$250 million for the social Web including healthcare

Pioneering venture capitalist John Doerr, lionized in Silicon Valley for leading investments in Netscape, Amazon and Google, helped build the consumer Internet. Now he’s making a huge bet on the next round of the Web. … Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has established a $250-million fund called the “sFund” to back social entrepreneurs who connect people online no matter where they are. …

He described the fund as a “quarter-billion-dollar party,” but its intention is serious: not to create the next Facebook but to give advice and cash to the entrepreneurs building out the social Web. Some of the areas ripe for investment are healthcare, education, mobile computing and tablets. “The third great wave of the Internet is mobile and social together,” Doerr said. “It’s going to be tectonic.”  http://goo.gl/rsDO

Patientslikeme.com may be one example. Almost certainly, these new ventures will involve the collection and distribution of medical information from more people and about more topics. Our picture of both the maintenance of health and the treatment of sickness and injury will be impacted. Our ideas about the scope and role of electronic medical records will change as will the sources and applications of the data.

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EMRs: Increasing Complexity and Capabilities

Stadiums Utilize EHRs For Injured Fans

“Electronic health records are coming to a sports arena near you. A hospital in New Jersey is providing emergency medical services at a stadium that hosts the local major league soccer team. If a person is hurt, they can go to the first aid station, where a team of doctors will treat them. When a person is transported to a hospital, doctors are able to treat them more quickly because they already have the patient’s medical record from the stadium and are notified of any medications that were already administered.”

Next step, an interface to transmit those records to the patient’s doctor if they do not need to be transported. The strategic objective, capture information that may be useful for medical purposes wherever and whenever it is generated and make it available wherever it is needed in essentially real-time.

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EMRs: Increasing Complexity and Capabilities V

Bathroom Scale, Apple ear-buds & 9,000 variables

A video of a direct link from a bathroom scale and from a blood pressure cuff to a patient’s computer and from there to their personal health record (PHR) that is linked to their doctors’ (intentionally plural) records. YouTube

A short video showing Apple ear-buds that can capture body temperature, heart rate, and blood oxygen level plus a number of other small devices to provide real-time and near real-time measurements of body functions including level and amount of sleep.TED

“BodyMedia has been working closely with Apple and Google, to develop its smartphone application. It opens the door to allowing a person to monitor a collection of the 9,000 variables — physical activity, calories burned, body heat, sleep efficiency and others — collected by the sensors in an armband in real-time, as the day goes on. The Bluetooth-enabled armband costs $249 and the BodyMedia data service costs $7 a month, when purchased in an annual subscription. The new offerings go on sale next month [November 2010] at the company’s Web site and at Amazon.” The company claims they have already “helped over 400,000 users monitor 10 million days of activity” using earlier devices.

Potentially massive amounts of additional data that can be captured, stored and analyzed at the level of the patient’s record or the doctors’. Data that can be used to track progress and risks in essentially real-time. Data that can be used to improve healthcare and reduce costs.

Short link: http://wp.me/pyfFd-87