billing and other tasks. But last month, it rolled out its first consumer-facing service, a ZocDoc-like doctor appointment booking site that positions it to manage additional data about patient conditions, medications and treatment outcomes. And on Wednesday, it plans to expand its footprint even further with consumer-oriented tools that help patients track and manage their health expenses.

The electronic health record may have been its foot in the door — as founder and CEO Ryan Howard recently told VentureBeat, it’s “somewhat of a Trojan Horse.” But that’s enabling the company to build an enviable online community for physicians and patients, all with an eye on bringing some light and efficiency to the health system while amassing a valuable treasure trove of patient data. To date, the company says it manages health information for more than 62 million patients.

“Every part of health care is obfuscated,” Howard told me in a recent interview. “But we’ve just opened it up – from the administration to scheduling to the clinical data to now health spending.”

With its new health cost tracking tools, which are similar to products offered by startups like Simplee and CakeHealth, for example, PracticeFusion connects to patients’ healthcare accounts to help them better understand and manage their health finances. For example, it lets patients easily visualize their out-of-pocket expenses, costs covered by insurance and the remaining balance of their deductible.

For now, the health tracking tools can only be used by patients whose doctors use PracticeFusion, but Howard said the service will expand to other patients in the next quarter.

Considering that the average family spends more than $3,000 on out-of-pocket medical expenses and that medical debt has been cited as a leading cause of bankruptcy, it’s no wonder that PracticeFusion is zeroing in on health spending. For many patients, medical expenses are a big black hole and, as healthcare costs climb and employers continue to shift to high-deductible health plans, the need for more transparency and guidance around price is becoming even more needed.

Offering more tools to consumers gives PracticeFusion more opportunities to build its growing advertising business (the company, which advertises to doctors, doesn’t yet market to patients, but has indicated that it will). But, over time, the health-tracking tools could also give the company an interesting and comprehensive window on to the varying prices consumers pay for different providers and treatments.

Companies like Castlight Health and ClearCostHealth already work through employers to help patients get health care pricing information and encourage “healthcare consumerism.” But in the context of PracticeFusion’s community and appointment booking platform, pricing information could play an even bigger role in helping patients choose doctors.

Recognizing the potential sensitivity for physicians, the company doesn’t have immediate plans to display pricing information for patients. But given the need to bring more price transparency to patients, it seems to be something the company is carefully weighing.

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I like going to baseball games for the camaraderie, ice-cold beer and general excuse to sit out in the summertime sun.  But the only way I can actually pay attention to what’s happening on the field (unless maybe it’s the last inning of the last game of the World Series) is if I have some money on the line.

It’s not that I’m a big gambler (whenever I’ve ever been to Vegas, I’ve wanted to spend more time poolside than tableside), it’s just that shelling out a few bucks into a hat with the prospect of winning a mini-windfall makes me see the game in a whole different way.

Similarly, a new startup, called LifeVest, hopes that by tying employee health goals to the opportunity to win or lose cash — through what it calls a “stock market for health” — it can encourage people to see their health differently and take the necessary steps to make it better. It may not be the right solution for every company, but I think it underscores an important lesson for many employers trying to get their employees to improve their health: having skin in the game can be a powerful motivator.

In theory, we all know that being healthy is a reward in itself — in matters of our health and wellness, we always, literally, have skin in the game. But when it comes to incentivizing people to lose weight, quit smoking and lower their blood pressure, a clean bill of health often isn’t a big enough carrot and the threat of chronic disease often isn’t a severe enough stick.

Blending carrots and sticks

Facing rising health care costs, more employers have started upping the ante for employees with wellness programs that either financially reward or penalize employees depending on how active they are in improving their health. CVS, for example, recently generated a ton of buzz for its decision to penalize employees who didn’t participate in its wellness program. And UnitedHealthCare is one of an increasing number of employers that offer employees financial rewards for getting their weight down and taking healthy steps.

But LifeVest, which spun out of heathcare IT company Trizetto, offers employers a model that blends rewards and penalties.

“We’ve got this notion of a stock tied to your health, which is powerful because it does a few things,” said CEO and co-founder Jon Cooper. “It changes the way people think about their health and [for a company] … markets are effective way to optimize an incentive budget.”

To start, employers can choose to invest a minimum amount in each employee, which can depend on the demographics of their employee base and their goals. Then, each employee, as well as his family and friends, can add to the amount with their own investments. Employers can opt to match outside investments up to a certain amount.

The more employees improve their weight, blood pressure and other health indicators, the greater their earnings and the less they improve, the less they stand to get paid (and the more they lose of their own investment).

Getting an upfront commitment

A Mayo Clinic study earlier this year supported the notion that financial incentives can lead to greater weight loss. But some argue that the fear of losing money can be a more powerful incentive for action than the prospect of gaining money and others say the effects may be short-lived.

What I like about LifeVest is that it enables companies to carry a big stick while still giving employees some choice — in contrast to some penalty-based programs, like that promoted by CVS, employees that don’t want to participate aren’t forced to pay, while those that want to participate can still benefit from the “loss aversion” incentive. Sure, you might have some holdouts. But it lets the company focus on the people who are interested in making a change — and the promise of a financial prize could even be a way to get non-health-enthusiasts to the table.

Also, similar to Stickk.com, a goal-setting site launched by Yale economists, it gets people to make the all-important upfront commitment. Just like paying for a membership to a gym or subscription to the philharmonic, it gets people invested in — and therefore more likely to follow through on — the activities we would like to have done but don’t always want to actually do.

Amid the crowd of companies pitching employers with this or that approach to boosting employee health, LifeVest is a relatively small and new player — it just launched in October and recently graduated from the Tigerlabs health tech accelerator. And it doesn’t include all the health-tracking and engagement features of bigger companies like Keas or WellTok (although Cooper said it could be complementary to services like those).

But I think its approach to incentivizing employees makes it an interesting company to watch — I don’t have any skin in this particular game, but you can be sure I’ll be paying attention.

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Education technology startup Knewton just inked another deal with a major education publisher. But, for the first time, the initial audience for its partnership with Macmillan isn’t high school or college students — it’s for adults around the world learning English.

Since launching in 2008, the adaptive learning company, which takes a data-driven approach to personalizing learning, has partnered with less than a handful of other publishers, including Pearson, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Its latest partnership shows that its not only making headway in the domestic K-12 and higher education markets, but that it’s extending its reach overseas and among markets that have been slower to go digital.

“Today, ELT [English Language Teaching] is all offline,” said David Liu, Knewton’s COO. “[Macmillian is] creating content for the digital experience from scratch — not only the educational content, but the assessment content.”

Over time, Liu said, the partnership will extend to other Macmillan content, not just that for ELT. But, to start, Macmillan will build on Knewton’s adaptive learning platform to provide personalized grammar and vocabulary lessons, exam reviews and other kinds of content to ELT classrooms, as well as individuals, across 120 countries.

In the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, Knewton isn’t the only game in town. Dreambox Learning, McGraw-Hill and Cerego are a few other companies pitching various approaches to customized digital learning experiences for K-12 students, colleges and individual learners.

While Knewton offers some evidence of its success – in a 2011 program of 2,000 remedial math students at Arizona State University, the company said, withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates climbed 11 percent – it’s still early days for adaptive learning and some learning experts say more proof is still needed.  Still, Knewton is growing steadily. By the end of last year, the company, which has raised $54 million, reached about 500,000 and it expects to reach 5 million students by the end of this year.

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ConsultingMD, a startup that connects patients with leading medical specialists, has raised a $10 million round of funding from Venrock Capital. The company, which launched earlier this year and previously raised $1 million from Harrison Metal, enables patients to seek second opinions from a network of top doctors, and to get referrals to  specialists in their own area. With the funding, the startup said it plans to further develop its technology and build out its network of elite doctors.

In contrast to startups like ZocDoc or HealthTap, which help patients find any doctor available in their area or online, ConsultingMD bills itself as service that offers access to only the doctors in the top echelon of the medical world. These physicians – who encompass the one percent of their profession – tend to be the chiefs or chairmen of the department, with publications in the top medical journals, the company says.

“The core problem is that in the highly elite world of academic specialists… access to these people is difficult [and] patients don’t know how to find them in the first place,” said CEO and co-founder Owen Tripp, who was previously COO and co-founder of Reputation.com. The company’s other co-founder is Dr. Lawrence Hofman, chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital.

Through the site, patients in need of second opinion spend a few minutes describing their case, disclosing where they’ve already received care and authorizing ConsultingMD to access their medical history. Then the startup digitizes and indexes the relevant medical records (an often frustrating and dragged-out process for patients) and delivers it to the appropriate specialist on ConsultingMD.

While it can take the company an average of seven or eight days to aggregate all the records, once the doctor receives the information, Tripp said, they the doctor  can turn around a second opinion in an average of 48 hours.

For individuals coming to the site, the pricing is steep, emphasizing ConsultingMD’s positioning as an elite service – the company’s website says a second opinion costs $3,750. But the company believes its bigger opportunity is by offering the service to employers looking for a way to help their employees get better outcomes (and therefore boost productivity and lower costs).

For an additional $200, the company will also locate and schedule a priority appointment with a top specialist in a patient’s area, as well as deliver all of the necessary medical records.

For doctors, the site offers a chance to interact with other top-tier medical professionals (doctors are only admitted to the site by peer recommendation), see more cases that match their research interests and, of course, earn a little more cash. For patients, the opportunity to reach the one or two leading experts in a given field may be attractive — especially in very specific or rare medical situations. But even though the company says that outcomes for elite doctors differ substantially from outcomes for less pedigreed professionals, it’s unclear that the research backs that up.

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Some investors, particularly angel investors, may see equity crowdfunding as a threat to traditional venture capital. But not InCube Ventures.

Over the past few years, the San Jose, Calif.-based life sciences venture capital firm has co-invested with accredited individual investors on a handful of deals.  On Friday, the firm went one big step further with the launch of VentureHealth, an equity crowdfunding site for biomedical technology companies.

As report after report has shown, venture capital funding for life sciences companies has been on the decline. This week, for example, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) revealed that venture funding in the life sciences sector dropped 14 percent in the first quarter of this year.

VentureHealth wants to give health startups — both early, but particularly later stage — a new option for raising funding, while embracing a model that enables doctors, health care professionals and others with sufficient means to support companies addressing issues they care about.

“The life sciences venture industry has been shrinking – there’s less capital available for really exciting companies,” said InCube managing director and VentureHealth co-founder Andrew Farquharson. “To the extent that we can mobilize capital into companies that need it, we’re meeting our mission.”

VentureHealth isn’t the first attempt at bringing crowdfunding to health care. MedStartr and Health Tech Hatch offer entrepreneurs a platform for raising relatively small amounts of seed capital without giving up equity. And last week HeathFundr launched an equity crowdfunding site targeting medical device and other health entrepreneurs looking for Series A-range funding.

But unlike HealthFundr, CircleUp and other equity crowdfunding sites that have recently emerged, VentureHealth doesn’t offer securities through a registered broker dealer. Instead of taking a commission on each transaction, it’s compensated through a combination of fees and carried interest, which is a percentage of the profits earned by investors when a company is sold or experiences another kind of liquidity event. While the amount can vary, the company said it will tend to be about 20 percent.

That’s a decent-sized payout, but Farquharson said its model means that VentureHealth only wins when its investors win so it’s extra incentivized to find the best deals.

Over the past decade or so, Farquharson and his co-founder Mir Imran, a medical inventor who holds more than 200 patents, have invested in a range of companies, from BodyMedia, a wearable technology company recently sold to Jawbone to epilepsy treatment company Neurolink. Given their track record and experience, he believes VentureHealth could give interested investors a well-curated selection of deals and entrepreneurs the extra support they may need.

For now, Farquharson said, they interact with every accredited investor on the site but, when it’s implemented, the JOBS Act will enable VentureHealth to reach a broader pool of investors and expand its options.

The site currently has no active deals listed, but Farquharson estimates that it could offer five or six deals over the next 10 months. Once VentureHealth scales sufficiently, InCube plans so spin it off as a standalone company.

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Over the past couple of months, massive open online course (MOOC) providers have been the focus of dissension on some college campuses. But now online learning company 2U is getting some pushback of its own.

Last fall, the company, which has partnered with several leading universities for online masters degree programs that feature small classes and live instruction, announced a new for-credit online program for undergraduates. But three of the 10 schools that had originally committed to the program have since backed out.

Last month, Duke revealed that it was withdrawing from the program after a faculty vote against the program. And, according to Inside Higher Ed, Vanderbilt and University of Rochester have also pulled out as of Friday, with Wake Forest sitting on the fence.

“Each school has their own process for evaluating these opportunities,” 2U’s SVP of communications Chance Patterson said, adding that the company is moving ahead with its plans to launch the program this fall with the remaining schools, including Northwestern, Emory and Brandeis. 2U also said that Boston College has since joined the consortium and that it’s in talks with 20 other schools.

At Duke, faculty concerns over the lack of administrator transparency related to the 2U deal, as well as unease with awarding school credit to students not admitted to the college, apparently led to the withdrawal.

Other issues led Vanderbilt and University of Rochester to back away from the 2U consortium. While several schools work with different online learning companies, University of Rochester reportedly chose Coursera over 2U because of the MOOC provider’s ability to reach a larger audience. Vanderbilt raised the issue of cost; while efforts like the MOOCs try to provide educational experiences at a lower price, 2U’s program costs the same as an on-campus for-credit program. Vanderbilt, as well as Duke, still maintain partnerships with Coursera for non-credit-granting courses.

The decisions to back away from 2U come after faculty resistance to online learning programs at other institutions. Earlier this month, San Jose State University professors refused to teach an edX course on justice developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to the country’s university system.  And in April, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the effects of MOOCs on U.S. universities.

2U’s model, which focuses on small class sizes, live instruction and real teacher-student interaction, exists in stark contrast to the mega-sized virtual classrooms created by the MOOC providers. But it’s still bringing a new and different instructional approach to slow-moving academia. Even though one could argue that 2U’s flavor of online education isn’t as disruptive as MOOCs — like traditional college courses, it promotes teacher-student relationships, live classes and paid courses — it’s still causing some faculty to wonder about its long-term impact on their institutions and employment prospects. For example, the New York Times reported that some Duke professors were concerned that it might eventually cause the university to offer fewer courses and hire fewer professors.

Ultimately, these on-campus debates emphasize that transitioning to online learning isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Faculty and administrators raising concerns aren’t rejecting online learning wholesale, they’re trying to determine the approaches that work best for their students, missions and economic needs. As MOOC providers and other online learning companies make bigger headway, we’ll inevitably see more of these tussles — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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As student debt levels reach new highs – the total outstanding debt just topped $1 trillion – it’s hard to argue that the current model of financial aid isn’t in need of a fix.

In the past couple of years, startups like Pave, Upstart, Campus Slice and CommonBond have started promoting crowdfunding platforms that give students a way to solicit microinvestments from friends, family and even strangers.

But those approaches tend to target older students (in college or graduate school) who have already made — and potentially eliminated — college options based on their financial situation. And, in some cases, those startups require students to give up “equity” in themselves (which works like a loan, sometimes with interest), a model that may work for companies but has yet to prove itself when it comes to supporting individuals.

Raise Labs, a San Francisco-based startup backed by the Imagine K-12 ed tech accelerator, is bringing another model into the mix: Instead of targeting students who have already made their college decision, it offers college hopefuls microscholarships they can earn over the course of their high-school careers. The money would come from colleges, corporations and foundations.

“We’re rethinking how students access financial aid for college. The system is really complicated… And it happens at the end of high school, when it can be too late,” said founder and CEO Preston Silverman.

Through Raise Labs, high-school students can set up an account and then earn scholarship money every week through school and community achievements. Sponsors, including corporations, universities and foundations, can award microscholarships for accomplishments like perfect attendance, community service, demonstrating leadership and improvement in grades.

High-school students can obviously already earn scholarships and financial prizes that can help them pay for college. But Raise Labs gives students and sponsors a centralized platform for learning about and promoting awards while making more scholarships accessible to a larger pool of students.

While Silverman declined at this time to provide specifics on the size of the microscholarships, he said the goal is to help students earn thousands of dollars. But given the rising cost of a college education, depending on where a student goes, a few thousand dollars may only make a small dent in the total cost.

For the students, opening up the conversation earlier could motivate them o set goals for themselves and potentially achieve more. For the sponsors, it provides opportunities for cause marketing (for corporations) and enables more engagement and relationship-building with students.

For now, Raise Labs is offering the program to a total of 20,000 students at range of schools. But it plans to open up the service to students nationwide this fall. Earlier this year, the company won a $100,000 grant after winning a top prize in an ed tech challenge sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook, and it said that, so far, it’s secured $30 million in scholarship commitments.

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Ringadoc, a San Francisco startup that helps doctors manage patient phone calls, has raised an additional $700,000 in seed funding.

The round, which included Siemer Ventures, Telegraph Hill Group and Dr. Lyle Dennis, a neurologist and founder of HealthKeep, brings the startup’s total amount raised to $1.9 million. Previous investors include FF Angel, Practice Fusion CEO and founder Ryan Howard and former president of One Medical Group Sharon Knight.

The startup launched in 2010 as a service for providing on-demand telephone and video chat access to physicians. For $40, consumers could use Ringadoc to connect with doctors anytime, day or night. But earlier this year, in a bid to bring more doctors on to its network, it pivoted to its current product, which targets physicians with an after-hours messaging and phone service.

Typical after-hours messaging services require patients with after-hours questions to leave messages with a non-medically trained operator, who then looks up an on-call doctor and passes the message along. When the doctor calls back, the patient needs to recount her symptoms all over again.

With Ringadoc, patients leave a secure message with a cloud-based answering service that automatically finds the appropriate physician – patients only need to explain their issues once and the cost, Ringadoc says, is cheaper than most existing systems. To date, the company said it has handled more than 100,000 phone calls for physicians.

With the new funding, CEO and founder Jordan Michaels said the company plans to beef up sales and marketing, as well as enhance the product so that it could integrate with other tools used by doctors’ offices, including practice management and electronic health records systems. Since Ringadoc is capturing valuable patient engagement data through its telephone calls, Michaels said, they want to enable doctors to make the most of that functionality.

“We’re tracking a lot of two-way conversations and that’s an important piece of the health care conversation,” Michaels said. “Our vision is to be on the frontline of virtual care for patients.”

For now, the company is focusing on its physician-focused product. But, later this year, he said, it could start expanding to patients and restore the startup’s initial mission of providing on-demand physician access to patients.

Recognizing the need to address the shortage of doctors in the U.S., other companies are also working to streamline physician-patient communication and promote virtual health care. For example, PingMD targets physicians with a mobile app for more efficiently communicating with patients and peers, HealthTap offers consumers a mobile- and web-based service for messaging and querying doctors and Sherpaa works with employers to help patients and doctors connect via video chats and phone calls.

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If you’ve ever tried to call your doctor with an impromptu medical question, you know that a single call can quickly turn into non-stop game of phone tag that may or may not have a productive ending.

PingMD, a New York startup, initially launched a few years ago as an app to help digitally-savvy parents communicate with their kids’ pediatricians. But after analyzing how tens of thousands of patients and doctors were communicating during their pilot, they decided to expand their scope. This month, they relaunched their app for iOS and Android as a service that enables doctors to securely communicate with their patient, as well as peers. And on Wednesday, the company said it had raised $2.5 million from angel investors, including RT Investment Partners, Stonewater Captial and SNL Financial. The round follows $1.33 million raised last year.

According to a 2010 New England Journal of Medicine study analyzing communication in a Philadelphia doctor’s practice, the average doctor in that practice took 24 phone calls a day and wrote 17 emails on top of seeing a full load of patients, processing their prescriptions, reviewing lab reports and completing all the other tasks that come with the territory.

“There’s a lot of call volume going on,” said CEO Dr. Gopal Chopra, who co-founded PingMD with his wife Dr. Manju Chopra. “And the indirect cost is the time spent trying to get you [the patient] an answer.”

Even though electronic medical records and digital practice management tools can enable doctors to look up patient information and history more efficiently, Chopra said the call volume can be difficult for doctors. And that’s especially true for those doctors who are open to emailing or messaging with patients through mobile phones or other more secure services.

Through PingMD, doctors can enable patients to securely message them with text, as well as relevant pictures and video, and they can easily loop in other doctors and nurses in their practices as well as other specialists.

For example, if you have a weird rash on your arm, you could send a note and picture to your doctor and then she could reply with her feedback, as well as add a dermatologist to the circle.

While Chopra estimates that response times on email and other secure messaging systems tends to average 72 hours because the message is routed through an administrator and then the doctor, the average response time on PingMD is an hour (although it can take from a few seconds to several hours depending on the severity of the case).

To make money, PingMD takes a software-as-a-service approach, billing itself to hospitals and physician networks as a way to gather data about how doctors are communicating and spending their time and how the hospital should allocate their resources. At the moment, Chopra said they’re piloting PingMD with several institutions and physician networks.

The startup is one of several companies attempting to help doctors improve their productivity and prepare for an influx of new Obamacare patients. American Well and Sherpaa, for example, work with employers to help patients and doctors connect via video chats and phone calls. HealthTap targets consumers with a service for messaging and querying a network of doctors. And Ringadoc offers doctors a simple service for handling after-hours calls and streamlining patient communication.

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Google already reaches millions of students through its Apps for Education classroom tools but, at its annual developer conference Wednesday, the tech giant said it’s making an even bigger push with Android.

Starting this fall, it plans to offer teachers across the country an education-focused Android app store, called Google Play for Education, which has been in pilot testing with various schools.

“There’s a big part of all of our lives – and the lives of our kids – that mobile technology hasn’t touched. When I visit my kids’ classroom, it looks pretty much like it did when I went to school,” said Chris Yerga, an engineering director at Google. “Google Play for Education was built from the ground up to meet the unique content needs of educators.”

Through the new store, teachers will be able to search for educator-recommended apps appropriate for their grades and subjects. And, as long as each student has their own Google account, teachers can deploy their app selections to the tablets for an entire class or grade from their own account.

Apple is also pushing aggressively in education — last year, it sold 4.5 million iPads to schools and reported one billion downloads for iTunes U. But Google is clearly getting ready to take on its Silicon Valley rival in the education market in a bigger way. Google’s existing school presence through its Apps for Education, which has more than 20 million users, could help the company in its latest effort, as could the seemingly teacher-friendly management features built into Google Play.

Ahead of the launch this fall, Google said it would start accepting app submissions from developers this summer.

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