The Start-Up Accelerator phenomenon is sweeping the nation, and it’s spread into the world of consumer health technology. With deadlines for 2012 approaching, I spent the other night researching and watching the Bloomberg TechStars documentary on this past class of tech start-ups. Sidebar: I totally recommend watching the series, whether you know what a tech start-up accelerator is or not.

I have been interested in the emergence of the specialized health start-up accelerator, for a while now. It seems to be a given that start-up accelerators help entrepreneurs, develop products, refine pitches and connect to money.  Let’s take a closer look:

TODAY’S MAJOR PLAYERS

Healthbox is based in Chicago, IL and is no longer accepting applications for their inaugural class of 10 health start-ups. Selected teams will receive $50,000 and give up a 7% equity stake to be a part of the program, that is scheduled to begin in January 2012 and last for three months.  On a consumer to health spectrum, program mentors seem to skew heavily toward having digital health backgrounds.

Rock Health is based in San Fransisco, CA and is accepting applications through November 16, 2011, to be a part of their second class of 10 health start-ups. Selected teams will receive a $20,000 grant and give up a 0% equity stake to be a part of the program, that is scheduled to begin in January 2012 and last for five months. On a consumer to health spectrum, program mentors seem to be mixed between digital consumer and and digital health backgrounds.

Blueprint Health is based in New York, NY and is accepting applications through November 13, 2011, to be a part of their inaugural class of 10 health start-ups. Selected teams will receive $20,000 and give up a 6% equity stake to be a part of the program, that is scheduled to begin in January 2012 and last three months. On a consumer to health spectrum, program mentors seem to skew heavily toward having digital health backgrounds.

SXSW Health Accelerator is based in Austin, TX and is accepting applications through November 18, 2011, to be a part of their inaugural class of 8 health start-ups. Selected teams will receive $0 and give up a 0% equity stake to be a part of the program, that is scheduled to take place on March 12 and March 13, 2012. There is no mentorship involved in this program, as it is geared to only represent the investor pitch portion of traditional start-up accelerators. (Disclosure Alert: I’m on the 2012 SXSW Accelerator Advisory Board)

Health Start Up Accelerators Are Not Created Equal

What I found interesting, when looking at these health start-up accelerator programs together, was how they differed in three key areas: timeline, seed investment capital & ownership and the backgrounds of the mentors involved. If you don’t want to give up any of your company to make connections then Rock Health and South by Southwest may be more for you. If you want double the money at a slightly higher equity stake, then I hope you got your application into Healthbox on time. If you want consumer web mentors, then Rock Health, or any of the traditional start-up accelerators may be more for you.

It’s definitely exciting times for consumer health start-ups, and I’m contemplating taking a more active role in researching this space. What do you think about it?

U.S. Map by Ian Latchmansingh

I’m on the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) 2012 Health Accelerator Advisory Board and we’re looking to recruit interactive health start-ups to pitch their products. SXSW is accepting applications for its Accelerator pitch event on March 12 and 13, with a submission deadline of Friday, November 18, 2011. This is the fourth year of the event and the first year that a category for health technology start-ups has been included. Prior years showcased big name judges like Tim Draper of DFJ, Chris Hughes of Facebook, Paul Graham of Y Combinator, Craig Newmark of Craiglist, Robert Scoble of Scobleizer, Jeff Pulver of 140 Conference, Chris Shipley of Demo, and Tom Conrad of Pandora.

Here is a link to the details and the application process, CLICK ME LINK, or browse below for a quick check to gauge your interest. Also, feel free to reach out to me, hallicious [at] gmail [dot] com, with specific questions or concerns about the application fee.

DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

Health Technologies: This category is about patient-centric health applications and technologies that connect patients, families, physicians, pharmacists, care providers (hospitals, clinics) and benefit providers – aka the care team – to share timely, relevant health data and drive better outcomes at affordable and sustainable cost levels.

Eligibility


• A company’s product / service must have launched no earlier than March, 13, 2011.
• A company’s product / service must not be launched after June 13, 2012.
• Companies will be allowed to submit only one product / services to the SXSW Accelerator event. Companies who submit more than one product / services will not be eligible to participate in the SXSW Accelerator event.
• Founders of the applying startup must retain some portion of ownership in the company to be eligible to participate.
• Must not have raised over five million in funds from combined funding sources.
• Product or service must fall within one of the following categories below.

Confidentiality

All preliminary application information that is submitted is confidential and will be only viewed by SXSW Music staff and the selected judging panelist.

Application Fee


A non-refundable $175 entry fee is required from all applicants who would like to be considered for participation in the event. All Accelerator entrants will be given the chance to register to attend SXSW Interactive at the lowest earlybird rate, if they are not chosen as an Accelerator finalist.

PRIME EXAMPLE

I spent some time on YouTube today, viewing last year’s presentations and have to say that if  you’re planning on submitting and giving your pitch, do yourself a favor and watch Hipmunk’s Adam Goldstein dazzle the panel of judges with his presentation. The data visualization nerd in me also found their approach to displaying travel data to be especially good. You’re welcome.

I was optimizing my Google Reader feeds this morning and I happened to check up on my LittleDialers listening station. Little Dialers is an app that I designed and financed the development of to teach my, then four year old, daughter an emergency phone number. You can read the behind the music here and see what people said about it here.

Long story short, my daughter rapidly learned her mom’s cell phone number and a bunch of my friends’ kids had similar results, but it never “took off” in the app store. I think I may have broke 200 downloads over the course of two months, which is definitely less than my strike it rich gold-rush app store aspirations. So it served its purpose in A. Teaching my daughter a phone number and how to use the phone in general and B. Teaching me about app development and promotion by doing…

The key takeaway here is that I haven’t even thought about promoting it since around the May timeframe.

So you can imagine my surprise this morning when I saw that three twitter accounts randomly promoted my LittleDialers app to actual Twitter users. (pic of one of the tweets below) The best part is that they’re using the name Little Dialers in the tweet but linking to a fake Amazon site to try to get people to buy iPhones, I guess? (screen shot above)

I’m writing this post, for the record, so that nobody thinks that I am a part of this scheme in any way. I am not. Since one account has been suspended, it appears as though the problem may be taking care of itself, but I don’t know that I have any way of stopping this in the future. If you have any ideas or comments, let them rip below.

I’m working on an iPhone app that will allow me to test a hypothesis I have regarding mobile health. I spent the last year and change of my life working on a mobile mood tracking product that reminded people to check-in to how they’re feeling on a daily basis. I was published as a co-author of a paper in the Journal of Participatory Medicine because that product worked really well. I’m also still getting phone calls about it, despite the fact that I no longer have an affiliation with it.

So I’m continuing my exploration of this basic idea with Kantine. I have designed the app, am working on the screens and it is currently in development with a release scheduled for the Holiday Season. Please connect with me on Twitter if you’re interested in learning more.

I volunteered to put some posters together during Vaccination Awareness month this year as part of the #hcsmvac crew and I had a pretty good time of it. I followed a photoshop tutorial to make one design and attached a Google Map to a QR code for the other design. You can get the full story and find out how to do it yourself by clicking here.

This experience first led me to think about the intersection of public health and design. I realize that really smart people are already thinking about this, but that hasn’t stopped me from applying my brain power as well. The angle that is interesting to me specifically, is what if public health messages were cool enough to be put on T-shirts that people actually wore around. This wasn’t exactly all my idea, although I’ve been into T-shirt design for some time. I attended this year’s e-Patient Connections conference and saw what Zemoga and PSFK have done with UNICEF with regards to public health messages on shirts. See slide 7 for a visual.

And that gave me the idea to try to put something together myself:

It wasn’t until after I put the design together that I learned about Pinkwashing and that Breast Self Exams aren’t as effective as once thought. Thanks to my friend Veronica Combs and to Katherine O’Brien for the education. That being said, I’m glad I put it together because it has helped me to imagine what could be… Not just with breast cancer, but with public health in general. I am inspired by both the design of Otl Aicher and the concept of information visualization… and now I’m thinking of of what’s next.

What do you think?

Last Wednesday, my friend Joe Wheeler and I threw Louisville’s inaugural Quantified Self Meetup, sponsored by HealthCentral and igNew. We had 50% participation from our fledgling group’s total membership, which was an awesome way to kick off the movement in the Derby City. There is definitely an interest for all things quantified and self in Louisville and I’m excited to be a part of it.

This first meeting was more of a round table discussion, as opposed to five minute presentations, and we were very fortunate to have Josh Rosenthal, co-founder of Sprigley and current VP of Product Innovation at Eliza, give us his insights on where data fits into and provides the most value for both the current and future healthcare system in America.

Joe talked about the Posterous he set up to track his food intake with friends in the Louisville area. I was actually an early participant in this experiment, who faded out. But Joe is still going strong. And I presented the aggregate data from Mood 24/7′s last 16 months, to give kind of an open kimono look at adoption and utilization for a tracking service.

We were scheduled for an hour meetup, but went well over and into the night, with a spirited discussion around entrepreneurial opportunities for quantified health data. I had also made a totally awesome presentation on feedback loops, summarizing this Wired Magazine article, (thus the Coors Light), but we weren’t able to get to it, so it will be ready to go for our next meetup.

What Is Quantified Self

Quantified Self Meetups are a regular show and tell for people who are tracking data about their body and conducting their own personal investigations and research into their bodies, minds, and selves. Anything is game — from diet and nutrition, exercise, to personal genetics, to ways to digitize and track information, to how to self-experiment with data and statistics.

More specific topics include:

* diet, nutrition, exercise

* self-experimentation

* using data and statistics to further self-experimentation

* behavior monitoring, tracking, and modification (including studying habit forming and breaking)

* lifelogging, lifecaching, and lifestreaming

* location tracking

* generating, capturing, and working with biometric data

* psychological self-assessments

* medical self-diagnostics and keeping track of one’s own medical data

* personal genetics and genome sequencing

A good source for more information and inspiration is the QS Blog ( http://www.quantifiedself.org)

Last Friday I had the privilege of attending an event in Cincinnati that brought parents of children with autism together. The event was put on by John Thornton, former Defensive Tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals and Tennessee Titans, co-founder of JockBiz and all around great guy. John raises money for autism and throws events like this one as a way for parents to have one night to themselves, among other people with similar circumstances. I volunteered to be there to talk with anybody interested about ways social networks and social media can be used to connect with people around health topics. like autism.

Prior to the event, I went online to put a cheat sheet together that highlighted some lists, as well as people on Twitter that had identified themselves around the word autism. I also found some links of great resources from a Google search, that made it on the cheat sheet as well. Check it out below:

Over the course of two hours, I hit everybody up and used the cheat sheet to spread the good word about the power of social media with regards to health topics. What I learned was that, in general, people who have children with autism are looking to connect with one another in the real world. Something else I learned was that I live in a bubble. Everybody in America doesn’t love the Internet as much as I do.

So the big take-away for me was that the on-line world is great, for a lot of people… but the digital divide is very real. I personally feel that the Internet is at its best when it’s used to find and connect people and information around topics of interest. Now I find myself thinking about how that all applies to people with either no connectivity or no interest in the Internet.

What do you think?

August is National Immunization Awareness Month, in case you weren’t aware. A couple months ago, my friend, Dr. April Foreman, introduced me to an impromptu group of health advocates who were all interested in the practical application of social media to raise awareness around immunizations. The group has been organized using online tools, and picked a single target city with a historically low vaccination rate in Kansas City, Missouri.

The concept of a small group of people getting together to volunteer their skills for a cause was intriguing to me. Even more intriguing, however, is the idea of a virtual flash mob stemming from the small core group’s efforts. This is most commonly seen in Internet memes, and I thought it would cool to be a part of something like it for health. The group may or may not be successful at creating an immunization meme, but I figured that volunteering would be a great excuse to put some things I’ve learned, and some things I wanted to try, together to contribute.

Social Media Infrastructure

Two big benefits of using online social tools is cost and utility. In this case, the group wanted to have a single place online for all  related activities to filter through. But this space also needed to be able to capture what anybody was doing to be a part of the cause. To facilitate this, the group came up with a unique tag in #hcsmvac. HCSM stands for Health Care Social Media and is an ongoing Sunday night Twitter chat from 9pm -10pm Eastern.

Once the tag existed, the group needed a central platform for all #hcsmvac tagged content to roll through. My old boss, Greg Matthews, was big on this at Humana’s Innovation Center. The central hub can pull in tagged content from multiple social media sources and display them all in one place, allowing everybody to stay up with the group’s most recent news. In this case, the central hub also allows anybody to be recognized for creating tagged content around the cause, as well.

The team chose About.me as the hub platform, because it is free and allows you to pull in multiple feeds into a single online destination. Check it out here: http://about.me/hcsmvac

takeaway A unique tagging convention and central hub is all you need to attempt to start a movement.

My Contributions

google map I am a huge nerd when it comes to Google Maps, among other things. So one thing I knew I could contribute would be a map. Since the group had zeroed in on Kansas City, MO, I thought it would be helpful to locate all of the immunization hotspots in the city. Google Maps allows me to share this publicly once I am finished and the result can be found here: KC Vaccination Map

I got a lot of props from the group for doing this, but I found it to be insanely easy because Google has already done all of the work. All I did was perform Google searches, from within Google Maps, for key words like “immunization” or “vaccine” in Kansas City, MO. When you click on one of the results, on the map, an information box will pop up giving you the option to save the destination to one of your maps. Clicking “Save to Map” will open up a drop down box that allows you to select one of your maps. Clicking “Save” saves it to the map you’ve created and allows you to do it again for the next destination. That’s it. Easy, huh?

qr code Now that we had a map of destinations, and an associated link, we needed a way for people to access the map if they weren’t near their computers. The idea of making posters that linked to the vaccination map via QR Code seemed like the way to go… but how is this possible?

It turns out that making your own QR Code is easy, as well, again with Google. The first step is to head over to goo.gl, which is a URL shortener/QR Code Generator. Paste your link into the box and click “Shorten.” Then look down and click on “Details” for the URL you just created. This will lead you to an analytics page that also contains your QR Code. Right click the QR Code to save it to your desktop and now you have a QR Code that you can put on things like…

posters As a kid growing up, I dreaded getting shots. I have my own kids now, and they dread getting shots. Once I turned 21, however, the word shots took on a whole new meaning. When Dr. Foreman was first telling me about #hcsmvac, we both got a laugh out of the negative and positive connotations associated with the word shots, depending on how old you are… I thought it would be funny to make a simple poster about “Doing Shots” that could go up in bars around Kansas City, MO, and created one:

Building on the concept of shots, last week I followed this excellent photoshop tutorial to create the poster at the top of this post, because I thought it would look cool.

Now that you know about #hcsmvac, how can you use social media to contribute and spread the word?

This week marks my one year anniversary with Mood 24/7, and today Mood 24/7 was featured  on a Kansas Public Radio piece called: A New Way to Track Mood Changes. Perfect timing. Bryan Thompson, who is the Health Reporter at KPR, interviewed Dr. Adam Kaplin (Mood 24/7′s inventor) Dr. April Foreman (A Mood 24/7 Early Adopter), a Mood 24/7 member, and me, to give a full account of how Mood 24/7 revolutionizes healthcare for people suffering from mental injury or illness.

Please click on the link and listen to the five minute clip to hear for yourself: LINK

Mood 24/7 Year In Review

I also figured that this would be as good a place as any to take some time and reflect on last year’s journey.  In one year, a small but agile team within HealthCentral has: completely overhauled the look and feel of the Mood 24/7 experience, added the ability to provide updates directly on the website and from E-mail as well as text message, and added features like Daily Averages and Member Sorting for Health Professionals.

These upgrades ultimately led to the quadrupling of Mood/7′s Monthly Active User (MAU) base, with an average of 70% of our active users responding to texts on a daily basis. We’ve also reduced our monthly churn by 12% and 35% of our membership journals with the service on top of providing numerical daily mood ratings. Mood 24/7 is open to the public and free for general use, and we’re currently being used within multiple organizations inside of Johns Hopkins University, within two American College Counselor’s Association campus Counseling Centers and in a rural Community Mental Health organization in Coffeyville, KS.

It’s been an awesome ride so far, and I’m very grateful and  fortunate to be a part of this effort that both helps people and helps save lives.

Mood 24/7 was developed by HealthCentral based on technology licensed exclusively from Johns Hopkins University to help you track your daily mood. Sign up for free and pick a time of day to receive a text message. You can even share your results with doctors, family and friends in your trusted circle.

Over the past 10 months, it’s become clear that text messages just don’t work for some people. They either don’t have a text plan, have a plan that makes it hard to receive texts from a shortcode, or don’t live in the U.S. We’ve been listening. I’m happy to announce that Mood 24/7 now allows users to set up E-mail reminders in lieu of text message reminders, giving you three ways now to track and update your mood on a daily basis.

Please note that if you’re happy receiving text messages from Mood 24/7, then this change will not affect you in any way. However, if you would like to start receiving E-mail reminders from Mood 24/7, instead of text message reminders, then this new feature is for you. It’s important to understand that if you opt in to start receiving E-mail reminders from Mood 24/7, they will work exactly the same way that the text message reminders work. However, instead of receiving a text message from Mood 24/7 once a day, you’ll receive an E-mail.

The daily E-mail has a link that leads to a secure web form where you’ll enter your numerical mood rating and optional comments. Clicking Post will submit your update to your account, and then you’re done.

GET STARTED WITH E-MAIL REMINDERS

new account If you’re creating a new Mood 24/7 account, then simply select E-mail for your Daily Mood Prompt and you will receive E-mails from Mood 24/7 at the time you specify, each day.

existing account If you already have a Mood 24/7 account and would like to switch from receiving text message reminders to E-mail reminders, then follow these instructions:

-          Log into your account

-          Click Account in the right hand navigation

-          Then Click Account Settings

-          Look for Daily Message Prompt in your Account Settings and click Change

-          Click the drop down box and select E-mail

-          Click Update and you’re done

I’m excited that Mood 24/7 can take your mood ratings via text message, directly on the website and now from E-mail. Start getting E-mail reminders today and let me know what you think.

Mood 24/7 was developed by HealthCentral based on technology licensed exclusively from Johns Hopkins University to help you track your daily mood. Sign up for free and pick a time of day to receive a text message. You can even share your results with doctors, family and friends in your trusted circle.